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Big boxes of books arriving at Highland store is like Christmas for manager


By Ian Duncan

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Peter Sim.
Peter Sim.

Customers travel from across the Highlands and Islands to buy books from the Inverness branch of Waterstones.

Peter Sim, one of the bookshop managers at the branch, reckons they have got one of the biggest overall land areas of any book seller in the country.

He said: “You’ve got the city itself but you’ve also got people coming down from Orkney occasionally, as well as Caithness and Skye.

“They will maybe make a trip monthly, so there’s a huge population base that we’ve got to tap. It is really good.”

Fellow bookshop manager Toby Ritty agreed and added: “It is a huge area and there are some fantastic independent bookshops throughout the Highlands and Islands but we are the only big-chain shop for books in the city.”

The shop boasts a large selection of specifically Scottish books and Mr Sim said this included books on the history and culture of the Highlands and Islands, adding: “It’s always been a very strong area for us.”

“All Waterstones do well with Scottish books, Scottish books are very big across the Scottish stores, but a lot of the places it will be tourist driven, with us it is local interest stuff.

“Local people who write books are very popular here and I think people in the Highlands are very interested in the Highlands as well – island stuff does very well as well particularly the Western Isles.”

Publishing hit the headlines recently when around 600 books were published on the same day and Mr Sim said that having more books to choose from was generally a good thing.

However, he said around half of that number would have been specifically academic or technical publications and the number could have been inflated because planned publications were delayed until later in the year because of the pandemic.

He said: “There are loads of really great books at the moment, whatever your interest is.

“We are always happy when there are lots of new books coming out.”

Mr Ritty said: “For a bookseller, getting big boxes of new books is like Christmas because it is so exciting – we love it.”

Waterstones first opened in the High Street in 1997 and it opened in the Eastgate Shopping Centre around 2006 when the chain bought out Ottakars.

It was able to reopen in July and Mr Sim said it was good to get back and see everyone again after the lockdown.

He said they had spent the previous days preparing the shop for reopening and making sure staff were ready for the new safety measures. “It was nice to get everyone back together and see them again,” he said.

Mr Ritty said: “We were very lucky getting back in and getting the shop open. The shopping centre had done a lot of good work to get the flow right so it was safe for people to come back.

“We’ve got a big shop with lots of floorspace so it was quite easy to set it up so people could socially distance and walk around the shop without any fear or worry about safety.”

And customers were pleased to see it back open with some bringing very long reading lists.

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