Comments on: Thinking About Borders No-Returns Deal with HarperStudio

By: Design Books to be Disassembled, Recycled, or Reused | INDEX // mb

Design Books to be Disassembled, Recycled, or Reused | INDEX // mb — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 02:07:52 +0000

[...] blogger at Book Calendar left a great comment on a post by Wiley’s Chris [...]

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 01:50:58 +0000

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.

By: Book Calendar

Book Calendar — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:31:09 +0000

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:24:22 +0000

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.

By: Ellen Gerstein

Ellen Gerstein — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:38:38 +0000

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.

By: Libros sin posibilidad de devolución « Booklishing

Libros sin posibilidad de devolución « Booklishing — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:40:31 +0000

[...] Webb comenta en su blog el acuerdo alcanzado entre la editorial HarperStudio y la cadena de librerías Borders, que [...]

By: feener

feener — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:56:48 +0000

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.

By: Ellen Dean

Ellen Dean — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:07:11 +0000

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.