** From Jan Murphy to Sam Waring on 06 Aug 96  20:53:41
 ** Preferred Authors
 JM> Speaking of stuff being out of print, this is probably a good
 JM> opportunity to remind people that books, at least in the US, have a
 JM> shorter and shorter 'shelf life' these days.  Publishing decisions are
 JM> being made more and more on the basis of what-sells-quickly rather
 JM> than what is good.  Of course you know this already, Sam, but maybe
 JM> others don't realize that some paperbacks can go out of print in as
 JM> little as 90 days, and the publisher isn't always ready to reprint
 JM> them when they do.  So I encourage anyone who has a 'favorite' author
 JM> to 1) buy their books NEW whenever possible -- at least in the US, it
 JM> doesn't benefit the author one bit if you just read their book at the
 JM> library and 2) don't wait around when you see a new paperback come
 JM> out, since there is no guarantee it will be around tomorrow.  Buy it
 JM> before it disappears, and buy it early so the bookstore will have a
 JM> chance to reorder it before it goes out of print. 
 The problem has been around for a while, and isn't totally related to 
 publisher greed.  One of the pet peeves over on the SF echo is the Thor 
 Power Tools case.  This concerned a tax court decision that had wide 
 ranging effects on how companies valued inventory in warehouses for tax 
 purposes.  While it wasn't directly concerned with publishers, the end 
 result of the court decision was to make it a *lot* more expensive for 
 publishers to keep books in inventory, with a side-effect of putting a 
 lot of books out of print quickly, as publishers declared them OOP and 
 destroyed them rather than paying large taxes on their supposed value.
 Genre titles are less affected by this than mainstream works: they are 
 more likely to be consistent backlist sellers and get reprinted.
 An additional concern is the number of new books published vs. the 
 average bookstore's shelf space.  The last numbers I saw (years old and 
 out-of-date) had something like 50,000 new titles published per year, 
 with the average bookstore able to stock between 5,000 and 8,000 titles 
 at any one time.  The competition for retail space is fierce, and has 
 led to publishers releasing books they know aren't up to snuff because 
 they had nothing else available to fill the release schedule that 
 month, and if they released three titles in a category like mysteries, 
 rather than the four they normally released, they might just lose the 
 shelf space the fourth would have gotten and not get it back.
 What sells quickly is always a concern, but it's a bigger one for the 
 bookstore than the publisher.  Any retailer has to generate the maximum 
 amount of sales/sq foot possible, and stuff that doesn't move gets 
 returned.
  
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30
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