It’s also been explained a couple of times, that books are a loss leader for mass retailers such as Kmart, Walmart, etc. You cannot make a profit sufficient to sustain a retail location that sells only books and booklike goods, at the 35% off model. You’re selling the books at cost. I can tell you for a fact that Borders LOST a few dollars on every copy of Harry Potter it sold at 40% off. Not lost a few dollars in profit. I mean, took a loss.
I AGREE that there is no business model in selling books at a price that sustains a physical book store. That is why, in my opinion, Borders will definitely fold and not emerge from bankruptcy (I mean, what’s their master plan, really?)
However the books are not “overpriced.” There is no gouging or excessive profit taking in the book business, I assure you. Well, I really don’t know much about the Australian book business. But in the US? Categorically no.
I have to agree with this too. I see a lot of people extolling the customer service of certain bookstores because the staff offered to order books that they didn’t have in stock. Well, I like good customer service, but *no fucking kidding? * A bookstore can order me a book? :rolleyes: With rare exceptions, any bookstore can order any book in print. They make it sound as if they are ordering me front-row Springsteen tickets.
When I go to a general bookstore, I expect a general selection, including current bestsellers and classics. I don’t read Anne Rice, to use Lynn Bodoni’s example, but if she has written a new novel, I expect a general bookstore to carry it, not have to order it for me.
You’re attaching “overpriced” to “price-gouging”, which is not necessarily the case.
“Overpriced” = the benefits from buying this book at Borders do not justify the additional price over ordering it from Amazon; therefore Borders is overpriced for what I am willing to pay.
“Price-gouging” = Borders is trying to profit at my expense, so I am not willing to buy from them.
What is going on is Borders books are over the price that customers are willing to pay. Regardless of how much profit they’re making or not making on the books. Customers are not willing to buy at their prices.
I do think that beacuse there are many consumer products commonly sold at 500% markup (clothes, jewelry, some grocery items) people do not understand that it costs $6 to get a $7 paperback into the store. They think it costs the bookstore maybe $1.50, and if the book is sold at list someone is rolling in outrageous profit.
Take a new, hot book-suppose Obama comes out witha new book called “Hope and Change-Yeah Right”. It gets priced by the publisher at $29.95. The initail press run is 1 million copies…and the major chains sell out.
I think they make a ton of money. Now, when interest wanes (and this book is now in the “bargain bin”-at $5.99)-do they still make money?
Really they don’t. The bookstores will mark it down at least 30% in order to compete with online sales and each other. They will make almost no profit on this book when it is first released. If moderate interest is maintained in the book for some time, they may make some money on it, when it is not the hot new thing any more and is not marked down as a bestseller (it becomes “mid-list” - something that sells regularly, but is not new)
Bookstores don’t put book in the “bargain” bin because THEY bought too many. They actually buy those books, by the pound, from the Publisher, who has too many. Those books are called “Remainders.” Because the bookstores pay very little for Remainder books, they make a very nice profit on them at the Bargain price points. At times, more than they made on the book when it was new.
This certainly isn’t true of the Borders near me – all the stores in the Boston area are eminently browsable, and I think I’ve gotten something almost every time I’ve gone to one.
The bookstore that fits this description is our local Waldenbooks, just before it closed. It was clear that they hadn’t restocked in a long time, and the books I saw on the shelf were the dregs that had been left behind after people bought out all the more desirable books. That’s the only time I saw that, though. Every other recent bookstore closing has shut down vibrant stores with interesting and rotating stock.
There was a time when American publishers reprinted hardbacks in mass market paperback format. That was decades ago. Except for a very few bestsellers, and some books in certain genre fiction, no book today is republished as a mass market paperback. So you can’t wait for it to appear, because it never will.
There are a couple of historic reasons for this. Mass market paperbacks were not handled by the same distributors as hardbacks. They went to specialized jobbers who put them into the multitudes of newsstands, drugstores, five and dimes, and other non-bookstores who had racks set up for paperbacks. The store owners seldom paid any attention to these. The jobbers came in, took the unsold titles off the racks and slipped new ones in. Many “proper” bookstores refused to carry mass market paperbacks entirely, and those who did tended to push them off to a basement or other less visible area. It was a totally separate, parallel distribution system to the gentleman’s world of mainstream publishing.
