Traditional Publisher Struggling in Face of Technology

Gas prices have sky rocketed for everyone and this is starting to make people think twice about how they are spending their dollars, this includes businesses and industries. One industry in particular that is looking to make a drastic change in the near future is the traditional publishing industry.

For many years, in fact, since the Great Depression, publishers would print up hundreds or in some cases, thousands of books by an author, some known and some unknown, in hopes of selling them to retailers like Barnes and Noble or Borders. These retail stores would order the books and put them on their shelves in hopes of selling them to consumers who read. If the titles did not sell on the store shelves, the retailers had the opportunity to sell the unsold books back to the publisher so the retailer could recoup lost sales. The publisher in turn would try and sell these unsold books to other retailers who carry books. This plan sounds great in theory, but what about in real life?

Well, it isn't working very well in real life at the moment, "The returns are actually down right insane." stated the CEO of Barnes and Noble and this is making people in the industry see this practice of returns as costly because approximately 25% of books sent out, will be returned, that's a 1 out of 4 book ratio. The amount of daily orders placed is, for one warehouse, 15,000 titles. So, costly, it is, starting from the sale of the book to the retailer, to transporting the books, to the processing of the return, transporting the book back, to finally selling it to another retailer, which in some cases, may be the same one that returned the book in the first place. This for obvious reasons is a waste of books, time, gas, and payroll, which really boils down to a waste of money. We also shouldn't forget how badly this effects the environment with unneeded transports, as well as the fact that these books were a tree or two once upon a time.

Too add fuel to this fire (pardon the pun), some books in earlier days were actually burned because they weren't in a good enough condition to be resold. Some warehouses would use these books as a way of heating their buildings during the cold winter months. Thankfully, they are sent off to be pulped today and then probably reborn into yet another book title that may find its fate the same.

With all of the cost factors to consider, it's no wonder that the publishing industry wants some things to change, but how to change, is not so clear cut. Some of the leaders in the industry want to go as drastic as producing less copies of a particular title. And yet, others want to cut out returns all together.

Both of these ideas, though practical, may wind up hurting the actual author with sales, and that may be in all honesty, the best case scenario for well-known authors. The unknowns may not get a second look if the editors have to look at production and sales as factors before they okay a new proposal.

With these factors in mind, some people are looking to print on demand (POD) as an alternative, but with sales only being one tenth of one percent here in the US; it is highly unlikely that that will spark a huge amount of interest here. It is, however, popular enough in the UK for bookstores to consider a pilot program called "Espresso Book Machine" (EMB). This machine will print up books while the customer waits in the store. If it is a successful pilot, the UK is looking to have 60 or so of these EMB machines in bookstores around the United Kingdom.

Something else that may be considered a great idea is the world's first pocket reader called the Readius. This will be out some time next year as "the Cadillac" of electronic pocket devices that can download e-books for the consumer to read on the go. Thomas vander Zijden who is the Vice President of marketing is very optimistic of its launch in the US, and we shall see.

I think, given the economy, that it is still really too soon to tell if any of this will have an impact on the readers of today. Readers have access to so much more than just Borders. Yes there is POD and e-books, but there are also a lot of writer's groups popping up on the internet too. I think reading has changed since the Great Depression and whatever the traditional publishers can do to catch up with that will only benefit everyone involved.