Books Bright Spot at Gloomy Borders – 11/16/2005 – Publishers Weekly:
Borders Group had a rough third quarter with total sales up only 0.5%, to $837.2 million, while the net loss increased to $14.1 million from $1.1 million. The good news for publishers, however, is that books performed well in the period with comparable book sales up 3% at the company’s superstores. “The trend for books continues to be good,” said Borders CFO Ed Wilhelm. Music continued to be the black hole for Borders with same store music sales down 15% in the quarter, resulting in a 0.2% decline in overall comp store sale performance at the superstores.
Book sales were driven by solid backlist sales and a broad selection of new releases, which helped to offset lower sales of bestsellers, said Wilhelm. Among the titles that did well in the third quarter were The March, The Historian and The Year of Magical Thinking as well as several mystery titles. Wilhelm said title selection for the holiday season looks stronger than last year. In addition to the top sellers in the third quareter continuing to do well over the holiday, other books that should be strong sellers include Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and the new James Patterson, Mary Mary.
Books rule. As far as this book-lover is concerned, while music, DVDs, and coffee are nice add-ons, it would also be just fine if Borders returned to its 1970s configuration of books — period.
This is obviously going to be a terrible book, but it’s a great title …
Dennis Rodman LUCKY TO BE ALIVE Ex-NBA Star Emerges From Coffin at His Book Signing NEW YORK, Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ — Dennis Rodman really should be dead by now, and his entrance at the official book signing of his upcoming biography proved he has a sense of humor about it. *
The NBA legend has been making headlines for years with his outrageous antics and decadent lifestyle, and now he is releasing a new book entitled “I Should Be Dead By Now,” that will showcase his history of wild living and outlandish publicity stunts.
With the logo of his sponsors GoldenPalace.com prominent everywhere, Rodman arrived at his book signing at Borders Books & Music on 100 Broadway in full spectacle. The enormous crowd that had gathered in front of the store looked on in disbelief when a giant hearse pulled up at the store and several scantily clad women wearing the infamous GoldenPalace.com ad tattoo acted as pallbearers for a monstrous coffin. Rodman emerged from the coffin dressed to the nines and wearing a Beetlejuice wig and makeup to greet the many fans and media that were attending the event. Rodman plans to be buried in the very same coffin when he dies and GoldenPalace.com has promised to keep the coffin until that day.
“We are always curious and fascinated by Dennis’ flair for the dramatic,” laughed GoldenPalace.com CEO Richard Rowe. “Anyone that knows Golden Palace knows that we also enjoy coming up with creative ways to get attention. We wish Dennis the best of luck with his book and we know that people will love to read about his exploits over the years.”
O’Reilly Radar > The Long Fail of Books: “Andrew Odewahn from our Research group recently went to the Bookscan book summit. One of the presentations was on the state of the overall book market, and had this factoid: 93% of all ISBN’s sold fewer than 1,000 units and accounted for 13% of all sales. It’s tempting to think of that as ‘93% of all books are failures’, but that’s not the full story. This being the Third Age of Capitalism and all, success and failure aren’t measured by unit sales. They’re measured by greenbacks, baby: wampum, moolah, shekels, Benjamin Franklins. Cold hard cash (or warm soft cash, so long as it’s cash). Unit sales figures are only part of the equation: cover price and discount to the bookstore are the rest.
Those of you who haven’t dealt with the vagaries of the publishing world before may not know that all books aren’t created equal. Compare Perl Cookbook and Information Visualization: Perception for Design. The former has a cover price of $49.95, but you can buy it for $32.97 on Amazon. The latter has a cover price of $59.95 and you can buy it for $59.95 on Amazon. The difference is because general computer books like Perl Cookbook and textbooks like Information Visualization are sold to booksellers at different discounts. Big distributors like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, etc. get the general books at around half-price but textbooks at about 80% of the cover price. The rationale is that publishers will make up the bigger discount on bigger volumes. Very rare are the textbooks that sell like Robert Ludlum mindcandy.
So without the discount and cover price information, you can’t figure out whether those sub-1,000 books were really failures.
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These are the questions the tech publishing industry faces as book sales slowly establish a new (lower) equilibrium after the tech bust of the early 2000s: Do we make blogs our long tail of tech publishing and only do bestsellers? How do we balance inventory and demand? Do we price for balance or for opportunity?
This is an important perspective from the smartest company in publishing. Scary stuff for book-lovers. Blogs are great, but they aren’t books.
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