It is increasingly common here to discount a book heavily when it fist comes out - particularly if it is only out in hardback, initially and is likely to make most of its sales when it comes out in paperback.

With the Net Book Price agreement here it used to be impossible to discount books, other than through a book club. So books were never sold on the "pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap" philosophy that worked so well for baked beans.

Nowadays even "Harry Potter" (which seems to sell like hot cakes) is discounted by up to a third when it first comes out. Traditionally the margin a bookseller makes is somewhere between 20 and 40 per cent, depending on volume, so these price reductions come directly from the publisher. As you probably appreciate, books are very expensive to produce in small numbers but once you reach a certain level the run on cost is very small, so profits can be large on low prices.

I like the fact that supermarkets now sell books here and although I love bookshops, I like the way that books have opened up to a wider market - it would never occur to some people to go to a bookshop.

The other day I bought a new dictionary (to keep up). It was the lastest Oxford Compact English Dictionary (only 187,000 entries in 1200 pages, so I don't know everything yet). The best thing about it was that it was £2.99 if you bought £12 worth of petrol. (For American's currently complaining about gas prices, it costs £3.60+ a gallon our gallon is about 25% bigger than a US gallon - so they should give away dictionaries!)