A record-breaking 150 participants from
around the world turned out for the annual day-long pre-Frankfurt distribution and supply
chain meeting, organised by the international standards group EDItEUR.
The day got off to a good start with book trade commentator Mike
Shatzkin’s look at the future. Cheaper print on demand; faster shipping of digital
files around the world; better, cheaper and faster e-book readers were all on his agenda.
Not that he sees e-books exploding into the marketplace, more insinuating themselves
through companies and institutions eager to reduce their own content distribution costs.
Hand in hand with the increased use of e-books will go the increasing sophistication of
ultra-short-run and print-on-demand publishing. Michael Holdsworth, publishing operations
director at CUP, referred to some academic books having an eternal life, but warned of the
dangers of delegating fulfilment to a partner who may not even be in the same country.
It would have been surprising if the high profile matter of simplifying
the returns process in the UK had not been addressed. Iain Burns, chairman of the UK book
industry Supply Chain Steering Committee, and Andrew Hodder-Williams of KPMG summarised
the situation.
With £100m in reduceable costs to play for, the now completed process
of understanding returns at both company and "bookshop-plus-publisher" level
seems to be spawning potential industry-wide solutions, with sufficient momentum to come
to fruition. This would make both the returns authorisation process and the physical
handling or destruction of returnable books the subjects of detailed scrutiny and
piloting.
A specific technological advance that seems to be in reach includes
Radio Frequency Identification. The idea is that a wireless signal from a reader unit
deposits sufficient electrical energy in a chip (tag) located in a book or on a crate of
books. The chip then radios back its data. The crate could be the so-called Red Box of
returns going for destruction from a mix of publishers, the chip providing a definitive
list of what was destroyed.
Karl Lawrence of HarperCollins said that the price of tags, now 50p, is
likely to drop to 10p next year and to 5p soon after that, at which point the economics of
inserting one in every book begin to look sensible.
Richard Knight, managing director of Whitaker BookTrack, described how
the sales data agency is extending its data collection activities outside the UK. From
Australia, 114 book outlets are providing Epos data, as are 26 South African shops and
1,600 in the USA, courtesy of sister organisation BookScan. Test data from China are
expected shortly.
PubEasy.com is now well established as an essential Internet tool for
accessing price and availability information from publishers, as well as placing orders,
There is a good list of development requests from both publishers and booksellers in the
pipeline, it was reported, ranging from the inclusion of special prices by market to the
facility to edit backorders.
It was taken as read during much of the meeting that the supply chain
works in hours or days, but Peggy Yu Yu of China’s CNBIP said that books despatched
in the east of that vast country can take 30 days to reach its western fringes. She also
contrasted college attendance rates in China with those of the USA (2% and 33% of student
age group), the number of bookshops in the two countries (77,000 and 12,000,
respectively), and the selling price of books (two to 2.5 times print/bind cost against a
multiplier of 4:6).
The difficulties of setting up as a publisher in China are aggravated by having to buy
ISBNs from "official" publishers, she revealed, as well as the (sometimes very)
long credit periods taken by retailers.
