More trouble for Borders U.K.

A BBC article reports that Borders U.K. has ceased taking online book orders and suggests that the company “does not have enough cash to last until Christmas.” The article caps a bad year for the beleaguered company, which operates 45 stores throughout the U.K.

Last December, Borders U.K. had its credit insurance cut off, in July CEO Philip Downer led a management buyout of the company, and earlier this month it reportedly jettisoned its Web team, after apparently investigating the possibility of outsourcing its website administration to an independent contractor. In addition to news that the website is no longer fulfilling orders, The Bookseller is reporting that one major distributor is refusing to ship to Borders and that W.H. Smith has backed away from an offer to purchase the company.

According to an email leaked to The Bookseller issued by The Book Service Ltd and Grantham Book Services, the distributor stopped Borders UK and Books Etc accounts earlier in the week. The distributor represents Random House, Little, Brown and the Independent Alliance companies.

According to the website Retail Week, W.H. Smith approached Borders to express interest in a buyout, but walked away from talks at the end of last week without reaching a deal.

Stephen King’s new face of evil: predatory pricing: UPDATED

When you’re an author of Stephen King’s stature, you can afford to be direct. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly (where the mega-selling author is also a regular columnist), King had a message for retailers who are selling prestige titles at steep discounts: “It’s time to give the smaller bookstores a little breathing room (although not much chance of that, with Walmart offering Dome for nine bucks.)”

King’s new novel, Under the Dome, set for release Nov. 10, is indeed being sold for $8.98 at Wal-Mart and Target, which are engaged in a price war with online retailer Amazon. The big box stores are selling King’s hardcover (which has a cover price of $35 U.S.), along with nine other titles by brand-name authors, as loss leaders. The move is expected to adversely affect the bottom lines of independent booksellers, who are heading into the all-important Christmas selling season.

The American Booksellers Association has approached the Department of Justice about the matter, claiming that Wal-Mart and similar retailers are engaging in “illegal predatory pricing.” From EW:

In a letter released [last Thursday], the ABA went on to say that the practice was “damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers.” A top publishing executive tells EW: “They had no choice. Bookstores are simply under siege. On one side, they’re facing the threat of e-books, and on the other they’re staring in the face of these three ugly superpowers.”

Meanwhile, the Toronto Star reported on Friday that similar deep discounting was not being implemented north of the 49th Parallel:

Andrew Pelletier, vice president of corporate affairs for Wal-Mart Canada, told the Star Friday morning that the company takes “a Canadian approach” to retailing based on “what is good for the Canadian market” that often differs from how Wal-Mart operates in the United States.

“We are two different countries. The U.S. approach is based on their marketplace,” he said. Wal-Mart Canada also doesn’t sell books online, he said.

Canadian politesse notwithstanding, it may be only a matter of time before consumers here start demanding similar price cuts. In any event, the ABA’s letter contains a dire warning: “The entire book industry is in danger of becoming collateral damage in this war.”

This post contains material that has been corrected. The quote concerning “collateral damage” was contained in the ABA’s letter to the Department of Justice. It was erroneously attributed to Canadian Booksellers Association executive director Susan Dayus. Quillblog regrets the error.

Online bookselling, publisher-style (continued)

Canadian publishers are continuing to experiment with direct sales online – and at least one is offering Amazon.ca- or Indigo.ca-style incentives. The Random House of Canada website is currently highlighting (see upper right corner of the home page) a “Summer Reading” promotion that offers 30% off and free shipping on all books. The same deal can be found on the McClelland & Stewart site.

Random has been edging in this direction for a while, doing similar deals in the past on selected titles. They’ve also denied that it’s an attempt to compete with booksellers, though undoubtedly not all booksellers will agree.

Random isn’t the only publisher courting the consumer with incentives: Anansi is currently running a buy-three-get-one-free deal on its site. Other publishers, like Penguin Canada, sell online sans deals, while others, like Key Porter and Douglas & McIntyre, direct readers to booksellers. Same goes for HarperCollins Canada, though their proper site is in the shop at the moment.

Bookmarks: Solzhenitsyn, Kafka, Rushdie, Meyer, and more

Some book-related links:

• Russians conflicted over Solzhenitsyn’s legacy (The New York Times)
• Apparently, Kafka liked the hot stuff (Times Online)
• Salman Rushdie threatens to sue over bodyguard’s memoir (CNN.com)
• Stephenie Meyer’s newest breaks sales records (USA Today)
• Speaking of Meyer and things being broken: Vancouver woman hit by car while waiting in line for Breaking Dawn (The Globe and Mail)
• Afghanistan’s biggest bookseller launches web site (CBC.ca)
• This week in cutthroat bookselling: Ann Arbor bookseller accused of hiring drug addicts to steal from competitors (Mlive.com)

Borders launches Borders.com (again)

Back in 2001, when the dot-com boom went bust, the U.S. bookstore chain Borders decided to get out of the online bookselling biz and scrapped Borders.com. Now, however, they seem to have thought better of the move and are taking another go.

According to ChannelWeb:

The relaunch of Borders.com is the latest in a series of e-commerce moves by Borders. In December of 2007, Borders teamed up with Sony to offer over 25,000 e-books online to customers for digital download.

