Tim’s posterous

Publishers: As Harlequin is Finding Out – Sometimes You Can’t Win For Losing

November 20, 2009 by Kat Meyer

 

There is a great discussion about the latest Harlequin brewhaha going on in the comments of Kat Meyer's blog post. I was rivited and actually learned a monkeyshit full.

According to AP, Doubleday announced Tuesday that hardcover, audio and e-book sales for "The Lost Symbol" topped 2 million copies for its first week of release in the United States, Britain and Canada. The total is "well over" 2 million for English-language editions worldwide, according to Doubleday spokeswoman Suzanne Herz, who declined to offer a specific number. Herz did say that around 5 percent, or 100,000 copies, of "The Lost Symbol" were sold as e-books (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/New-Dan-Brown-novel-tops-2-apf-2025745368.html?x=0&.v=1).

p.s. Please help BookNet aggregate ebook sales!

After seeing Enhanced Edition, Apple featured it online. Now books by Philip Pullman and David Simon, creator of The Wire, are planned.

"Supermarkets sell three books for the price of two. Value is being shipped out of books. We want to add value," says Collingridge.

This picture is why it is so nice to commute by train to Toronto. It is also the reason why you might want to book a trip across Canada in the summer by Via , not because you think after all of your hard planning and weird happenings your coveted sleeper car for two seven year olds and their parents is going to be canceled because 340 people can stop this service in Canada.

I don't know how I feel about that -right now quite angry! Keep those points a coming Via I will be able to travel across and back next summer. A kind of doubling up, because now Air travel will go up.

This by the way is a great study for risk management. I suppose if I knew all about the climate of Via I could have seen this coming. However, as it is I found out about this late.

Someone on the train tonight said so did you call via? I said why? And she said oh not because you can do something about it -something like that anyway. But of course I have been following twitter all day and finding out all kinds of stuff.

Here is a bookstore owner's nightmare. Customer walks in; browses around; has grand old time in this temple of knowledge; peruses a book that costs $27; takes out Kindle and orders it for $17, right there in front of your nose, using your wi-fi connection. Aaagh!

You wake up sweating at 3:00 in the morning.

Have you noticed all of those best-seller books stacked up at the front of your local bookstore? Did the retailer buy them hoping to sell them all? Of course not. They are relying on a variant of the age-old practice of "sale or return." Publisher have agreed to take back unsold ones for credit. As this article on Bloomberg states:

"Returns date back to the Depression, when publishers implemented the practice as a way to ensure that bookstores would continue stocking new books."

Now that we are in a major recession, or micro-depression, or whatever we're calling it these days, surely this practice will continue. Well, probably not. Digitization, whether via e-book or print on demand, makes it unnecessary. And publishers simply cannot sustain it. Approximately 25% of their books are being returned. Think of what that does to their profit margins.

How can retailers survive if they have to decide what to buy based on their forecast of what will sell? The answer is, they can't. No one can forecast fickle consumer taste. With retailer's profit margins being what they are, one small error could lead to an operation's failure.

But they have to stock their shelves with something, right?

Not necessarily. Have you noticed that bookstores are becoming more like coffee shops and coffee shops are becoming more like bookstores? And that both have wi-fi?

Retail bookstores might look more like community hang-out spots in future, with the following:

• Good (but expensive) coffee and snacks,
• Free wi-fi,
• A few best-selling books and DVDs (under the sale or return policy),
• A way for patrons to order any book in the universe, while taking a cut of the transaction.

This last possibility is not hard to imagine. The customer could have the book delivered to the bookstore if they will be passing by again soon or, for a little extra (plus guilt for the bigger carbon footprint), their home.

These coffee shop/bookstores could even host virtual "Meet the author" sessions on a big screen, with back-channel chats going on via Twitter. And they could host book clubs for both face-to-face meetings and online gatherings.

If the "local printer" model becomes a reality, book delivery would be immediate. We can even imagine digital printers setting up shop in the back of coffee shop/bookstores?

That sounds like fun for readers, authors, and store owners. But for students and the unemployed, the walk to the local library seems all the shorter.

And what about big-box bookstores in malls? Nope. Sell your commercial real estate and big-box retailer stock. That will get ugly.

Article by Bernard Lunn envisions (albeit not a full business plan) the future bookstore.

At least they’re being honest about it. They’re worried that ebook sales will negatively impact the potential for this title to hit a bestseller list. They’re worried that the difference between earned digital royalties and lost print royalties is too vast. Apparently, ’tis better to have no sale at all and all that.

Too bad bestseller lists aren't based on sales of digital books as well.