I’ve been in publishing for a few years now (first on the indy side, and lately on a larger scale), so I have some familiarity with the economcs of bookselling. In my experience, most booksellers/distributors receive a 55% discount off the cover price for books (that is, they buy books from the publishers for 45% of the cover price).
But Scholastic Book Club is a different animal. They sell massive amounts of books to almost every school in the country (a nice little monopoly!), at incredibly low prices. Does anyone know what percentage discount SBC usually receives from publishers?
Scholastic has two different types of books they sell in their book club – books they buy directly from publishers and books they license from publishers.
For the books they buy direct, they usually negotiate seperately for each title so the discounts will vary. But usually they are pretty steep – in the range of 75% to 85% off of list price.
The licensed books are a little different. They will negotiate reprint rights with publishers for a period of time (a year or two) and print their own versions of the books, paying royalties to the publisher on their sales through their club. The Scholastic-printed books are usually (but not always) a more cheaply printed version. Cheaper paper, thinner paperback covers, cheaper binding, etc. That’s why you will see things like childrens picture books at really low prices – $4.99 for a paperback version of a book that would be $16.95 in a book store in hardcover for example.
The revenue that publishers get through Scholastic is pretty slim per title compared to what they could get from a Barnes & Noble, but Scholastic can move boatloads of units.