IN THIS ISSUE:
Publishing Industry News - BookMasters Enters eBook Limited Partnership
Bob Kasher to speak on EPUB3
BMI Industry Photos - Author Rex Pickett signing copies of Vertical
Marketing & Distribution - Returns from a Booksellers Point of View
Trade Show News - Digital Book World Conference & Expo, January 24-26
Blog Reminder - e11even
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BookMasters Enters eBook Limited Partnership
BookMasters and MPS Limited, a Macmillan company,
have announced a strategic partnership that will offer
customers combined service across digital publishing, fulfillment,
and print and electronic distribution. The partnership
allows us to offer our customers cost-effective services
for eBooks and enhanced eBooks, whereas MPS' customers
will gain from our Converso service, which will distribute
eBooks to Amazon, Apple, Overdrive, Barnes & Noble,
Gardners, and 35 other eRetail sites. In addition, the partnership
will let both companies jointly offer clients a complete
fulfillment and distribution package.
“With the rapid
emergence of different
distribution platforms
for digital content, I
believe that MPS offers
the most dynamic breadth of offshore services while
bringing critical knowledge and capacity to our U.S. clientele,” said David Wurster, CEO of The BookMasters
Group. “The partnership with MPS will greatly benefit
our publishers’ eContent initiatives.”
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Bob Kasher to speak on EPUB3
EPUB, the book industry standard for digital eBooks is being upgraded and updated. The new EPUB 3 release, announced on February 14th, gives publishers a much more powerful standard that will be able to incorporate any of the world’s languages and scripts, multi-media options such as audio and video, navigational capabilities to deal with touch screen opportunities, and support for accessibility for disabled readers. The new standard addresses the opportunities that new digital devices like the iPad, Entourage, Color Nook, and Galaxy Tablet are bringing to the marketplace as digital reading continues to grow exponentially.
Digital is the fastest growing sector of the book market, and BookMasters is in the middle of the action with a complete array of services for digital production, conversion, and distribution through outlets like Amazon, Apple, Nook, Kobo, Gardiners, and other worldwide suppliers or off of your own website to your community of readers and fans.
Bob Kasher, our Business Development Manager for Integrated Solutions, is in the heart of this change as both a member of the EPUB 3 Working Group and a speaker on this subject. He spoke on EPUB 3 for the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference in New York on February 15th and will also speak at the London Book Fair in London, UK April 12th and 13th.
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Rex Pickett, author of Sideways, signing copies of his new
book Vertical at the City Winery in New York City.
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Returns from a Bookseller's Point of View
from the AtlasBooks
Distribution Blog
Returns. This is an ugly word in publishing, almost like a four-letter word, but it has seven letters.
For decades, booksellers have been able to return unsold stock to the publisher. In many cases, this gets to be time-consuming and expensive. There is labor sending the book out and receiving it in. Trucks waste gas on the extra transit. Publishers sometimes don’t know the actual sell-through of a book until months after copies were initially shipped. Books are often returned only to be reordered by the same outlet that just made the return. This can be an inefficient system.
This all dates back to the Great Depression. The initial intentions were good. Publishers wanted to encourage booksellers to try new books, those books that they might not otherwise have taken a chance on. Publishers offered bookstores the ability to return unsold books for credit. And so this system of returns developed and has been operating for years, and no one has been able to successfully break from it yet. If you make your books nonreturnable, then stores just won’t buy them in the first place.
Here at AtlasBooks, we sometimes hear from publishers who are not satisfied because of their returns. Because our contract has fees associated with returns, AtlasBooks has even been accused of overselling so that we may make a profit from returns. This is just not true. Returns are a part of the book business that we must work with, and so by extension you, our publishing partners, must work with. Our fees enable us to manage the labor to process books going out and coming in, and to cover the fees we must pay our partners.
Recently I read a post by Josie Leavitt on Shelftalker (which is highlighted in Publishers Weekly’s PW Daily). Josie and her co-worker Elizabeth Bluemle work at The Flying Pig Bookstore, and they blog about their experiences.
In this particular post, Josie gives her take on returns. Here is a piece that stuck out to me:
"I look at each book that’s on the return bubble and I play this game: would I miss it if it weren’t here? Conversely, am I sick of looking at it? If I answer these questions with no or yes, then in the return tub it goes…
Doing returns in January and February can help close the cash flow gap of the slower seasons. Of course, publishers hate returns, and in a perfect world, every book I buy would be a winner, but that’s just not the case. Mistakes abound: hardcover picture books with adorable bears just don’t sell at the rate I buy them, too many 100th day of school books (does that day really get celebrated?), and one too many young adult hardcovers about the girl with challenges triumphing against the odds of the drunken mom, the absent father, and her eating disorder. These books have to go. Not just because they’re not good books, but because they are money sitting on the shelf and often it’s money bookstores don’t have in January or February.
