News

So much of the recent focus of the book trade has been on using the Internet for getting books into the minds and hands of the consumer, rather than getting books from the supplier to the bookseller. But for the past 18 months many booksellers have been logging on to PubEasy.com, a self-service enquiry and ordering system aimed at helping the book trade do business more quickly and easily.

PubEasy is a professional, closed, databased Internet service that makes it possible for booksellers anywhere in the world to find up-to-date bibliographic information and place book orders seven days a week, 24 hours a day – but only with those publishers, distributors and wholesalers participating in the service. Happily, their numbers are increasing.

Launched in December 1997 as BookEasy (the name was changed earlier this year), PubEasy was created and developed in the UK by software supplier Vista Computer Services in partnership with Whitaker, and in co-operation with Macmillan Distribution, Exel Logistics and Bookpoint. These affiliated companies have now been joined by HarperCollins, Martson Book Services, Penguin UK (its site launched last week), TBS/Grantham Book Services, John Wiley (in the UK; due to go live in September) and Gardners (also due to go live in September). Airlift has just signed up. The PubEasy site has links to TeleOrdering and Whitaker’s bibliographic database.

Meanwhile, the service has been attracting US publishers and has signed up Broadman & Holman, LPC Group Distributors, National Book Network and Von Holtzbrinck (Henry Holt, St. Martin’s Press and Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

More than 1,300 booksellers in the UK, Europe, North America and Asia have registered with PubEasy.com. About half are UK-based, the rest international.

To use PubEasy, booksellers need a PC or laptop with an Internet connection (the service is designed for Web browsers Netscape version 3, and Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3 and upwards). As it is a closed service, users must log on to http://www.pubeasy.com with a user ID and password, which they receive on their first visit. They can then search by author, title, ISBN, publisher, series or subject to:

• obtain current information on price and stock availability;
• check order status (this can be done while the customer is in the shop);
• check dues;
• place orders through TeleOrdering, to which the PubEasy site is linked, or go direct to the sites of participating suppliers;
• reserve stock against confirmed orders;
• visit individual publishers’ marketing Websites.

In terms of title information, the basic service provides title, ISBN, author, binding, price, availability and publisher/distributor, with daily updates. Users with a subscription to Whitaker’s BookBank automatically receive an added value service, which includes publication date and a short description. If booksellers want to order titles from a distributor site, they will need to use a bookshop’s SAN.

Since going live, PubEasy has added various bells and whistles in response to user demands. Version 2.0, launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair, introduced multi-user access for large booksellers and chains; a "new publications" order form, offering the ability to place early orders for forthcoming titles; back order management, for booksellers to view the status of outstanding back order; and an improved display sequence facility so that users can tailor searches to suit their own systems.

At this year’s London International Book Fair, PubEasy announced direct navigation between affiliate sites and the Whitaker site, plus virtual catalogues and searchable lists of participating publishers. In June, it introduced TRANSACT, a facility that enables booksellers to batch their enquiries, and by December, PubEasy hopes to batch orders too.

PubEasy is free to Bookseller users; publishers, distributors and wholesalers pay an annual fee to have their sites on the service.

For participating publishers, the service effectively allows year-round 24-hour access to customer service desks. According to PubEasy, this gives publishers a number of benefits: reductions in the time and money spent giving out basic bibliographic and order information to booksellers; overcoming the time zone difficulty of servicing international customers; and improving the speed and accuracy of the ordering process.

There is also a site for publisher’s sales reps, who can access their companies’ operational systems and customer details. They can also check credit, ordering patterns and returns, as well as current and back orders and dues. The rep can input orders or subscribe new titles, from home, from a laptop or from the bookshop he or she is visiting.

PubEasy’s subscription management service (www.pubeasy.com/subs) is aimed at providing efficient communication for the subscription supply chain – publishers, agents and end-users such as academic institutions, libraries and corporate customers.

The users that spoke to The Bookseller praise PubEasy but with reservations. All find it to be an invaluable information tool.

Duncan Rodger, proprietor of the Helion Bookshop in Solihull, a history books specialist, says PubEasy saves his business time and money because it is quicker and cheaper than trying to reach publishers by telephone or fax.

"The advantages are more than marginal. It saves a lot of time and we can give customers an instant response when they come into the shop, which is something I always like to do."

PubEasy provides a more accurate and convenient means of finding bibliographic data than his old method, which involved a trip to his local library. "It’s the best way to check availability because it can tell you instantly what is in print, and the information is up to date. We publish books ourselves so we can easily check on how good it is. It is accurate and fairly efficient."

Alan Harrop, director of UK-based educational books supplier Proceuro, says his main use for PubEasy is as an information tool, which he finds invaluable even though he is not a BookBank subscriber. "Ours is a specialised business and it requires extensive researching of bibliographic information." PubEasy is especially useful, he adds, because the information is so current, unlike microfiche or CD-ROM, which quickly become outdated.

Maria Hadjioannous, owner of the Hadjioannous independent bookshop in Greece, agrees that PubEasy’s search facilities are invaluable. "I use PubEasy several times a day, most often to give a price quote to a customer. It is especially reliable for price information. You almost never get quoted the wrong price and this is of great value for me as I have to give prices for lists of titles to libraries as well as to individual customers. In 99% of cases the invoices price is the price PubEasy quoted you."

