To Go Where No Buyer Has Gone Before

I got a glimpse into the future this week when I bought the HarperCollins children's and the Penguin adult hardcover lists using the electronic catalog Edelweiss instead of the paper catalogs provided by the publishers. Edelweiss, an offshoot of the popular bookstore data analysis program Above the Treeline, is attempting to position itself as the industry's catalog repository of the future.

Why should each publisher have to develop their own ecatalog when Treeline can create a format that will allow them to just plug their title information into it? Overjoyed buyers would only have to learn one program instead of dozens. At least that's the reasoning of Treeline's founder John Rubin. Rubin has been working furiously since last June's Book Expo America in Los Angeles, when HarperCollins announced their ambitious plans to rid themselves of paper catalogs, to get his product off the ground.

Rubin was in my office for the HarperCollins children's buy along with my Harper rep John Zeck. Zeck and I have been two of the biggest proponents of Treeline over the last few years. It's a program with an enormous amount of potential to revolutionize how bookstores and publishers relate to each other. Publishers can see nearly real time sales data at stores on a title-by-title level as well as their aggregate sales.

Much to my frustration, the industry tends to use Treeline, which has the analytical power of a Maserati, as a child's tricycle. Publisher reps timidly suggest that stores buy a title here and there based on Treeline data. Instead, the publishers could do something truly useful like allot co-op dollars to stores for the year based on the Treeline data. Get one more marginal title into a store or save hundreds of hours of extra labor? Seems like an easy decision, and yet every publisher has opted for the extra title so far. In my experience, only Random House has made some attempts to use the true power of the program.

Rubin is smart enough to know that his program is under-utilized by the industry and saw a golden opportunity to position Treeline front and center as publishers looked for ways to save catalog costs. It's a bold step but one that might be necessary for the long-term survival of Treeline. When the cost-cutters at bookstores and publishers start snipping their budgets, it's easy to imagine Treeline, a program filled with potential but short on results, just might go by the wayside.

Well, after two full days on Edelweiss, I can honestly say that Rubin is well on his way to changing the industry in a drastic way. Each buy took a little longer than it would have taken using a paper catalog, but I should be able to get that time back when I dump the order directly into our Point of Sale system rather than having to enter each title of the purchase order by hand.

Edelweiss is organized by catalog just like the publisher's mailings, and that's how I bought the lists. It is possible to reorganize the catalogs on Edelweiss and look at a publisher's whole list by category or date. That's what I planned to do with the Penguin hardbacks, but I was thwarted. When I brought up all of the fiction titles, the rep's notes, which contained co-op incentives, disappeared. It was frustrating, but an email to Rubin resulted in the glitch being fixed by the end of the day.

The more challenging and entertaining appointment was the Harper's children's buy. Zeck and I have a routine (we are both gregarious East Coast guys) that usually distracts everyone else in the office. The day is spent thrusting and parrying over the merits of Harper's books, co-op, publishing philosophy, as well as our bookstore's buying policies, independent stores' reluctance to change and whatever happens to be in the news that day. Add in the fact that I hadn't bought a major children's list in over a year, the confusion of learning Edelweiss and Rubin's high energy presence and it was quite a day in the office.

The next day Penguin rep Tom Benton and I were able to power through the Putnam, Viking, Riverhead and Penguin Press catalogs in just over four hours. His appointment was noticeably calmer then Zeck's. We were both a little more familiar with the mechanics of the ecatalog and Tom's demeanor is much more low key. Instead of a fencing match, our appointments are more like a civil conversation between old friends. We trade ideas about what songs to download from emusic and consult the baseball schedule before making our summer appointment. Also, with Rubin off skiing in the Colorado high country, we were able to proceed more like a normal appointment.

During the Harper meeting, Rubin quickly typed in notes every time Zeck or myself stumbled over a difficulty in the program. Why can't we assign department categories to books when we are in the title list view? How can we tell whether a comparable title mentioned by the publisher is a hardback or paperback? Shouldn't this page load quicker? What is this buyer rating feature?

We spent most of the day in the single title detail screens, going title by title through the catalog. I would have preferred scrolling down the title list screen that shows dozens of titles and then just darting in and out of the detail screens but this just wasn't practical because the title list screen took a little too long to load. Rubin left determined to increase the speed of the list page and was already emailing his programmers with ideas before the appointment ended.

One of the catalog's features is that the reps can rate the priority of the titles and buyers can sort by the priority level. Zeck had rated a couple dozen at high priority, and in the future I would probably start with those titles. Going title by title through the catalog, it was interesting to see which ones popped out as priority titles.

I loved having the comparable books a single click away rather than having to type in the ISBN. The other great thing about seeing the author's previous title in Edelweiss is that the sales and inventory data for the first three months after the book was released come from Treeline. In our POS system if a title is over a year old we lose this monthly data. These out-of-the-gate sales are critical for determining an initial buy, and for the first time ever, I was able to see it on older titles.