As part of the new Borders.com, Borders is hyping the personalized “Magic Shelf” feature, which displays book titles customized to each user on a virtual bookshelf that looks much like a shelf in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. Borders is also incorporating its “Staff Picks” into the online store, and allowing Borders Rewards members to earn points through online purchases.

In addition to an extensive inventory of 2 million new books, 100,000 movies, and 400,000 CDs, Borders is also offering second-hand and rare books through its “Borders Marketplace” in a partnership with Alibris.com.

Incidentally, it looks like they do ship to Canada, although with added service charges. You can see their shipping rates here.

Online bookselling, publisher-style

Recent visitors to the Random House of Canada website may have noticed a new Father’s Day promotion. Like many Canadian and American publishers, Random has been selling books directly on its website for some time, but the pitch for the dozen or so Father’s Day titles is unusually aggressive: Random’s offering 30% off the list price and free shipping.

That’s likely to raise some eyebrows, or at least provoke some resigned sighs, from booksellers who are sensitive to competition from publishers. Q&Q e-mailed Tracey Turriff, Random Canada’s senior vice-president and director of marketing and corporate communications, and asked about the rationale for the special, and customer reaction. Below is Turriff’s response:

We see this and any other promotions on our website as a way of bringing attention to our books and authors and communicating with readers, not as a way to sell a lot of books, and certainly not as a means of competing with bookstores. Promoting our books is naturally essential to us. Our website is a promotional vehicle and we are using it, as with our other marketing efforts, to make readers aware of our books and to drive them into bookstores. The Free Shipping and 30% off simply add greater focus. We have done other promotions in the past, such as Mother’s Day and “Green” themes, and are planning a Summer Reading promotion. The sales through our own site have been minimal, but we have seen increased sales through bookstores for the titles featured in these promotions in the past, which suggests it is working.

And in response to a follow-up question:

Research has shown us that many Canadian readers like to look for books online, and our promotions are targeting them, to bring attention to the books and authors we feature. The main focus of these promotions is to interact with readers and build awareness for these books, and with consumers spending so much time online, our own website is a good place to do that.

Canadian Heritage’s state of the (bookselling) nation

Last year, the Department of Canadian Heritage commisioned a report entitled The Book Retail Sector in Canada, which was releases late last month. (You can read the whole report here.)

Its key findings probably won’t knock the wind out of anyone familiar with Canadian bookselling and publishing. To wit:

• The Canadian book retail sector is highly concentrated.
• New sales channels are emerging.
• Exchange rates are fuelling imports.
• The supply of books in the Canadian market is growing much more quickly than is consumer demand.

The report concludes that Canadian bookselling and reading habits are affected by similar changes and forces as in other Western industrialized nations, that Chapters-Indigo dominates to a potentially unhealthy degree, and that “Canada’s book retail sector faces many challenges today, but many opportunities, too.”

(For more on these developments, see Quill & Quire magazine, passim.)

Bookmarks – Paddington the Bear in jail, comic books in Kandahar, bibles in China, and more

Some book-related links:

• Paddington the Bear arrested on immigration charges on 50th anniversary (CBC.ca)
• Comic books handed out in Kandahar to teach kids about human rights (The Canadian Press)
• Speaking of human rights, China to hand out bibles – 50,ooo,ooo of them! – in make-nice gesture (Times of India)
• Making new books out of old (The Register-Guard)
• Bookselling and the gender divide (Mister Aeden Goes To Dubai)
• Who really wrote “‘Twas the Night Before Chrismas”? (Associated Press)

Book-Writing Idol II: Electric Boogaloo

Remember that Lit Idol contest in the U.K. back in 2004? Unpublished novelists submitted their work for a chance to win representation from a British power agent, and a Canadian, Paul Cavanagh, beat out everyone. He ended up publishing his first novel, After Helen, with HarperCollins Canada last year.

Now Simon & Schuster in the U.S. is also doing the contest thing. As The New York Times reports, S&S imprint Touchstone “has promised to publish a book by a first-time author who wins a contest on Gather.com, a social-networking site that might be described as MySpace for grown-ups.” The winner will have to make it through three rounds of public online voting on Gather; the five finalists will then be chosen by a panel including execs from S&S and bookselling chain Borders. (No word on whether Paula Abdul will be talked into joining the panel, though she’d no doubt be moved to tears on a regular basis.)

For their trouble, the winner will get $5,000 from Gather and “a book contract” from S&S. Not much in the Times piece about the nature or terms of that contract, which would certainly be interesting.

Virtual gold

An Associated Press story by Hillel Italie claims that there may be more money in small and niche publishing than people think. A new study by the Book Industry Study Group in the U.S. claims that smaller publishing companies (as well as self-published authors) are carving themselves a larger slice of the retail pie than was previously believed, mainly through the new sales opportunities available through online bookselling. Margo Baldwin, who runs Chelsea Green Publishers, a company that specializes in environmental and political titles, is unequivocal in her praise of the Internet. “The online retailers have significantly altered the industry,” she says, “because they allow small publishers to have their books alongside the books by the big publishers, at least in a virtual retail slot. Before that, if you couldn’t get into a traditional store, you had no distribution channel.”

Related links:
Read Hillel Italie’s article