Investors should ponder whether the main HMV board have shown the right level of interest in their book operation.

The King is dead. Long live the King. Gerry Johnson was unceremoniously dumped as managing director of Waterstone’s last week as HMV announced unsurprisingly mediocre Christmas trading numbers for its book division.

In fact, Waterstone’s 9% like-for-like decline was not far adrift from the overall book market, excluding the online monoliths. The big W cannot compete with the giant Amazon on price, nor on depth of backlist, and Waterstones.com will struggle to match the slickness of the latter’s online fulfilment. Long-term success will depend on providing high levels of store service. Patently this did not happen last Christmas.

There are two interconnected reasons for this. The “book hub” - Waterstone’s vaunted central distribution facility, operated by Unipart - was, and is, bad for its owner’s health, to put it politely.

Standards of service to stores seem to have been little short of disastrous in December. Fulfilling customer requests has been a problem for several months. All this makes it difficult for Waterstone’s to retain a customer base that requires only a slight incentive to defect.

The other reason why service was under strain was that too many store staff were disaffected - and there were too few of them. The main financial payback of the hub was to allow a reduction in store labour hours.

The attendant redundancy programme was combined with a shift to more part-timers. The end result has been fewer knowledgeable booksellers on the shopfloor, and disaffection among those that remain.

Booksellers are a sensitive bunch, and a significant number clearly feel bruised and marginalised by the change programme of the past year. So even if Waterstone’s had the right stock in December, it would have been understandable if service levels had slipped. Unlike some other retail sectors, booksellers tend to be both very knowledgeable and passionate about their product, so they feel doubly upset by supply chain failures.

Where does the HMV board stand in all this? They have been denying - to the outside world at least - that there have been material problems with the hub for a long while. Or rather they have admitted problems, somewhat belatedly, but then affirmed that it was now performing to plan.

Perhaps this was their sincere belief. Or perhaps a case of repeating a mantra so often they started believing it. But it seems to me that there has been a degree of self-delusion going on. Investors should ponder whether the main board (excluding Johnson) have shown the right level of interest in their book operation.

Group chief executive Simon Fox quickly installed himself as boss of the music business, but has rarely been seen at book industry events in support of his Brentford team. Fiddling (on downloads) while Rome was burning?

The Pretender, Dominic Myers, was in charge of the integration of Ottakar’s. This acquisition has yet to have a demonstrable benefit to Waterstone’s bottom line. Now enthroned, he will need a dose of good luck, and more support from the main board than his predecessor enjoyed.