Mr. Curtis: Why So Serious?
The industry is about (again) to upended.
Over at Ereads.com, agent Richard Curtis has critic-proofed his essay “Behind Publishing’s Wednesday of the Long Knives.” Go read it. It is worth it anyway. In a Godin-esque move he has also comment-proofed his whole blog. It is subtle. I left a comment there but you will never find it, so I have reprinted it below…
================================
Let me run down the checklist of where you ring true:
- bookstore owners hurt from cash shortages. Check.
- returns misunderstood at the MBA and bookseller level. check.
- publishing executives manipulate returns to their own ends (hello year end bonus). Check.
- publishing executives shoveling money to retailers to prevent returns eventhough that compromises their supply chain and gives retailers incentive blindness. Check and check.
Let me also run down where and why I think you are off the mark.
- Consignment is good business. It spreads the risk around and it builds trust. Like we have seen elsewhere recently, with no trust and lots of risk you have bad business. But like you say, returns need to be better understood and better managed. A returns cap would do a lot of good.
- Amazon is not the biggest change in the business since 1992. The internet is. And the internet is a big copy machine. Thank you Kevin Kelly. That has changed the nature of economics (no more scarcity) and its changed the nature of intellectual property (remix/reuse). The internet is not a distribution platform and authors actually don’t own the book that the bookseller sells.
When you combine those two points, it starts to make sense to pass on a little of the free love from the consignment business from retailers to readers — make the business more return-friendly by removing the phyiscal inventory all together. Too hippy? Maybe. But stricter trading terms doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s not soap. Let’s not sell it that way. Let’s invent a new way. Let’s change things radically for real.
No Comments Yet