The other thing that returns do is it readies the store for the new spring books. It’s a sort of "out with old, in the new" scenario. There is something wonderfully satisfying about knowing that your shelves truly reflect what you want to sell, not just what you happen to have on hand. Inventory control is a fun balancing act, and doing returns allows me to correct the wrongs."
It helps me to consider returns from the bookseller’s point of view. They have a business to operate, and they must be shrewd.
Predicting sales is more of an art than a science. And sometimes, the bookseller guesses wrong. And in this economy, shelf space is in great demand. If a book isn’t selling, it needs to make way for one that will.
So returns aren’t orchestrated by some malevolent returns-villan. No one writes an order for a book, laughing (I’m imagining an ominous witch cackle) about how the books will eventually come back as returns.
The best scenario for everyone would be for the bookseller to order the exact number of books that will sell in the store. The publisher and distributor don’t have to worry about shipping and processing, the buyer doesn’t have to worry about a bad rating (buyers in bigger operations are graded and budgets adjusted by the sell-through of the books they order), and the bookstore doesn’t have to worry about labor, costs, and time associated with returns.
But returns still stink. No doubt about it. Lots more could be said about it. But look at it this way, the books had their run. They didn’t sit in storage, and maybe some copies did sell, and those never would have sold had they not been ordered.
Back to Top
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Digital Book World Conference & Expo, January 24-26
Claire Holloway, Content Services Operations Manager,
recently attended the Digital Book World conference to
learn new electronic publishing and digital strategies on behalf
of The BookMasters Group. The conference was held
January 24 through 26 in New York City and was well attended
by publishers from across the country, according
to Holloway.
She said she took away from the conference two important
key words.
“One is ‘discoverability’,” she explained. “Now that
an eBook has been created, how do you let people know
of its availability? The other word is ‘curation,’ which
means to assemble a collection of related or similar titles.
No one does this well for eBooks.”
There were several guest speakers discussing issues of
importance to electronic publishers. Mike Shatzkin of
The Idea Logical Company
chaired the event and spoke
on the industry’s view of the
future. “He summed up a
lot of data on our industry,”
Holloway said. “He bombarded
us with great information on consumers’
attitudes toward eBooks.”
Holloway also said that publishers need to shake
themselves out of a “book-only” state of mind. With the
growing popularity of electronic media and repurposing
of content for other formats other than just print, publishers
should begin looking at themselves as “media
producers.”
“A traditional book is now just one facet of content
presentation,” Holloway said. “As one panelist said, ‘If
content is king, then distribution is King Kong.’”
For more information about upcoming trade shows, please see our
2011 ATLASBOOKS TRADE SHOW SCHEDULE
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Regional U.S. Shows
Michigan Reading Association
55th Annual Conference
Grand Rapids, MI
March 12-14, 2011
www.michiganreading.org
Association of College and Research Libraries
Philadelphia, PA
March 30, 2011- April 1, 2011
www.ala.org
New York State
Reading Association
Saratoga Springs, NY
April 3-5, 2011
www.nysreading.org
Texas Library Association
Austin, TX
April 12-15, 2011
www.txla.org
Pennsylvania School Library Association
Hershey, PA
April 28-30, 2011
www.psla.org
LA Times Festival
Los Angeles, CA
April 29 & 30
events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks
Connecticut Library Association
Stamford, CT
May 2-3, 2011
www.ctlibraryassociation.org
New Jersey Library Association
Long Branch, NJ
May 3-4, 2011
www.njla.org
Florida Library Association
Orlando, FL
May 4-6, 2011
www.flalib.org
BookExpo America
Jacob Javits Center
New York, New York
May 24-26, 2011
Visit The BookMasters Group at
Booth #3038 - 3049
www.bookexpoamerica.com
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International Shows
Abu Dhabi Book Fair
Abu Dhabi, UAE
March 15-21, 2011
www.adbookfair.com
Bologna Children's Book Fair
Bologna, Italy
March 28-31, 2011
Hall 26 B38
www.bookfair.bolognafiere.it/en/
London Book Fair
Earl’s Court
London, England
April 11-13, 2011
Visit The BookMasters Group
at Stand #G405
www.londonbookfair.co.uk
Beijing International Book Fair
Beijing, China
August 29, 2011- September 2, 2011
www.bibf.net
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