I also appreciated that Edelweiss is adding up your buy as you go along. That was particularly critical since I was intent on ordering less this year. During the Penguin buy, I was determined to cut at least 20% off of last year's buy. It was great to have a running tally of the dollars spent as I went along. Unfortunately, Penguin made this task of cutting dollars fairly easy by publishing a pretty weak list this season. Hopefully, the presence of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice, which Tom described as "the most accessible Pynchon ever" will help redeem the list.

I found that I relied on Zeck and Benton more than usual during these appointments. This might have been because the difficulty of dealing with a new program made it a bit harder to focus on the titles or that I needed more help in deciding which piece of the abundant information to give credence. Harper sometimes listed 25 comparable titles for a children's picture book or teen fiction title. I'd turn to Zeck with a forlorn look in my eyes and he'd invariably tell me to compare the book to Marley and Me which seemed to be listed half the time.

Penguin actually had the opposite problem -- a lack of information. Putnam at least populated its catalog with cover images, descriptions, quotes and an occasional comparable title, but Penguin Press frequently had no information whatsoever accompanying its titles. One piece of information that I had on the Penguin Press catalog was Tom's suggested orders. Those suggestions would have been more effective if they weren't hovering in the middle of an empty screen. Reviewing those titles, I'd look at Tom's lonely suggestion and ask him if it was perhaps based on more information than I could see. We both peered at his paper catalog with its scribbled notes about print runs and publicity and tried to come up with a number.

When my buying appointment with John Zeck was finally over (Harper's children's catalog alone contained 232 items, and that didn't include Greenwillow or Hyperion), we were too exhausted to attempt a marketing meeting. Next meeting I might tell him to just sort out his top 100 titles before we sit down. Tom Benton and I decided to meet with the store's marketing manager after we'd completed all of the online catalogs (significantly fewer titles than Harper) and save the old-fashioned Dorling Kindersley's and Rough Guides' paper catalogs for another day.

As I was doing the buys, I was using Edelweiss' tagging feature to highlight different titles for our store's newsletter, displays and possible events. Our marketing manager opened up the catalog, sorted it by the tags and instantly had the information she needed. She cut and pasted the title and ISBN info from the catalogs, and the marketing appointment took half the time it normally does. I think I can safely say she was an instant convert to the ecatalogs.

On reflection, I don't think too many buyers will choose to use Edelweiss instead of the publishers' catalogs at this point. Buyers, like many people, are averse to change and it's not clear that the ecatalog is advantageous yet. Looking at all the titles and imprints on screen in the same format (a Putnam title looks like a Viking title) gets a little tedious. I think a few tweaks, especially getting the title list page to load faster and being able to order directly off of that page could change things quickly. Suddenly, the ecatalog would be quicker to buy than the paper ones because it's faster to scroll down a page of books that are mostly skips than to turn page after page.

I was extremely impressed with John Rubin's attentiveness to what the reps and I needed and his willingness to make the necessary changes to make the system even better. After all, I was basically the first beta tester and I consider it a bit of a miracle that we were able to do two major buys in the first two days. Hopefully, over the next few months several more teams of curious and intrepid buyers and sales reps will use the program. Their input could mean the difference between revving up that sports car engine he's designed or merely pedaling uphill in one speed.

Welcome to the Digital World

Can Anyone Use a Computer Around Here?

Buying new books for the store, the crux of my job, can be an exercise in absurdity and futility. It's an antiquated, inefficient system that hardly takes into account the invention of the personal computer and completely ignores the existence of the internet. Here's how it works in a nutshell:

1. The publishers send out catalogs several months in advance of the publications of their new titles. I just bought Oxford University titles that aren't due out until next winter. These catalogs, which look and read like poorly edited magazines, usually feature one title per page. For each title there is a short (a few paragraphs) description, an image of the cover, often an author photo and information on the author's previous titles. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you get a humorous tagline that reads something like "a cross between All the Pretty Horses and the Da Vinci Code."

2. I flip through the pages of these catalogs (sometimes 500 or more pages in a single day), going through one at a time to discover the books I want. I dutifully look up old titles by the authors, previous editions of travel books, and books with similar themes or topics. The titles in each catalog are in a seemingly random order that must make some sense to the publisher, but usually befuddles me. For instance, HarperCollins, Random House, Penguin, and Simon and Schuster each may have up to a couple dozen different catalogs. The new hardback fiction titles might be spread throughout as many as ten of these. This makes it nearly impossible to really know how much of any one topic or genre you are ordering during the sales call.

3. The sales rep goes through the catalog with me, highlighting books that the press is particularly excited about, or, more often, books that the publisher isn't really supporting with publicity, helping to guide me to a final number. Since the catalogs are out of date by the time they are printed, a lot of the rep's job during the appointment entails pointing out which terrible covers in the catalog have been changed, mentioning price increases, and informing me about upcoming publicity that was recently booked. They do this at every appointment. Honestly, I don't know how they stay awake.

