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For the book business, VMI in warehouses might happen before VMI in stores

January 16, 2017 by Mike Shatzkin 2 Comments

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 […]

Filed Under: General Trade Publishing, Licensing and Rights, Marketing, Supply-Chain Tagged With: Amazon, B&N, Barnes & Noble, demand planning, GMROII, Ingram, vendor-managed inventory, VMI

Penguin Random House does its competitors a favor by walking away from subscription

November 19, 2014 by Mike Shatzkin 30 Comments

I sometimes feel like I’m the only guy in town (NYC, but I’d include London too) contemplating out loud how Penguin Random House might use its position as by far the biggest commercial trade publisher to make life a bit more difficult for its competitors, which in the first instance means the Following Four: HarperCollins […]

Filed Under: Direct response, eBooks, General Trade Publishing, Licensing and Rights, New Models, Scale, Subscriptions Tagged With: 24Symbols, Amazon, Bertelsmann, Bookmate, BookScan, FutureBook, Hachette, HarperCollins, Jonathan Stolper, Kensington, Kindle Unlimited, Macmillan, Nielsen, Oyster, Penguin Random House, Philip Jones, PRH, Scribd, Simon & Schuster, Skoobe, Ted Hill, The Bookseller, Tom Weldon, vendor-managed inventory

The future of books in stores

July 23, 2013 by Mike Shatzkin 15 Comments

The future for books in retail stores is not unified; it’s dispersed. To the extent that there continue to be bookstores (and although shelf space in them will continue to decline inexorably, they’ll also be around for years to come), the bookstores will increasingly be more about books for reading and less about books for […]

Filed Under: Atomization, General Trade Publishing, New Models, Supply-Chain, Vertical Tagged With: Abrams, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Chronicle, Kindle, Nook, Quarto, showrooming, vendor-managed inventory, West Broadway Book Distribution, Workman

Vendor-managed inventory: why it is more important than ever

April 23, 2013 by Mike Shatzkin 9 Comments

The idea of vendor-managed inventory has never become particularly popular in the book business, despite a few experiments over the years where it was implemented with great success. (And despite the fact that I was pushing for it back in 1997 and 1998.) But as the book business overall declines, with the print book business […]

Filed Under: General Trade Publishing, New Models, Publishing History, Supply-Chain, Vertical Tagged With: Above the Treeline, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Doubleday, Doubleday Merchandising Plan, Leonard Shatzkin, Philip Van Doren Stern, Two Continents, vendor-managed inventory, West Broadway Book Distribution

Some ideas for publishers that will help bookstores; other suggestions that make us skeptical

February 13, 2013 by Jess 25 Comments

This is the fourth of a series of posts on bookstores and their future. The previous posts have covered the challenges of buying (proposing VMI as a possible solution), explored what we should expect for the future of Barnes & Noble, and envisioned what the world of brick-and-mortar book retail might look like in the […]

Filed Under: General Trade Publishing, New Models, Supply-Chain Tagged With: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Candid Camera, Consignment, Indigo, MDF, Philip Jones, Random House, RDA, vendor-managed inventory, VMI

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Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and a widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry. Read more.

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