I was browsing some used books online, and noticed a few books mentioned “remainder spray” on the bottom edges of the pages.
The book I am currently reading, which I bought used, but nonetheless has had a $3 sticker as a new book, was obviously a remainder, and had this spray-dye on the bottom pages.
So what is the point of this? The publisher is obviously marking it as a remainder book, but to what end? Why is it necessary to mark individual books with this? And as far as I can tell, a “remainder” book is a hardcover book which was over-published, and is being sold at a discount.
Knowing nothing about the economics of bookselling, I can hazard a guess that perhaps the publisher is thinking “Well, this piece of crap book is clogging our warehouses, let’s spray it with dye, reduce the price, and if we catch anyone selling it for full-price, we’ll go after them!” But this explanation doesn’t make much sense. I’ll quit babbling and let you all enlighten me.
Yeah, that is pretty much exactly right. The only addition is that remaindered books are sold to professional remainderers, if there is such a word, who resell them to bookstores for a slight profit. I’m assuming that they, not the publishers, put the spray on the books.
Why doesn’t that explanation make sense to you? The publishers make some money on books that indeed they would have to use storage space on, which is limited and expensive. (Authors often contractually have a first right to buy up unsold books, but often publishers lie and sell them out from under them illegally [as happened to me] or the authors just can’t afford to buy up thousands of unsold books.)
The bookstores get a chance to sell cheap books, which brings people into the store – booklovers also love bargains. The middlemen can more efficiently deal with the publishers and the bookstores to get the books out to the public. (And some of these stores are storefronts set up especially to move remainders, so they have an incentive to work with middlemen who have a wide selection of books rather than with a series of individual publishers.)
Everybody’s happy except the authors, who get no royalties from remainders, but nobody in the system cares about authors in the first place.
Well, I’m happy that I got it right, but what doesn’t make sense to me is this: Don’t the publishers sell the books to the bookstores at whatever price they can get for them? Why would the publishers care what price the bookstores sold them for? If I’m a publisher, and sell 5000 books to barnes and noble for a dollar a piece and cleared out the warehouse, I’ve made my money, right?
What difference does it make what B&N sells the book to the consumer for?
I imagine it has something to do with the authors’ rights:
“(Authors often contractually have a first right to buy up unsold books, but often publishers lie and sell them out from under them illegally [as happened to me] or the authors just can’t afford to buy up thousands of unsold books.)”
and
“Everybody’s happy except the authors, who get no royalties from remainders, but nobody in the system cares about authors in the first place.”
So, I guess my confusion about the issue boils down to
Why do the publishers care what the bookstore sets its price on remainders?
And, (thank you for your reply and bringing up the authors, btw)
2. What is there about author/publisher contracts which would make this an issue?
Bookstores and publishers operate on a modified consignment procedure. The publisher sells the books to the bookseller at the list price “discounted” according to the size of the bookseller and the expected volume the seller might achieve. B. Dalton, B&N, and Borders get discounts in the 50% range on most hardcovers. Your local bookstore (with far less buying power) may get only a discount of 40%. If the local (non-chain) drugstore chooses to carry a few hardcovers, (more common 30 years ago than today), they may get only a discount of 25-30%.
However, the discounts are only a portion of the deal. A bit over 100 years ago, bookstores would frequently order only the number of books they expected to be able to sell by an author. So they might order no more than one or two copies (or order no copies if they did not believe they would find any customers for a title). Some marketing genius persuaded the publishers and booksellers to consider a different option. If a store displayed twenty-five copies of a book, they reasoned, they might sell 10 or 15 of them, instead of two or three. Since, once a press run has begun, the costs for each individual copy are reduced significantly, selling 10 of 25 books actually netted better income than selling 1 of 1. The booksellers initially rejected the plan, reasoning that they would then simply become extended warehouses for the publishers’ overprints. So the publishers made the sellers a deal. Take the 25 books, sell as many as you can (increasing profits for both of us), and we will allow you to ship the unsold copies back to us at the end of a specific period of time. We will then credit your account for the books you have not sold toward the purchase of the next load of books.
When the books were returned to the publishers, of course, the publishers needed to get them out of the warehouse, so a new industry sprang up–remainders. Theoretically, the publishers should have made money on the first round of sales, based on volume, and they could have simply sent the books back to the paper mills to create new stock. However, someone recognized that there were people who would be willing to buy the original book, but would not be will to pay full price for it. They began the practice of buying up the returned books at a huge discount, marking them*, and reselling them to the bookstores. The bookstores were will to buy the remainders, because they recognized that there was a clientele that would buy the discounted books. An added incentive to the booksellers was that the remaindered titles were generally priced at a third or a quarter (or less) of the original price–and the remainder sellers were willing the extend 75% discounts to the booksellers. (The remainderers also follwed the “returns” policy of the publishers for the same reasons–although returned books, at this point, were often trashed.)
*The purpose of marking the remainders is to protect the bookseller, so that a customer could not buy a remainder and attempt to return it as if it were new.
tom~ got it right, so I’m not going to retype what he said. I will, however point out that, in many cases, remainders get marked at the store, for threason he gave (protection of the retailer). Publishers generally only add a remainder stripe if they are remaindering a book that has not yet been declared “out of print”, because they generally don’t accept any returns on out-of-print books. OTOH, since the retailer’s margin is usally in the range of 75-80% on remainders, it’s usually much more cost-effective to keep them in the store, even if a particular remainderer would allow returns.
