One of my major complaints about the whole book industry is the concept of substantial discounts tied to unlimited return privileges. That’s right, kids, the book retail business is a consignment business regardless of what it might look like on the surface.
You see, booksellers want to get at least a 40% discount off list price (no matter how few books they buy), pay in maybe 90 days (if you’re lucky), and then return anything that hasn’t sold even a year or more later and no matter what condition it’s in. Think about the likely condition of a book that’s been thumbed umpteen times while sitting on a bookstore shelf for a year.
This system, by all accounts, appears to have started during the Great Depression of the 1930s by publishers hoping to keep bookstores (just about their only retail outlet back then) from going belly-up.
The system is so entrenched that nobody, not even the big publishers, wants to fight to change it. People who study such things claim that, industry-wide, returns average 25-30% or book sales.
Small booksellers see nothing incongruous about insisting that equally small publishers buy into this system…or forget about having their books stocked regularly in those stores.
Today, Elizabeth Burton, Executive Editor at Zumaya Publications LLC posted the following message on the Publish-L discussion group in a discussion primarily oriented to those of us who use a lot of digital/print-on-demand technology (reprinted here with her kind permission):
I have no problem with returns. I have a problem with a system that demands you accept unlimited numbers of them in whatever condition they arrive in.I object to having perfectly good books destroyed if you opt in to LSI’s returns program or paying more than they’re worth to have them shipped to me.
Bookstores that won’t direct-order books because they can’t ship them back to Ingram will often, in the same breath, say they will take copies on consignment from the author. Even though this creates for the publisher, if they provided consigned stock, the same additional work the booksellers complain about having to do if they order direct. Not to mention the time and expense involved in shipping, invoicing and–all too often–frequent requests for payment or at least sales information. And then they have the chutzpah to demand a full 40% discount?
I think we all know that the problem lies not with us but with a group of retailers who have become so dependent on free merchandise they can’t or aren’t willing to think beyond the status quo. However, I’ve had the delightful experience of speaking with indie booksellers who actually see the logic when I explain it. The deeper discounts I order for direct and prepaid direct orders, and my guarantee that the cost of undamaged copies will be cheerfully refunded–just not through Ingram–don’t hurt.
It’s a question of re-education. Treating on-demand printing as if it’s identical to offset run-based production is absurd–it negates the whole advantage of the system. For independent booksellers to insist that smaller presses have to eat losses as if they had the resources of a Bertelsmann, especially when appended to the “we’re losing business to the chains and Amazon” lament is so laden with irony it’s almost worthy of a satirical novel.
Well said, Liz.
