Publishers As The Bookstore
20 Oct 2005, 12:31:10 pm
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If you walk into a Barnes & Noble, the racks have a number of books published by Barnes & Noble, mostly reprints and public domain books. Amazon has started a print-on-demand service, comparable to B&N's iUniverse connection. Now, publishers are turning the tables -- selling books at their own online retail outlets.
Now, you may not know this (or understand the scale of it), but bookstores, in general, keep 55% of the cover price. Author royalties are around 10%-15%, and minus the cost of marketing & printing, publishers keep only a tiny portion of each book's cover price.
Bookstores certainly have a lot of expenses to cover -- salespeople, retail locations, computers -- but if Amazon has taught the industry anything it's that books can be sold online. Why should a publisher bother with the middle-man? Publishers can keep the 55%, or even discount sharply and beat the retailer's discounts, yet still get their books out to the buying public.
This certainly is reason to scare booksellers, and publishers are quite behind the times if they didn't see this before. It might even be touted as the savior of the publishing industry, a new unforseen source of income that requires little more than a canned software package to run the online shopping cart. Hopefully those people don't overlook the benefit of retail stores, which feed the public's need to touch the books & flip through them before buying. Amazon is the one who needs to look out; with e-retail aggregators like Froogle, individual online sellers can be paired alongside their competitors without a middleman's help.
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