Book Scandal
Jul 02 2001
The pieces are now in place for the book industry's first integrated sales-reporting system. Bookscan would work like the music business' Soundscan system, with publishers paying a fee for access to the data. The benefits could be immense. So could the costs.
When Soundscan was introduced, two things happened to the pop charts. First, whole genres of music previously ignored were suddenly perceived as wildly commercial. Those records had been selling all along, just not charting. Once listed, though, multiplier effects kicked in and they did even better. If you were an artist or label that benefited, you couldn't help but think Soundscan was great.
But what also happened, and this is certainly subjective, was the charts got worse. That is, just about everything became Britney, Faith, Puffy - in short, junk. Every so often something interesting got through, but on average, records slipped to the lowest common denominator. The resulting market lock-ins led to mediocrity.
Bookscan could easily do the same thing. For example, the New York Times bestseller list skews toward sales in independent stores , which tend to be more literary in orientation than chain stores. This means that certain literary or regional books can "cheat" their way onto the list. Once on the list, those books can cross over into the chains and sell tons of copies. The Times' list also has all sorts of rules that result in some books being left off. For example, romance novels, which sell tons of copies, are not included on the fiction bestseller list - unfair to romance novelists perhaps, but it makes room for the Chuck Palahniuks and Walter Mosleys of the world. Diet and self-help books, which ostensibly are nonfiction, have their own separate list. The rules can be silly - the Times considers humor books, no matter how fanciful, to be nonfiction - but they work well when it comes to advancing literature.
It is awfully hard to resist the charm of hard numbers. But the intangible can be exactly what makes a product - or, in the long-term, an industry - work. You can pay Tom Clancy $15 million per book, and if you're lucky you'll end up making a few million in profit. But the real winners are the books that cost almost nothing up front and turn into superstars. Bestsellers aside, smaller books can sell steadily, over time, and if an author's later books become bestsellers, then the catalog becomes much more valuable. A publishing house's prestige, which is often built on small, marketplace-unfriendly books, can have immense value in the long term in attracting future authors, many of whom could turn out to be commercial. And small books can be seen as part of a company's investment in employees - employees who are often in the business because they love the good stuff, whether or not it sells.
Business history is full of examples of market lock-in and technology advancement resulting in inferior products and services. What's worrisome about Bookscan is that the Soundscan experience shows that businesspeople often settle for the least creative interpretation and manipulation of data. It is no coincidence that as database and inventory systems have improved, fewer and fewer books are consuming a larger portion of the sales pie. Someday we may read how Bookscan resulted in a bestseller list of "get thin quick" books and celebrity bios. Or maybe we won't read about it at all, which is the point.
Geoff Shandler is the executive editor of Little, Brown Company, a division of AOL Time Warner.