The new just-opened Amazon bookstore in Manhattan made my wife think of an airport bookstore or a “gallery, where the books are displayed rather than sold”. Everything is faced out. The selection is limited. An airport bookstore would almost certainly have a different mix of titles: far fewer cookbooks (the Amazon store gives them quite […]
Knowing which titles to work on is a challenge today that was not important 10 years ago
About 15 years ago, my friend Charlie Nurnberg, then the Sales VP at Sterling (which was, then, an independent publisher not yet bought by Barnes & Noble) threw me a challenge. “For years,” he said, “I got the B&N green-bar report [by which he meant an Excel spreadsheet] every Friday. I had 800 titles on […]
Amazon could become our leading physical retailer before very long
More than five years ago in this space we contemplated the likelihood that Amazon would just keep growing and growing its share of the book business without any end. Of course, a book business-centric view of Amazon these days doesn’t really do Amazon justice. Books and ebooks are a really small part of their business […]
For the book business, VMI in warehouses might happen before VMI in stores
The sales-and-returns convention by which most books are sold by most publishers to their retail and wholesale accounts is too often described as “consignment”. It actually isn’t. Actual consignment terms would give us a quite different supply chain, and we may be closer than most people imagine to shifting to it. Although major trade accounts […]
Conferences are thermometers recording the level of fear about publishing changes
In the latest sign that the need for information about digital change in publishing has undergone a sea change in the past few years, it was announced today that Nielsen will not stage an independent conference in London this April, but will instead join forces with the London Book Fair to do an event there […]
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