On Jul 23, 4:39 pm, Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote:
> > It's interesting that articles like this don't implicate publishers in > the fall of independent, then chain bookstores. The chains got big > discounts from publishers which allowed them to undercut independent > bookstores to the point of driving the independents out of business. > Now with online discounts, especially from used book aggregators, the > full price new book market is disappearing. Book publishers have a > horrible business model where they oversell new books and take back > the unsold ones and wholesale them out as remainders to discount > merchants. You made so many good points in your post but the one in the second sentence above just isn't true. Publishers do not give greater discounts to the big box stores than to independents. They aren't allowed to. That doesn't mean the big chains don't have ways to eke out some extra bucks from the publishers. B&N and Borders squawked that the publishers were saving money by shipping books to central warehouses of the chains rather than to each individual store. It is true that this saved the publishers money, but it also was the preference of the chains. They were able to extract a self-distribution discount for this, I believe about equal to the actual cost-saving of the publishers. Traditionally, the chains have held the dominant relationship with the publishers, extracting fees for end-caps, getting into seasonal catalogs, front-of-store placement, etc. (all of which have been given to some independents, too). But the chains haven't been all bad. In the past, they had the pockets to carry a broader range of books than independents, because of their deep pockets and greater shelf space. Although the bottom- line of the buyers had to be financial, most of the buyers at, say, B&N, knew their subject matter and cared about the content. I was lucky enough to see a meeting between a sales person at a major publisher and a buyer at B&N (both were pros), and when the sales guy promised that a certain fiction title was worthy despite no obvious commercial hook, the buyer, against his better judgment, made a buy that was trivial to the bookseller but a big deal to the author and the publisher. That was yeas ago; I doubt that kind of purchase would be made today. As you suggest, the stupidest policy in the book business is the return situation. Where else can a retailer buy product and return 100% of it for full-price (minus shipping costs)? -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
