(Note to my readers. This longer-than-usual post is really two. The first half is a recital of what I believe is very relevant history. The second half is about how things are now. Although I am personally fascinated by the historical context, if you get bored with the history, the bolded text below marks the […]
It is being proven that smaller bookstores can work commercially
Sometimes it takes a decade or more for an insight to be validated, but it is always nice when it happens. Around the turn of the century, I was developing a business called “Supply Chain Tracker”, which had a nice client base for a few years. What we did was take the data feeds — […]
Seven key insights about VMI for books and why it is becoming a current concern
Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a supply paradigm for retailers by which the distributor makes the individual stocking decisions rather than having them determined by “orders” from an account. The most significant application of it for books was in the mass-market paperback business in its early days, when most of the books went through the magazine […]
Print book retailing economics and ebook retailing economics have almost nothing in common
There has been a lot of conversation lately about the differences between wholesale pricing and agency pricing for ebooks and about what constitutes a “fair” division of revenue between publishers and retailers. Since the economics of bookstores have been generally misunderstood for years, it is not surprising that the understanding of what changes make sense […]
It is hard for publishers to apply even Harvard B School advice in their struggle with Amazon
Harvard Business Review published an article recently by Benjamin Edelman called “Mastering the Intermediaries” which gives advice to businesses trying to avoid some of the consequences of audience aggregation and control by an intermediary. The article was aimed at restaurants who don’t want their fate controlled by Open Table or travel companies who don’t want […]
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