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Thinking About Borders No-Returns Deal with HarperStudio

Publishing and Business

It was widely reported this week that Borders has agreed to accept books from HarperStudio as non-returnable.  For those who don’t know, books sold to almost every bookseller can generally be returned to the Publisher for full credit.  In fact, this has been the norm since the 1930s so this arrangement between Borders is unusual and interesting.  Some thoughts:

The reported discount is pretty deep – 58% to 63% so that in itself is interesting in that it will allow Borders to deeply discount them in the stores if that is what they choose to do.

A discount that deep would normally trigger a deep discount clause in many publishing contracts.  I’ll assume that HarperStudio either has no such clause or has taken this into account in some other way.

The non-returnable nature of the purchases likely means Borders will take less stock to begin with, meaning less copies of a book per store.  Unless, of course, they decide to adopt a strategy where they buy large quantities at discount and hope to “stack ‘em high and watch ‘em fly.”

At any rate it’s it very encouraging to see that a publisher and bookseller are willing to experiment and push the edges of an industry that is in transition and in need of change.

What do you think?

(Image credit Leo Reynolds)

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  • I think a returns allowance would be more beneficial than a returns ban. With non-returnable, the retailer loses -- no room to manage there margin or their risk. Give retailers price control? That is a different story, but for now selling NR is like paying someone to be your bag man.
  • There is a wonderful book called Cradle to Cradle, the book is designed to be recycled and reused. There is no reason this cannot be done with other books on a much larger scale. It is not printed on paper, it is printed on a thin sheet of plastic. The ink can be removed using a chemical bath of green chemicals.

    I would imagine it would be possible to take the reusable concept and build it into a print on demand system, where the returned material could be recycled into the printing process with a few intervening steps.

    Something like this could change the returns process completely.
  • Great follow up points Ellen, thanks. As you know I am a big fan of experimentation and change within our industry, and I have been impressed with many of HC's efforts over the past year including HS.
  • There's another part to this story.

    When Harper Studio was founded earlier this year, their mandate was lower advances to authors in exchange for profit sharing, and eliminating returnable discounts. It's a boutique imprint within Harper, so the thinking was that they can get away with that and not imapact the rest of the house. It's interesting for the rest of us in publishing to see exactly what this means for them. That Borders has gone along with this is significant, but it's significant because it's going to be what HS is asking all retailers for, not that it's something Borders wanted to do.

    HS has a number of great authors signed up, and are only doing 25 titles per year. Originally, they said they were offering a 50-50 split between publisher and author, but who knows if they kept to that.

    You can learn more about Harper Studio on their blog - http://www.26thstory.com/blog/

    Disclaimer - I don't work for HS, I work with Chris.
  • I think it is about time, the idea (as most are in publishing) is archaic. Harper is on the cutting edge of ideas, such as the recent deal with Nintendo, I believe this is mostly due to Brian Murray and his business savvy.
  • Many of the Borders stores here in the UK have bought copies of my book direct from me over the last two years. Signed copies, non-returnable. They have been very good to deal with.
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