0805848525.pdf by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub

JOBBERS

The book publisher’s jobber unit is also a highly significant component of the marketing strategy. They service large national and regional book distributors who stock and maintain warehouses filled with books (some companies have inventories that exceed 200,000 titles and 1,000,000 copies). The organizational chart in Fig. 7.4 (which lists the representative types of distributors) outlines how the jobber function is handled within the typical large book house.

Many distributors sell books directly to libraries. They provide generous discounts, critically important collection development advice and services, and one consolidated bill to the library covering all of its services, an especially attractive service for hard-pressed librarians working with slim staffs. In addition, they pro-

vide independent bookstores, some of the smaller to medium-size chains, other retail stores, and Internet bookselling sites with frontlist and backlist titles. Successful distributors created fast, efficient, cost-effective delivery services (using their own fleet or land or air package services); they can provide a needed title within 1 to 2 days. Some firms promise same-day delivery. Book publishers, often plagued with ineffectual warehousing and distribution systems, in spite of investing countless millions of dollars in computer systems, offer better discounts than jobbers; but they can take up to 7 to 10 days to deliver the same title. Some publishers established dollar minimums for orders, forcing many stores to consolidate orders or use the services of jobbers. The laws of supply and demand indicate that distributors will continue to exist and profit handsomely from some publishers’ inability to improve their delivery services and rigid ordering procedures.

Price clubs emerged as a powerful force in the U.S. book industry in the early-to-mid 1990s. These clubs generally charge members an annual fee, which allows members to purchase items at rock-bottom prices. Although their inventories are substantial, they generally do not offer the enormous variety of a giant supermarket or a home improvement center.

They follow the same strategy regarding books. A limited number of titles are offered for sale, but what they have are delivered in the hundreds (if not the thousands) on skids. Titles are stacked on tables, the floor, or, occasionally, on delivery skids. Purchased at a steep discount from the publisher, books are offered at tremendously reduced prices, often only pennies above their wholesale cost. This retailing strategy seems to work because the book is positioned as a commodity, along with bulk purchases of peanut butter, cereals, and automobile oil. Some independent bookstore owners can purchase books at a price club cheaper than they can get them from the publisher or distributor (a fact that became rather public in June 2003 when certain independents, unable to obtain copies of the fifth Harry Potter book, shopped at price clubs). These clubs offer reading for the millions, and they sell tremendous numbers of units annually. However, the titles they stock are almost always in the bestseller or blockbuster categories, along with cook books, children’s books, map books, and inexpensive reference books.

In the late 1990s, many of the major children’s toy store chains opened “book centers.

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