B&N Shuffle

I walked into a Barnes & Noble today. First time in awhile. I remember I used to enjoy doing that. You know, walking into a Barnes & Noble. Today it felt obscene, and not the good kind of obscene. Everywhere I looked I saw excess. The same title with 15 or more copies piled high. I imagined those books piled high in B&Ns across the country.

Then I imagined how many of those books wouldn't sell. Would be sitting on a table or a shelf until B&N collectively boxed them up and sent them back to the publisher or marked them down to far less than their value. Less than B&N supposedly paid for them.

So why is this obscene? Shouldn't I be applauding the fact that B&N (and Borders and Wal-mart) are bringing books to the masses? Clap ... clap. Primarily because of the chain "super"store (and the weakness of publishers), you and I are paying twice as much for books than we should be paying.

You see, once upon a time (i.e., before the big-box store), publishers set the suggested retail price for books at approximately five times their production costs. This is according to Andrew Laties must-read for any bookshop owner: Rebel Bookseller. Andrew goes on to say that due to illegal wholesale deals with publishers and the overstocking on books, the big-box stores were the main factor in publishers hiking their suggested retail prices to roughly 10 times their production cost to offset the money they were LOSING in providing the big-box stores with these great wholesale deals and all these stacks of books.

Wait, publishers were losing money? Yep. You see to meet the faux demand of the big-box store they ended up publishing in higher volumes. Then the big-boxers would send the unsold back, which the publisher would have to write off. And which is why it's obscene to me now to see 15 copies of a title in B&N (and knowing there's a stack like that in every B&N across the country). Eesh.

A few footnotes. Andrew's book does talk about the lawsuit against the publishers for unfairly providing better deals to the big-box store than to independent bookstores. The lawsuit was successful and the lopsided wholesale practice, in theory, no longer exists (do you believe it? I don't. I assume they've come up with some nifty accounting tricks to stay within the law ... but I digress). However, the damage was/is done. Thanks to the big-box and to the stupidity (or weakness) of publishers, we're still paying approximately 10 times the production costs of a book. So why hasn't the price come down?

Because big-box stores still order way more copies than they ever plan to sell. So publishers still eat this cost because they're too afraid of the big-box to say "No."

And, of course, the big-box store doesn't affect only booksellers. Really, they affect every business and everyone in the country. If you're interested in this topic look for these books at your INDEPENDENT bookseller (and don't be afraid to have them order it for you if they don't have it in stock):

Rebel Bookseller by Andrew Laties. I borrowed all of my facts from this book. Any errors are completely mine.

Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses by Stacy Mitchell. The title says it all.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell. It talks about how discount pricing is affecting us all, and it ain't good.