In the British and American markets, it is clear to us that our supply chain is not nearly as effective as we would like. Returns are high, possibly as high as fifty percent of the copies of new titles shipped for many consumer segments in the US. Returns are not as dramatic, but they are climbing, in Britain
Restoring Health to the Book Trade – Vendor-Managed Inventory for Books
It is safe to assume that everybody in this room read Ken Auletta’s piece in The New Yorker a month ago which described in somewhat frightening terms the current state of consumer publishing in the US. It was a piece that didn’t make any publishing insiders very happy and which had flaws that made it easy for some to dismiss. And while I agree that it fails in economic analysis, I think Auletta’s piece was pretty good journalism
Taming the Inventory Tiger
The argument I want to make to you today is that our current buying-and-selling system, which my father Leonard Shatzkin has dubbed “distribution by negotiation”, actually is responsible for the prevalence of unprofitable buying decisions and that a vendor-managed inventory system could make these decisions considerably more profitable for everybody
Staying Competitive in a Wired World
…we know that the medium of the Internet is perfectly suited to selling books. That is because what nothing can do better than the Internet is to deliver information arranged in databases, permitting searches by various criteria. And since the day arrived, so long ago we can’t remember when it was, that a bound volume of Books-in-Print became so fat it isn’t even wieldy for the customer in a bookstore, providing access to information about *all* the books has been a challenge for every bookseller
Books as Bytes: Death of the Paper Book?
The technology is evolving to make it increasingly possible for the content-driven mind to understand what the technology can do, and to have useful ideas about how to do it.