The move of populations out to the suburbs, making corner newsstands less attractive as major distribution points, the rise of malls and mall bookstores catering to a public not as disposed to get only literary books, and the bankruptcy of many of the major distributors all lead to an enormous change in the industry. Mass market books depended on reaching a true mass market. They were McDonald’s. Each sale’s profit was small so the volume had to be huge to compensate.
That’s why publishers invented the trade paperback. “Proper” bookstores would stock them and they could be sent through the standard distribution channels. They were profitable because their much higher price allowed smaller sales to reach break even. They were printed off the same plates (now read same electronic format) as the hardbacks so all that had to change was to update the blurbs. Sometimes new and more lurid, eye-catching covers were also used.
Trade paperbacks have displaced mass market paperbacks almost entirely in the U.S. I’m not as familiar with the situation in other countries, and they have different industry histories, but modern economics would seem to have similar pressures everywhere.
E-books are effectively replaced the mass market paperback. They will never return.
Publishers send bookstores their books on consignment. If a book doesn’t sell, the bookstore can return it and get all its money back. This is different from almost every other industry and a big cause of publishing’s difficulties.
Most books are printed in far too many copies, especially any book that’s intended to make a splash. In addition, the number of copies of a book sold can vary greatly from bookstore to bookstore within a city, let alone from state to state. Therefore almost all books wind up with a large percentage of them returned to the publisher.
The publisher doesn’t keep them. They sell them to specialty “remainder” houses, for a buck or two. The remainder houses contract with bookstores and with those odd stores that pop up in empty storefronts for a while and discount stores and dollar stores and whatever to resell the books. You often see a magic marker spot or line on the bottom of the book to indicate that it’s a remainder. The publisher has a marginally better return for selling the book than to pay to pulp them. The remainder house is McDonald’s, making a small return and hoping for volume. The store gets a second chance to make a few dollars and bring people in. The author gets exactly zero.
I know that’s what they mean, but the usual point behind gift cards is that you don’t have to spend your own money with them (unless you want to). This new policy basically turns all existing gift cards into “50% off your purchase with a (probably not insubstantial) minimum purchase required” voucher.
If the books are priced over what people are willing to pay for them, they’re “Overpriced”. The factors influencing what people are willing to pay for them are many and varied, but “What can I get this for somewhere else?” So, if several other well-known retailers have the books for less money, and Borders is the most expensive place as a result, they’re “overpriced”, regardless of the “behind-the-scenes” stuff that means the cheaper retailers aren’t making any profit on the books for whatever reason.
What’s interesting is that most of the “General” bookstores I’ve seen around here now seem to be one step up from “Remainders”- they’ve got “new” books there (if you want the latest bestsellers or Vampire Something or Special Operations Adventure Stuff or Yet Another Australians in WWII books) but a significant part of what they’ve got can best be described as “Quality Remainders”- not random crap, but not really “A-list” stuff either, for want of a better way to describe it.
That’s all nice for you and me, but, as I realized recently, what about kids like my nephew? Are we to expand his love of reading through message boards? Will he and others like him be at the mercy of the interests of his adult relatives, without the ability to just wander in a kid’s section and soak up all he can?
Given my history and memories of them, I’m extremely disturbed at the thought of a nation without bookstores. It really chills me.
Where are you getting this? Mass market paperbacks are still being published in huge numbers across a wide variety of titles and genres. Yes, the trade paperback is pushing them out a little, but that’s because a lot of people prefer the trade paperback over a mass market one (I know I do).
But any reasonably popular hardback will eventually be released as a paperback.
When I was a kid, I had the ability to wander in the kid’s section of, wait for it, a library. While my parents did buy books (they have bookcases full of books and more packed in boxes) we rarely got them at actual bookstores. I’d get them through Scholastic order forms and school book fairs, they’d buy them at everywhere from WalMart to Costco, books would be received as presents, but I really don’t remember spending much time as a child in bookstores. I did later, as a teen (especially when I had my own car), spend a decent amount of time at used bookstores. What I do remember are lots and lots of library books and trips to the library. In fact, we probably would have gone to a library even more often than we did when I was under 10 or so had there been a closer branch library to our house. (There is now, after we moved from that house, and I have to say it’s pretty nice from the couple of times I went in it.)
Borders stocks roughly 141,000 titles per store. The small community library I work at stocks 80,000, with another two million available throughout the countywide system. To say there’s no where to browse for books anymore is extremely ignorant.
