Jennifer Marie Brissett

From the LA Times ”Skirmish with Amazon draws new attention to Bay Area bookstore”

As part of a holiday shopping promotion, Amazon had offered customers a price break if they used a smart phone app to scan products’ costs in brick-and-mortar stores and then bought them online instead. Although the promotion did not apply to books — Amazon said it was aimed at electronics sold in “major retail chain stores” — it infuriated booksellers long stressed by Internet competition.

When I heard about this promotion, I was so angry I closed my eyes and I saw every color in the rainbow. I didn’t know about the petition. I’m glad there is one and I’ve just signed it. This promotion is beyond competition and IMHO it is evil. Bookstores take time and serious effort to put their book collections together for the customers they serve. To have someone come in, take the information, and profit from it without any compensation to the people behind the counter is intellectual theft.

“Pull and Pulp” could also be called “Pull and Dump” and it works like this: a bookseller makes a purchase order—they estimate the number books that they think will sell. Now a larger store--say B&N--makes that same estimate only multiplied even more to fill all of their stores and to make the fortress display of books for their windows. Here’s where the pull comes: say they didn’t sell all of those books? You have 30 days to return them to the publisher and not have to pay for them. So the larger store, having the man power and time, will return a lot of books. While the smaller store will have sold less but didn’t return any. So let’s see how this works with some numbers--

B&N makes an order of 3,000 books for “See Dick and Jane Run” the latest blockbuster
They sell only 1,000 of them and return the remainder
What happened to that 2,000 books?
They either a.) Get pulped or b.) Go to a discount house and then get pulped
Who lost in this deal? Answer: The publisher.

This causes a large overproduction of books that the publisher will eventually see flying back at them like a boomerang. And most publishers have no choice, but to fill a B&N order (especially since most indies are now gone.) The only thing they can do is RAISE book prices. This has been going on for a long time now driving small bookstores and publishers into the hole and out of business. It makes eBooks and print-on-demand books seem very appetizing.

Why is there such a difference in ordering from a big box store compare to a small indie? An indie will know it’s customers and order accordingly. A big store will order according to gross sale estimates and a one size fits all mantra. The Rebel Bookseller by Andrew Laties did a pretty good job of explaining this.

You would think that overproduction would cause the price of books to come down and not up. In the book world, this low price shows up in THE DISCOUNT INDUSTRY. You can buy any book you want for about $1.00 at discount houses. You see them listed on Amazon, alibris, abebooks, etc. Places where the shipping cost more than the book itself. Books are essentially worthless now. All classic signs of overproduction.

So in the book industry, retail prices get higher while discount prices are in the dirt. How can a indie bookstore survive this? Actually, the whole industry can’t survive this. This thing is about to come down.

The one thing that I took away from my time as a bookseller is that artistic and intellectual products should not be produced in bulk.