Since the first CIROBE (Chicago International Remainder and Overstock Book Exposition), held at Chicago's Congress Hotel back in 1991, the bargain book business has seen significant growth and no small amount of change. As the show heads into its 15th year, PW decided to ask publishing veterans—15 of them, to be precise—what these changes have been, and in what ways bargain has changed the face of book retailing in general.
Jim Harris
Owner, Prairie Lights Iowa City, Iowa
"The thing about the bargain book business is that it's gotten bigger, which means that it mirrors the whole book industry because newer books have an increasingly shorter life these days. More and better remainders are available. Publishers don't hold onto books for years now and, consequently, we don't load up on remainders. We used to gorge ourselves and really stock up because you might not find the good things if you didn't. But today, you turn around and here comes another list—of good books. If you're on my remainders table, it's a badge of honor. You're not an also-ran."
Dean Winegardner
CEO, American Book Co. Knoxville, Tenn.
"In the past, publishers wondered if selling remainders and hurts is bad for the frontline market. I think it helps. Someone may not want to try a new author at full price, but at $3.99, $4.99, $5.99, they'll be more liable to sample an author they haven't read before. If they like the book, they're much more likely to buy the author's new one when it comes out. When I got into the business 15 years ago, we'd rent a store for 30 days and sell remainders at half price. We could buy Harper novels at 25¢ or 35¢ and sell them for $12. In 1990, you just couldn't make mistakes because you were buying them so cheaply. Today, you may buy a book for $1.50 and it'll sell to the consumer for $4.99. Retailers have a certain mindset on what a book price has to be in order to be a bargain. Retailers won't allow us to raise our prices, and publishers want us to pay more for the books. Publishers have gotten smarter with their printings, so the amount of remainders on a particular title gets smaller and smaller, which also causes the price to go up. Whatever you think the formula for being successful in this business is today, give it 45 days. Everything changes so fast, you'll have to come up with something new."
Barry Baird
Executive director, bargain book sales, Thomas Nelson Nashville, Tenn.
"We sort of ventured into the bargain book business 10 years ago, when returns started backing up from the mall stores and big-box stores. Since then, I've seen the bargain book world grow into a real, established category, and it's a profitable category, not just an area for liquidation. At Thomas Nelson, we're a separate sales division with our own staff, and we've developed a consistent flow of revenue.
Company decisions to call a book remaindered or out of print or out of stock are made much more quickly than they used to be because bargain books are no longer seen as a threat or something that will cannibalize frontlist sales."
Denny Magers
Owner, Magers & Quinn Booksellers Minneapolis, Minn.
"I've noticed more consolidation in some of the bigger sources of bargain books. This has changed the way they're distributed. Today there are more middlemen taking the hurts, which means there is less selling of books directly to booksellers. The good side of that is that you can sometimes find books that you couldn't find otherwise. On the other hand, bargain books can cost you more where there's someone in between you and the original source. The business climate is tough today, and bargain book sales reached a kind of plateau in the last few years. I don't know if it will hold, but I do feel that they are growing again for us."
Drew Montgomery
Director of inventory management, Chronicle Books San Francisco
"The overwhelming change I've noticed is the ascendance of the Internet. Anyone looking for overstocked or marked-down books used to have to go into a bookstore and look for the sale table. Now people can shop for this kind of book on the Net. However, in addition, I believe that a lot of bookstores are increasing the percentage of used and bargain books that they sell. Something else that may be specific to Chronicle Books has to do with our gift division. When I used to go to CIROBE or BEA, I would take only adult trade books and children's books. But with our gift division around for several years now, we can generate a list of slow-moving inventory, and when I take that to CIROBE, I'm astounded by how quickly things like journals and note cards are snapped up."
George H. Mitchell
President and CEO, University Co-op Austin, Tex.
"I have been buying remainder books for the past 40 years, when department stores would have two or three remainder sales a year, usually with full-page ads. In the past 15 years, the book business has changed dramatically with the superstores and the closing of thousands of independent bookstores. Today a bookstore has to carry remainders for survival. The product change has been tremendous, especially in children's books and university press books. You can probably pick from 5,000 or more children's titles, and university presses are operating more like a business for their own survival and selling off dead stock. We are in the process of opening a 12,000-sq.-ft. remainder store with an emphasis on academic titles and children's books. We expect to do over $700,000 in sales annually."
John Alden
Formerly with HarperCollins, now a consultant Philadelphia
"The biggest thing to happen in the last 15 years, from a publisher's standpoint, has been the realization and development of bargain as big business. At HarperCollins, I created a division of one person—me—to do what had always been handled out the back door. Fifteen years ago, very few people dealt with hurts, but today they are a way of recouping some of a publisher's investment. More and more, with international companies owning the giants here, every little revenue stream becomes important. CIROBE is what brought it all together. Before, we had all these mavericks operating out of tents in the Florida panhandle and all of a sudden they were all in one place. We also had the beginnings of more wholesaler growth. Some of yesterday's giants don't exist today, and others stepped into the breach. A whole new generation of remainder customers came along."
Richard Fisher
Independent sales representative Oakland, Calif.