4. Five or six hours into the appointment, when I've worked through all the titles in the catalog and it's all I can do to keep from dropping off to sleep, the sales rep stealthily whips out a stack of photocopied pages for me to peruse. These are sell sheets for titles that the publisher announced too late for inclusion in the catalogs. Often these books have no descriptions or jacket photos on the sheet. When I ask the reps about them, a shrug of the shoulders is the most common reaction I get. Of course, many of the most important books of the year get released like this, so I have to wade through these pages and pick out the Bob Woodward or Stephen King title lurking among them.

5. Once the rep leaves, my assistants and I enter all of the titles one by one into our computer system from the marked-up catalogs. When the data entry is complete, we recycle the catalogs immediately. It comes to over 100 pounds of wasted paper every few months.

A Better Way to Buy

Several publishers, most notably HarperCollins, are discussing the possibility of moving to an online catalog. I have one word for these publishers -- Hallelujah. It's about time. It was about time five years ago, but this is the book business, and things move at a glacial pace.

The publishers are doing it mostly to cut costs and to get some points for being green. Apparently, the current catalogs cost a fortune to produce and mail out. The bigger houses report that they spend over a million dollars on their catalogs. As far as being green, that's just a bad joke. We are in an industry that doesn't think twice about overprinting and shipping vast quantities of books that will never be sold. Our catalogs might come to 300 pounds a year, but our returns probably run to several tons.

What interests me about an online catalog, if it were done right, is that it could be a much better way to buy from the publishers. As soon as a book has a new cover, I could see it on the site. When new publicity, like an NPR show, is booked, it would be updated online immediately. Never again would my rep and I have to waste time looking at outdated pages. Instead, our appointments could be used to quickly discover the best books for the Boulder Book Store and to determine how best to position those titles. Add-on sheets for late titles would be a thing of the past. Instead, those books would be up and ready to go on the website.

Here's one buyer's vision of how this should work:

1. The catalog would be available online, and each store would access it through a distinct login. All of the information that is currently available on each title in the paper catalogs would be present on the online version. In addition, there could be extended reviews, pages of the text (especially helpful with children's books), author interviews, etc. Buyers would be able to annotate and customize these pages.

2. Each buyer would be able to sort the catalogs however they wanted. Publishers (in my wildest dreams, I see the major houses working together to come up with a standard format) would enable buyers to sort the books in dozens of different ways. How about looking at debut paperback fiction? How about hardback American history under $30? I'd love to sort out fiction with a spiritual theme.

3. The bookstore's computer system would feed into the online catalog to provide sales data on older titles. Why should I look up what John Grisham's last title sold, when the two computers could just talk to each other? We already give the publishers access to our sales information through a program called Above The Treeline; the presses should just feed it back to us on the online catalog. It should come up that I've sold 24 copies of Grisham's latest hardback and 47 of his most recent paperback. Perhaps carpal tunnel syndrome won't have to be the scourge of all middle-age book buyers.

4. An alert system could let buyers know of all the changes or additions that have happened since they last placed an order. Instead of receiving 5 to 10 pesky emails per week from each sales rep, perhaps buyers could just log on to the site once a month or so. I envision three tabs that would keep buyers informed: "New Titles," "New Publicity," and "Price and Title Changes." Bye-bye photocopied sheets.

5. The publisher's online catalog would dump the purchase order directly into our computer system. I know this is problematic due to most stores' (including the Boulder Book Store's) ancient computer systems. But it is still something that we could work towards once we get online catalogs up and running. The amount of staff time this would save is immense.

Words of Caution

HarperCollins held a meeting at the recent Book Expo America in Los Angeles with buyers from many of the top independent bookstores in the country to discuss their plans to implement an online catalog in the next nine months. It was a fascinating study in how people react to change. I was leading the charge into the online world with a handful of other booksellers. Many other buyers were much more hesitant to change a system that has worked for them, despite its inherent flaws. To them, the rush to change seemed reckless.

My biggest concern is that bookstores are some of the most under-capitalized businesses you'll ever find. Most stores do not have state-of-the-art computers and speedy internet connections. If an online catalog features too many bells and whistles, (HarperCollins is planning on having video and audio components to many pages) it could take too long for bookstores to load the individual pages. Staring at a stuck screen for more than an instant is going to bring the whole appointment to a crashing halt. There has to be a quick-loading basic page, with the exciting, colorful features all offered as something booksellers can access only if they want to learn more.

It's true that there are some potential downsides to ordering from an online catalog. It's harder to snuggle up with a laptop than a catalog in bed. Also, there's definitely something alluring about seeing photos on glossy paper as opposed to a computer screen. And a catalog is a lot easier to pass around the office.

However, the potential to revolutionize the buying process, save hours of tedious labor for both reps and buyers, and to make better decisions based on current information is too great to ignore. It's time for publishers to step up and make this happen. I applaud HarperCollins for the strides they've made and challenge Random House (the so-called industry leader), Penguin (publisher to most of last year's mega-sellers) and Simon and Schuster (home of the most useless catalog in the business) to wake up and give buyers a tool they can really use.