I went to B&N on Wednesday, and browsed several categories of fiction. I didn’t take inventory, but my impression was that about 75-80% of the books on the shelves were mass market paperbacks. There were some trades and some hardbacks for sale, but the vast majority were mass market paperbacks. Granted, this doesn’t mean that the MMPB are the most desired books, it’s just that they are the ones I saw available.
If I have a choice between a mass market and trade paperback at the same price, and all other factors are the same, I’ll take the mass market PB. They are far more convenient for me, in reading, in handling, and in storage. I’ll only buy a trade paperback if it offers me something positive, such as a collection of recipes in the back (Fried Green Tomatoes) or an author’s afterword that’s not available in PB. Right now, most of them offer only negatives for me. I will, on occasion, buy hardback, if I think that I’m going to want to read the book to death, because hardbacks generally stand up to use better than paperbacks of either MM or trade, except for the dust jackets. Mostly, though, the larger size of both hardbacks and trade paperbacks are a severe drawback for me.
I think the problem here is that you and Lynn are thinking of fiction, not the entire market. Fiction is a small percentage of the total trade book market. Nonfiction used to be released as mass market paperbacks, and there were several houses that had lines that specialized in this, like Signet. Today virtually no nonfiction is ever released as a mass market paperback. I cannot remember the last time I bought one. The only exceptions might be pocket guides, calorie counters, and other take-along-with-you books.
When we get to fiction, I did explicitly say that bestsellers and many genres do mass market. Literary fiction does not, except for very rare cases. Most mid-market fiction - the books that are not quite super literary and not bestseller material - never appear in mass market either.
You can check this by going to the New York Times bestseller lists. There is no category for mass market nonfiction. The paperback nonfiction list is all trade paperbacks. There is a mass-market fiction list. Every book on it, down to #35 on the extended list, belongs to the bestseller or genre category. (Note that “bestseller” is now a category or genre unto its own. You’ll occasionally see a literary novel make the bestseller list. But those are still rarely if ever reprinted in mass market.)
You may be mislead by the visibility of these titles, but as a percentage of the total number of mainstream trade books published, they are minuscule. And they represent an enormous percentage drop from what the industry used to do.
So you’re chastising us for forgetting a segment of the market that doesn’t exist? You’re right, mass market paperback non-fiction hasn’t existed in a very long time. But trade paperback non-fiction is a thriving section of any bookstore. And the two are similar enough that saying “I’ll get it in paperback” is a perfectly viable option.
You’ve got to remember, you’re looking at this as an author (and as an author who was most active in the industry a while ago IIRC). Readers only care about hardcover or paperback. The nuances of the different types of paperbacks don’t matter to them.
But again, all of those genres are released as trade paperbacks.
The relevant part of the discussion he’s responding to started with the distinction between mass market paperbacks and trade paperbacks. I don’t think he’s being unjustifiably nitpicky.
Woke up early to hit the Boylston Borders and wound up with about $110 of books I’d been meaning to buy for years. I wanted to go for a cup of coffee, but the damn cafeteria was already closed down.
I agree with those who say Borders is doomed. It’s just not a viable business model anymore, and I can’t complain too much, because I buy most of my books from Amazon, even for impulse buys. When the Downtown Crossing flagship store closes, though, that will be the final chapter of well over ten years of my life spending my days off and breaks from the job search (which ended months ago with a good job) hanging out on the mezzanine drinking my coffee, reading whatever I happened to pick up minutes before and wondering why the fuck I had to grow up in rural-fucking-PA without this kind of thing.
And I’m lucky. The BPL in Copley Square, just a block away from the Borders is easily the best public library I’ve seen. It’s even got a cafe, the last time I checked . . . I’ve already got enough material in my private stash not to have to buy books for the next ten years. I tell myself that I can just take what I’ve already got and spend those years in one of the approximately 7.2 billion Au Bon Pain shops in the Greater Boston area, but I will cry tears without shame when they finally shut the doors on the big one downtown. Borders, like most other bookstores out there has lousy business sense, lousy prospects, and an outdated view of the market, but it’s still going to be like losing my home.
True, but while jackdavinci may not understand why someone likes trade paperbacks, most readers don’t care. All paperbacks are the same. That’s the point I was making along with mentioning that paperbacks still exist in huge numbers.