"I now represent Daedalus and Texas Bookman, and in terms of what we do in bargain books, things haven't changed much in the 40 years I've been in the business. However, the nature of the product is different today—and there's more of it. Back in the '60s, there were three primary companies, but in the early '90s a lot of small companies started popping up. CIROBE provided a venue for those who didn't know how to sell bargain books, and the variety of product began to improve. The single largest change was when you started seeing recent bestsellers—even sometimes current bestsellers—on sale tables. Most independent booksellers have better bargain books than the chains do, and they've learned how to merchandise them. The books are more tailored for their customers, who are now much more demanding. Another interesting change is that people in the industry used to be isolated from each other because they were completely competitive. Today there's a collegial quality to the remainder business because we're all dependent on each other to keep our business healthy."
Rick Perritt
President, S&L Sales Co. Waycross, Ga.
"Competition is the crucial issue today. There are more people in the bargain book business, but there are also a lot of books. Not a day goes by that I'm not offered books to buy. Competition, though, is getting sharper. You have to pay more attention to what's happening; you have to watch trends. You used to be able to run your business from day to day, but now you need to be thinking four or five months ahead, and cost has become a big factor. It's a question of what you want to pay for books, and how long they've already been out there. Costs keep rising. As gas prices go up, everything moved by fuel goes up, too. But with gas prices rising, more people sit at home and read because reading's cheap. When the economy goes bad, the bargain book business gets real good in a hurry."
Steve Kelly
Owner, After Words Ann Arbor, Mich.
"In the bargain book business, we've gotten away from buying from New York remainder dealers. In terms of merchandise, we're doing much more with hurts, so we've geographically shifted south, where we do more business with skid sorters than remainder sellers. That's because we find more current titles and more variety there. This is a college town, so we look for university press and scholarly titles, and to do that we're spending a lot of time on the road. We look for short quantities that don't show up on lists or Web sites, and to find them we actually have to go to warehouses and search through inventories."
Fred Bass
Co-owner, Strand Book Store New York City
"The business has grown tremendously in 15 years. More and more places are very happy to sell discounted books. At one time, legitimate bookstores didn't want to. Then, too, more people are buying books. We have more customers than ever before. We're gambling that the business is going to continue to grow. We've added another whole floor to the store, so we have the basement, main floor and a second floor. The third floor is for our rare books. We installed an internal elevator. We added air conditioning. Our biggest expansion is in art books. I took over Hacker Art Books and have discounted some of those titles, and we've also been buying a lot more remainders. Publishers are turning them pretty fast now, especially when the titles go into paperback."
Ben Archer
Executive v-p, Book Country McKeesport, Pa.
"One of the biggest changes has been the migration from remainders to hurts, and this has affected business in general beyond bargain books. Today, when you go to Amazon's used books or Alibris or Half Price Books, you see so many copies of discounted current books for sale. What's interesting is that, if publishers are careful, they can structure their agreement with a remainder wholesaler so that their remainders don't show up all over. On the other hand, you're seeing more and more differentiation in product available to different-sized businesses. Buyers for chains aren't really interested in purchasing 100 or 300 copies of a book, so all the little guys snap them up to fine-tune their business. When I started out at the Strand Book Store 25 years ago, bargain books at other stores were not a big deal. They were more of a sideline, but a lot of guys who didn't want to get into bargain books aren't around anymore."
Carole Horne
V-p, merchandising, Harvard Book Store Cambridge, Mass.
"I think that bargain books have changed less than any other aspect of the bookselling business. Daedalus was important 15 years ago and still is; Texas Bookman, too. New companies pop up, like Great Jones, but on the whole it's kind of a small world. We've always had a pretty big remainder department, for longer than I've been around, which is 30 years. They account for 12%—13% of our sales. Actually, sales showed a slight decline for a couple of years, very slight, and like everyone else, we put used books and remainders on the Web. That's probably the biggest change—using the Internet to sell used books to the general world. We've had remainders at Harvard.com for years, but sites like Abebooks and Amazon dictate shipping costs, so you don't have quite the freedom to do what you want."
Charlie Unsworth
Unsworth's Booksellers London, England
"A very significant change we've had in the last 15 years is the end of the Net Book Agreement, the retail price maintenance that was in effect until the early '90s. There was a bit of a time lag before the major book chains decided to battle it out with discount books to build their business, but that has stolen the thunder of remainder booksellers who used to have a monopoly on discount books. At the same time, with the Internet coming along, a bewildering array of discounted books became available to our customers, who could then order directly from the States. One of the things we'd done to make our shops distinctive was to buy primarily from the U.S.—remainders and, at CIROBE, university press white sales. We operate at the scholarly end of the spectrum and look for books that were not heavily distributed in Britain when new."
John Herring
V-p, sales American Book Co. Knoxville, Tenn.
"The fact that there are far fewer independent stores has changed the nature of how we sell books today. There once were many more reps traveling on the road, calling on booksellers with catalogues or jackets. With fewer stores in a given area, it's easier, cheaper and less cumbersome to send booksellers lists of what's available by e-mail. The rise of hurts is another change. In the past they were not as prominent as they are today. A lot of vendors are focused on breaking down trailerloads of returns they buy from publishers, taking those books off skids and sorting them. We've also seen the growth of exclusive arrangements between publishers and vendors, which eases the whole process for a publisher to get rid of books. In another area, promotional books used to be the dog and cat type, but more serious books are now being reprinted for the bargain book market."
