Why Tobias Buckell's Latest Isn't Stocked at Borders, and other stories

[davidlevine]

This is a really important essay for anyone who wants to understand the bookselling industry today. Read it.

http://antickmusings.blogspot.com/2008/10/on-being-skipped.html

(Hat tip to jaylake)

Comments

[andrewwheeler.livejournal.com]

1) Tone is a tricky thing on the Internet -- I can say that I didn't intend to sound "belligerently self-righteous," but you can counter that I came across that way to you. And we'd both be right. I will say it wasn't my intention; I was trying to work through some complicated background that closely affects writers' careers and that I didn't think they had generally been informed about.

I completely agree that a good bookstore should always place special-order for a customer, assuming the book that customer wants is available with a typical discount from one of the major distributors. There are reports that Borders does not always do this, and to the extent that those reports are true, Borders fails to be a good bookstore.

I don't think you're saying that stores should be expected to have physical copies of all books in print on hand, and, if so, then we're in agreement there.

2) We may disagree on this point; large retailers do have some more leeway to compete on price, but the Robinson-Patman act (and other anti-trust legislation) has kept the discounts from publisher to retailers at parity for the same terms.

I tend to think the major reasons a large number of independents went out of business was undercapitalization and poor business practices; you seem to think that predatory competition was the largest reason. I agree that the competition was one reason, but many of the still-existing independents had competition equally as bad, and have managed to survive -- that suggests, to me, that the competition in and of itself wasn't the defining factor.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your very thoughtful comments.

Re 1), I would accept that your tone was the result of feeling exasperation at what you considered unjustified pouting.

Re 2), I was not thinking so much of discounts provided by publishers to retailers as those provided by retailers to customers: B&N 40%-off loss-leaders, "book club" coupons and so on that make up for decreased profits with induced customer loyalty and simple volume. Smaller stores have a harder time doing that.

The cause for lost business may be an imponderable. If you can say that sufficiently well-run independents have survived against competition, I can say that some poorly-run stores survived a long time until the competition showed up. So it wasn't just being poorly run that killed them. And in fact some very well-run and even economically strong independents - Cody's in Berkeley an outstanding example - have collapsed in recent years.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, the only books that B&N will refuse to order for customers on request are print-on-demand, because they have (as a chain) suffered through too many POD authors or agents ordering books and not buying them when they arrive.

There may be books that they can't order because those books aren't available to them, but that's a different matter. Even B&N, large as it is, doesn't have infinite resources to maintain purchasing accounts with every publisher in America, though they do a pretty good job of it.