Additional Giant Rats

I just read where HarperCollins is starting a new imprint that not only will not accept returns but will also not pay advances. I believe another publisher began a similar program a year or two ago and I think, in the publishing world, that this is too nearly a trend.

If you don't know, books are traditionally sold on a consignment basis. This means that a bookseller has the option to return books that aren't selling for credit. This obviously makes it easier for sellers to stock perhaps a wider selection than they would otherwise, the publisher can't really know how profitable a particular title is until such time as they no longer accept returns for it.

Eliminating the consignment system across the board would probably be a good thing for the industry if they could figure out how to lower the prices or uniformly discount (wholesale price is typically around fifty percent of the marked price). I'd like to think that by eliminating waste they could actually lower the prices to consumers.

But I don't live in the real world...

Anyway, eliminating advances means an author, presumably new ones (established, selling authors wouldn't take this deal, would they?) would be working for nothing longer. Even the typical advance of three to five grand doesn't come out to much per hour (or per day, per week, per year). Leaving that alone, what point does it serve to dis-incent booksellers from stocking your titles?

I would think making it harder for a store to accept product is the wrong way to go. Evidently the point is to use the internet to market and sell the books. Um, how exactly do they plan to do that?

Perhaps it's the wave of the future and e-books will rule uber alles after all. My fear (or paranoia) is that it's not readers that want physical books to go away, it's the publishers. Soaring oil costs mean through the roof shipping rates and I have this vision of being pushed to e-books as the single distribution option rather than choosing it for myself should I choose to do so. Which could happen, I suppose, if they start charging a hundred books for a hardcover I'll be loading up the Sony Reader. But I don't want that. I want books: I want to hold them, browse them, pick them up, put them down, and create a visceral atmosphere of knowledge.

A recent study showed that the biggest factor on a child's growing up to become a reader is not how much they read as a kid, or how much was read to them, but how many books they were around as they grew up.

What's ironic to me is that Neil Gaiman's publisher made his American Gods available online, complete and without charge (read only, no downloading). This provoked some controversy with some people wondering how on earth it would make financial sense to let people read a book for free rather than forcing them to buy a copy. Gaiman himself takes the position that the online experiment is like the library where the point is to encourage readers, to create readers: author appreciation and subsequent book sales will follow.

This seems to me to be eminently sensible and filled with the common sense of how real people actually think. At the end of the experiment, the publisher reported that instead of declining or freefalling sales, orders for American Gods were actually up THREE HUNDRED percent. Which makes complete sense to me. What doesn't is who Mr. Gaiman's publishers are: the aforementioned HarperCollins.

I don't think I get it. Clearly, I miss much. I have no other explanation.