George RR Martin, author of “Game of Thrones,” once said that “a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. He who never reads lives only once.” And yet, those who sell books have a problem with them. At least, Costco.
What happened. The supermarket chain Costco plans to stop selling physical books in its stores in the United States. Four executives in the publishing segment have indicated this in The New York Times, revealing how problematic this can be for both editors and authors.
They are a nuisance. According to these managers, abandoning the sale of books is “largely due to the labor required to store the books.” Books have the problem that each copy has to be handled by hand, and large quantities cannot be handled on pallets like other products sold in their shopping centers.
Constant rotation. There is also a continuous renewal of this catalog: new ones come out every Tuesday, but you also have to return those that have not been sold. This generates even more work and makes business operations difficult for a chain that seems to seek to optimize its workflows.
Bad news. It is true that Costco is not a physical space especially known for selling books, but for years it has provided an interesting alternative to people who perhaps did not enter specialty stores like Barnes & Noble. It was therefore a way to attract occasional readers but now those sales may disappear, which is bad news for a segment that has been struggling for some time.
Especially because of the massive scale. The problem for publishers is that Costco was a great way to distribute many books at once. The magnitude of this commercial chain is enormous, and their orders for copies of books often amounted to tens of thousands of copies to be offered in their centers. In the case of especially attractive books, it could store hundreds of thousands of copies of a single book.
E-books do not seem to be the solution. The alternative of electronic books is there, but it has not particularly displaced physical books, at least in the United States, where hardcover and softcover books generate income six times higher than that of e-books in recent years. Now it is likely that some of that revenue will be lost due to Costco’s size.
Goodbye to impulse purchases. That decision may impact the reading habits of many of your customers if they live in areas without a nearby bookstore. Often these types of book purchases were impulsive, and therefore those customers who did buy those books as part of their purchases at Costco may no longer look for them in stores like Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Image | Steve Bowbrick
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