NEIBA Launches with Conversation on Bookselling
by Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 9/19/2008 7:21:00 AM
The 35th annual New England Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show opened yesterday morning at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston with a program that hearkened back to earlier (pre-Amazon) days when independent booksellers dominated the book market, and booksellers and publishers (not just sales reps) treated each other as colleagues. Billed as a “conversation” with Bob Miller, president and publisher of HarperStudio, and Jonathan Karp, publisher and editor-in-chief of Twelve at Hachette, the discussion focused on ways that independents, which now comprise roughly 10% of the book market, could shore up their financial stability and covered a broad range of topics, including asking ABA to look into working out an arrangement for bookstores to sell Sony Readers. Other topics included POD, with Karp predicting that within the next two decades books will be distributed in hardcopy and that booksellers would print them from digital files in their stores, to nonreturnable product, something HarperStudio is exploring.
Karp, whose imprint publishes only one book a month, suggested that booksellers apply that same kind of selectivity to creating word of mouth, one of their biggest assets to the book industry. “I think you need to be more emphatic about what you endorse, who you bring into your stores and putting more muscle behind fewer books,” he said. He also called on booksellers to exploit other areas that make them unique in a time when people spend increasing hours online, such as making themselves a gathering place to provide what he called “humanity in person.”
Moderator Roxanne Coady, owner of R.J. Julia in Madison, Conn., noted the need for independents to monetize what they do. “Here’s what’s becoming a problem,” she said, “we don’t charge. You can talk with our staff, and there aren’t even tip jars. We see people spending an hour in our store and then leaving and buying the books where it’s cheaper. Is there another way of paying for being that filter?” Addressing Miller and Karp, Willow Books and Café president David Didriksen said, “If you really do value this channel, you have to give us more co-op.”
For Miller, the concept of greater co-op is embedded not just in returnability but removing suggested retail prices from books. Although a brief show of hands indicated that booksellers were evenly split on both concepts, a round of applause followed his proposal that through the ABA or NEIBA booksellers make exclusive publishing deals of their own with publishers. Miller also raised the idea of bundling books in different formats and suggested that independents might sell a customer a physical book (or what he jokingly referred to as “treeware”) and then add-on for a small additional fee, say $2, the same book in e-book and audio book.
In the end, the fact that a dialogue between editors and booksellers took place at all was more important than resolving the problems facing independents from what Coady described as more forks digging into the same pie in a morning session. It also gave publishers a chance to let booksellers know that they are trying to find ways to work with independents to get their books to rise above the din.
Look for fuller coverage of NEIBA and the other fall regionals in next week’s PW Daily.
