The debt-ridden Borders bookstore chain filed for bankruptcy last month, saying it would close 30 percent of its retail stores and reinvent itself as a purveyor of e-book and nonbook options.
Even though Borders isn’t a big source of sales for most university presses—and, like most publishers, they saw the bankruptcy coming—the news has unsettled them. It’s a reminder of just how much the book-distribution chain has changed, putting more pressure on presses to find new ways to get their books to readers.
University presses don’t stand tolose anything like the $41.1-million the chain reportedly owes Penguin Group USA. But the failure of a large brick-and-mortar outlet does affect university presses with regional lists or books with crossover appeal—the kinds of books a chain is likely to stock. Those titles help support the more academic portions of the publishers’ lists.
The news also gives Amazon.com more power to call the shots at a time when the online retailer has already established itself as a major conduit for university-press books. And Barnes & Noble announced in January that it would cut back on a sales force that bought many academic-press titles.
“We’re going through the same transition the music industry went through 10 years ago,” John P. Hussey, director of sales and marketing at the University Press of Kentucky, told me. “We used to be this ivory tower that never interacted with anybody, in some ways, and now we’re becoming much more grass-roots.”
Mr. Hussey said Borders had provided a modest part of the press’s sales. But Kentucky publishes a lot of books on the state’s history and culture, and the chain had been a strong supporter of that part of the list. Its support helped maintain Kentucky’s scholarly publishing program of books that a general-interest bookseller tends not to carry.
“We are concerned that if some of these regional lists go away, that is going to affect our academic books,” Mr. Hussey told me. “That’s what scares us the most.”
When the big Borders store in downtown Louisville, Ky., shuts its doors, he wondered, how will the press put its Kentuckiana books in front of the tourists and other browsers who shopped there? University presses have to step up and do a lot of direct marketing to consumers, an effort that they used to count on booksellers to make, Mr. Hussey said. The decision by Barnes & Noble to cut many of its buyers with strong regional publishing connections has added to the sense of urgency.
For the Kentucky press, that means finding sales partners in unlikely places. “Our bread and butter has been things like state parks and gift shops,” Mr. Hussey said, because they attract visitors interested in the state. But he’s been cultivating relationships with less obvious sales outlets, including clothing stores and distilleries.
The press has a number of titles devoted to the state’s famous liquor, including The Social History of Bourbon and The Kentucky Bourbon Cookbook. “There’s more money in bourbon than there is in books right now,” he said. “I sold our Kentucky Bourbon cookbook to a grill store in North Carolina.”
The press has also become a regular at the state-sponsored Kentucky Crafted show, which features the state’s arts and crafts and has turned out to be a lucrative source of new accounts. “You can’t find that stuff on Twitter,” Mr. Hussey said. “You need to be in a location where they find you.” That used to be a bookstore. Now it can be almost anywhere.
What Choice?
Other publishers I talked with reinforced Mr. Hussey’s points about how different the supply-and-demand landscape is looking these days. Alison Mudditt, who took over late last year as director of the University of California Press, pointed out that the supply chain “is undergoing as much transition as we are as publishers.”
Borders hasn’t been nearly as important a supply channel as Amazon.com, which she described as “a very efficient partner” and an increasingly important source of sales for the press as some traditional outlets fade away. The Amazon boost comes at a price: The online retailer has more power to ask publishers to do business its way when it comes to negotiating contracts and prices and how orders are fulfilled.
But what choice do publishers have? They need to do business with e-tailers just to keep up the sales numbers that used to come from other stores. “We’ve all seen tremendous sales growth through Amazon, but it’s mainly been displacement from other outlets,” Ms. Mudditt said.
She expects that California’s revenue stream from electronic books soon will be greater than that from print books. “The challenge for us is both how we can work effectively with online retailers and how we can get word out about books ourselves electronically,” she said. For instance, like a number of other university presses, California has yet to come to a satisfactory agreement with Apple to have its books included in the iBookstore. It also wants to reach more customers directly.
As for direct losses because of Borders’s bankruptcy, all of the university-press officials I talked with said they had seen this coming and had been cautious lately in their dealings with the company. (Ms. Mudditt estimated that California’s losses would run somewhere in the $20,000 to $25,000 range.) Some presses decided not to deal with Borders directly but to work through intermediaries, like the wholesaler Ingram Book Company, that could decide when to stop accepting orders and thus assume the risk.
Garrett P. Kiely is director of the University of Chicago Press, whose Chicago Distribution Center handles the output of 90 presses. Sixty of them could lose money because of Borders, possibly close to a million dollars, but the final accounting isn’t in. He pointed out the losses “are nowhere near some of the big creditors. The orders haven’t been that large, so the exposure hasn’t been that large, either.” Still, he said, “it’s not nothing.” Hecompared Borders to a terminally ill patient. “You know they’re going togo, but it’s shocking when it happens.”
No publisher likes to see a bookseller fail. “It’s still a bitter pill, and whether you’re doing 1 percent of your business with Borders or 5 percent, it’s still painful,” said Richard Brown, director of Georgetown University Press and president of the Association of American University Presses. He also noted the human cost: “There will be thousands of people who no longer have jobs.”
I wondered whether Princeton University Press, whose list has strong crossover appeal, stood to lose much money. Peter J. Dougherty, the director, said he couldn’t say right now, but expected to have a better sense in the coming weeks.
For now, uncertainty rules. Borders says it plans to reorganize, but no one knows what that will mean. “What will a reorganized Borders look like?” Mr. Dougherty asked. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and a lot of question marks. We just don’t know how it’s all going to shake out.”