It is a significant benefit to her business, she says. "As it is so reliable, it saves me a great amount of time I would otherwise take to search on each publishers site." She is particularly pleased that Gardners will shortly go-live; she will be using its site to place orders.

Despite their praise for PubEasy, none of the booksellers uses it to its full extent. All of them have found it to have drawbacks.

Gwyneth Caster, proprietor of the Phoenix Bookshop, a general bookseller in Leamington Spa, is an occasional user of PubEasy. "There are a number of great advantages to it and some considerable disadvantages, " she says.

Good search facilities such as the ability to search for key words or by ISBN have proved very useful, but there are issues which have made her reluctant to use the service on a regular basis. Because the bookshop does not subscribe to BookBank, it only has access to a lower level of detail on titles. "It is possible, for example, to get the wrong version. We ordered a novel through PubEasy and ended up getting the play because PubEasy did not specify which version it was."

Other information, such as which editions are available, the date of publication and the number of pages, would be useful, she adds.

Peter Clifton, PubEasy chief executive officer, confirms that some users do receive more in-depth title information than others. "The Whitaker site on PubEasy automatically provides a fuller bibliographic information display if a bookseller is a BookBank subscriber. Otherwise, the site will only display a certain level of information."

But there are moves to offer more information to everyone. Mr Clifton says individual publishers are beginning to offer more bibliographic information regardless of whether the bookseller subscribes to BookBank.

Perhaps the most worrying for PubEasy is the fact that none of the booksellers quoted uses the service regularly for ordering. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, but most revolve around the specialist natures of their businesses.

Ms Hadjioannous does not use the service to order books regularly because of the level of publisher participation, although she concedes that this situation is improving. "At present the titles of many publishers that are important to us are missing. PubEasy is also limited because it does not provide information about non-participating publishers and their distributors, or provide information on out-of-print books or CD-ROMS."

PubEasy is addressing this problem, says Mr Clifton. "We are working hard to persuade publishers and distributors that have not yet joined the service to do so. I ask booksellers to mention to reps that they want them on the service.

"We have grown tremendously in the past year and plan to continue on the same growth track, adding more publishers, distributors and wholesalers in both the UK and the US. We are beginning to see interest from other regions of the world as well. Over time, PubEasy.com will become even more robust and full featured".

Another complaint, from Mr Harrop, is about the excessive time and effort required to order large batches of different titles because of the very specialised nature of Proceuro’s worldwide institutional business, its own special procedures and the way the PubEasy Website is set up.

Mr Harrop says this is the main reason why he does not use PubEasy to order books. "We do a lot of block orders, lists of 20, 30 or 40 titles. You can’t enter block orders on PubEasy. It’s far easier to fax an order through to the publisher or to give a verbal order." The other drawback, of course, is that many of Proceuro’s suppliers have not joined the service. However, the company is gradually refining its own systems to take advantage of PubEasy’s continuing developments.

Proceuro would do all of its ordering through PubEasy if it could send orders in blocks rather than individually, he adds. "You can’t order books by cutting and pasting the titles you have looked up into the order file. Having typed up the information it seems pointless to type it all out again. If I had a more convenient method of placing the books on order instead of typing them line by line we would use PubEasy every time. But it’s still a godsend".

This is another issue that PubEasy is trying to address, says Mr Clifton. "We are in the process of building a new module that will allow booksellers to submit orders in a file. This will extend the system’s ordering capabilities tremendously".

But booksellers can still order multiple titles, he adds. "And the best way to offer titles so that the issue of cutting and pasting is addressed is simply to the Shopping Cart facility. This allows the user to perform a search and place an order directly on the search results page". Alternatively, booksellers can use the TeleOrdering link.

Several of the booksellers have experienced other minor niggles. "It is more long-winded than logging on to Amazon.com for example," says Ms Caster, who finds it irritating to have to go through the logging-on procedure of password and SAN each time she wants to use the service, which could be several times a day.

Changing attitudes

Mr Clifton admits that there is still a lot of work to do to encourage booksellers to use the system more fully. "Habits are sometime hard to change. The booksellers I talk to vary in their use of PubEasy.com. Some tell me that it saves them ‘a week of work every two weeks.’ others have only dipped their toe in and prefer to do things the way they always have. We are trying to educate booksellers more on its uses and advantages." Most of the booksellers’ misgivings are being addressed and they are beginning to use PubEasy more extensively, he adds.

He is bullish about the growth rates PubEasy is experiencing. Although he would not disclose the total value of orders, there was a 146% increase in the order value across all affiliate sites in June over May, and the volume of orders was up by 188%. Central site usage time increased 66% in the same period. He expects traffic to build as Penguin comes online and to continue to do so with the launch of the Wiley and Gardners sites.

Publishers are coming round to the idea of signing up as those participating demonstrate the savings and benefits to be had, said Mr Clifton, although he was unable to quantify the savings. "It varies from site to site. The affiliates who are aggressively marketing their PubEasy.com Websites are realising the highest benefit, and from what I see, the savings are terrific."

Further details can be had from www.pubeasy.com (tel. 01252 742500; email info@pubeasy.com).