Life In The Sad Warehouse

There's so much to read. It's impossible to keep up. So, sometimes you just have to rely on serendipity to get you through.

This evening, preparing the paper trash for tomorrow's pickup, I finally got around to looking at Friday's Wall Street Journal.  And what do I see, but this classic WSJ quad-headline:

Shelf Life

Quest for Best Seller
Creates a Pileup
Of Returned Books

Hoping for a 'Da Vinci Code,'
Publishers Flood Stores;
An Industry 'Gone Mad'

A Trip to the 'Sad' Warehouse

 Wow.

And here are the opening paragraphs:

There are two Time Warner Book Group warehouses on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Although separated by only an eighth of a mile, between them stretches a gulf of disappointment.

One building, dubbed the "happy warehouse" by one publishing executive, is filled with about 60 million hardcover books and paperbacks waiting to be distributed to stores across the U.S. The other is the "sad" warehouse. Piled high are some of the 20 million books returned every year by retailers. Many will be resold at cut-rate prices. Two million to four million will have their spines sliced off before being piled into a recycling machine the size of a Dumpster, chewed up and spat out as bales of paper.

Returns are the dark side of the book world, marking not only failed expectations, but the crippling inefficiencies of an antiquated business. It's a problem that's only getting worse. The industry's current economic model pushes publishers to generate a small number of blockbuster hits. But picking winners is a quixotic enterprise, and as publishers ship an ever-increasing number of books to stores, hoping to hit the jackpot every time, stores are sending an ever-increasing number back.

If ever there was a marketplace ripe for a disruptive entrant, book publishing is it.

And, here's one of the industry's scions:

Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble, the U.S.'s No. 1 bookstore chain, says he has a solution: He wants Barnes & Noble to start marking down books and selling them on the spot. Customers would relish the bargains, publishers would generate more sales and costs would be cut. He says eliminating returns would "revolutionize the book business and revitalize the book business."

But Mr. Riggio says he can't implement the change by himself, since it's ultimately a decision for publishers. "We'd like to see this practice discontinued," he says. "Any rational business person looking at this practice would think the industry has gone mad."

It reminds me of that great joke about factories in the old Soviet Union.  Remember this one? 

A Western reporter approaches the superintendant of a Volga auto factory  in Minsk and asks him, "what it's like to run this plant?" 

"Well," says the plant manager, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us!"

It's kinda like that in publishing today, no? 

Publishers and bookstores say:

"We pretend to sell books and customers pretend to buy them."

Yup, "an industry gone mad."

No wonder the virtually frictionless long tail looks appealing to self-publishing authors.

How long do we propose to go on like this?

Comments

[Aldon Hynes]

I suspect that as more savvy small presses start doing more with publishing on demand, we will see this change. In other industries, just in time production is taking over, why not publishing?

A good example of this is The Writer's Collective over in Rhode Island. A friend published his book there and has been fairly successful with it.

Another interesting site is lulu.com. I wrote a chapter for Extreme Democracy which is published by them.