A secondary point that tom~ didn’t cover: for virtually all newly-published books, the vast majority of sales are going to happen within the first 90 days of publication. Consequently, many (most) publishers will deliberately overprint copies of their major titles (anything by Steven King, John Grisham, Danielle Steel, and so forth) in order to have more than enough copies in stores for that crucial period. In these cases, they’re already assuming beforehand that they will just sell the excess returns as remainders, so it’s built into the price you pay on those books.
Maybe I haven’t thought-through the details quite right, but–
why don’t the booksellers themselves offer the leftover books at a cut price, rather than going through the process of shipping them back, only to turn around and buy them again–etc?
Presumably they don’t want the buying public to wait around for a price drop, but:
–I would think the enthusiasts would snap the book up right away, not knowing exactly when the sale-price will take effect;
–after all, the books DO come back at lesser price anyway, in the remainders system.
The publishers sell remainders at a price below the discounted list price they refund booksellers to return overstocks. If the reaminders were indistinguishable from the original stock, unscrupulous dealers would buy them at the low price and send them back as overstock, collecting the difference.
In fact, few of the outlets that sell new releases sell remainders. Remainders are usually found in discount shops that specialise in them. But the reason that a shop might send back overstock and replace it with remainders is that the remainders are cheaper. They can collect the discounted list price and pay the (lower) remainder price, and pocket the difference.
Agback is from Australia, which may have some different practices, but it is common in most bookstores here in the US to have a remainder table or a bargain or discount section.
And to expand on the answer, bookstores can actually get two profits by sending back overstock.
Profit one: buy book, usually at 40-55% off cover price. Sell for 0-30% off cover price.
Return all overstock. Publisher deducts returns from author’s royalty statement. (Oversimplified since a reserve on returns is usually placed in the beginning, but my last royalty statement was in fact negative. No, I don’t have to pay them - it will just be subtracted if I get future royalties.)
Publisher sells ovestock to remainder house at, say, $1.00 per book, which is money in rather than money out.
Profit two, bookstore buys book from remainder house at, say $3.00, sells for $4.99.
Yes, I’m an author but I didn’t amass 10,000 books by buying very many at full price. At least remainders get our books into the hands of people who want to read them. That can create some future sales and it’s also a lot better than seeing the books pulped without them ever having been read.
Some Guy, maybe I’m misunderstanding, but books must be declared out of print before a publisher can remainder them. At least that’s the way my contracts have already read.
The difference is that if they did this, the bookseller would lose money. Normally, the bookseller gets about a 40-50% discount off the pre-marked price of the book; they are therefore not about to sell for less than this much off if they don’t have to. Since the publishers are willing to take returns at cost (less shipping at the bookseller’s expense), there’s no point in doing this. Since someone will ask: lesser discounts (25-30% off the marked price) work well for new books, but would be suicidal for backstock with no advertising behind it.
OTOH, since publishers are already committed to taking returns, bulk sales of remainders make them a bit more money, which is good. Furthermore, once the same remaindered book comes back to the bookstore, it will usually be priced at around 70-80% off the original marked price, far lower than the retailer could afford to mark down their own inventory. Furthermore, as noted above, that price is usually 75-80% store margin - precentagewise, they are a good deal, even considering the lower demand for older books and the lesser volume of bargain shoppers.
In other words, even though everybody’s just selling it around in a big circle, right back to where the book started, nonetheless everyone makes more money that way. That’s capitalism for you
Chain bookshops in Australia frequently have paperback bins with remaindered books in them but the quality bookshops don’t tend to. We’ve got the remainder bookshops here too.
There’s nothing quite like the special feeling when you see a book you sweated blood on remaindered to $1
I’m not a published author, tho I did formerly work for a large bookstore chain, as you can probably tell. We didn’t get in-print remainders very often, but it did happen. In my experience, this was often the result of some huge fuckup in the printing process that the publisher wanted to try to sell off for whatever reason - for example, we once got a huge shipment of Robert Jordan hardcovers printed in something like 4 point type, single spaced. Now, as a matter of fact, I may well be wrong about striping being indicative that way - while it’s what was commonly believed at my place of work, I don’t have further backup on it. If your publisher tells you differently, in writing, you can probably believe them. Make sure it’s in writing, though ;).
I’ll add that hardcover books typically have a 47% or greater “recycle rate” on them. What that means is that a bookstore orders, say 100 copies of Danielle Steele’s latest drool, only sell 20 of them, and ship the rest back to the publisher.
I spent seven years working the belly (i.e. their main distribution centers) of one of the largest bookstore chains (well, they were the largest, but that’s another story) and I can attest that things worked similar to what Tom described. However, at least in the place I worked at, any cost savings which the retailer might have gained in this system were off-set by the retailer’s purchasing agents inability to judge what was likely to sell. (Come on, what fool thought that Nancy Reagan’s autobiography would be a best seller? Yet, they ordered hundreds of thousands of copies! I boxed up for return something like 70,000 copies in a four month period of time.) When I pointed out that hardcover books have a high rate of return, and that we should cut back on the number of hardcovers we ordered to save money I was told, “But we get our money back when we ship them back to the publisher.” They failed to grasp, though, that we didn’t recoup the money it took to stock the books, ship them to the stores, then ship them back to the DC, restock them, and then ship them back to the publisher. Another irony is that we would be shipping returned hardcovers back to the publisher, while receiving brand new copies of the same book in hardcover, non-remaindered!
If you read any of the trade publications for the book industry, you’ll see the retailers whining that they’re basically at the mercy of the publishers, while the publishers are whining the reverse.
