Indigo Books Releases Holiday Numbers
A couple interesting things in today’s press release for Indigo Books Q3 Report…
As expected revenue was up (hooray!) by 2.3%, but Reisman is quoted as saying, “Our profit was dampened by the steep and unexpected decline in the Canadian dollar during the quarter which impacted the cost of imported goods and a number of our operating costs.”
I translate that as the cost of buying around Canadian vendors to serve the online business made them lose money. Any gift items that would have been imported would have been purchased before the quarter started. They were buying books from Ingram to support Christmas sales and that killed them.
Ingram — not the exchange rate — is their achilles heel. They could fix it if they split off the online business as its own store number then created a second, separate inventory feed for each Canadian supplier. If the Canadian supplier couldn’t fulfill within 6 hours then cancel the order and redirect to Ingram. This seems vitally important but Indigo appears oblivious to the problem. They are adding paperstock metadata to the ONiX feed instead. Come on guys. Get it together for everybody’s sake.
Shortcovers also gets a mention. The relationship between that project and the mothership is a curiosity. I thought it was being treated as its own company. Maybe not though.
With Amazon concentrating on its own formats and with a new Kindle on the way in February, I am actually feeling bullish about shortcovers even though they will struggle to get attention once Amazon kickstarts the Kindle2 press machine.
One of the things I am wondering about is whether consumers will be able to read shortcovers content offline. My sense is not. Personally I want to own content I pay for. I don’t want it to live exclusively on Indigo’s servers, but going with a cloud-solution would bypass all this nonsense with competing formats. That could be a smart move at the end of the day — provided the pricing is reasonable.
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