IOBA in the News

Or maybe it should be titled Amazon is flexing their muscle again. In any case, IOBA is speaking out against Amazon.uk's new policy which could raise the price of books for us all. From What's New? on the IOBA site:


1st June 2010

On behalf of IOBA, today I sent the following letter of concern re: Amazon.uk’s Price Parity Policy to these government offices and representatives:

* European Commission Directorate-General for Competition
* EU Antitrust and General Registry
* UK Office of Fair Trading
* Germany Fair Trading: Bundeskartellamt
* Graham Watson MEP
* Nick Eaton advisor to Stephen Williams UK MP
* John Thurso MP
* Rob Gibson MSP
* Jim Mather MSP - Scottish Minister for Enterprise, Energy & Tourism
* Mark Prisk MP - UK Minister of State for Business and Enterprise



Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to you on behalf of the Independent Online Booksellers’ Association (IOBA) to express our concern about recent moves by Amazon to force independent booksellers to set prices on Amazon’s UK, French and German websites equal to or lower than on any other sites which sellers use to sell their books. The IOBA believes Amazon’s demands for ‘price parity’ to be an anti-competitive measure by the dominant online marketplace for new and used books designed to undermine smaller competitor websites and even independent booksellers’ own websites.

The IOBA is an organization which represents more than 250 independent online booksellers around the world. While the majority of our members are based in the US, we currently have about 20 members based in the UK, France and Germany who are directly affected by Amazon’s latest policy change. The IOBA also runs IOBAbooks – one of the small aggregator websites which are likely to be adversely affected by this move. By way of background, Amazon’s Marketplace is an aggregator website through which thousands of independent businesses (including booksellers) can offer their goods for sale to the general public. In this latest policy change, Amazon have contacted independent sellers using their UK, French and German websites and said that any items they have for sale on Amazon must be sold at the same price or cheaper on Amazon than they are sold on any other website including booksellers’ own websites. This policy change has been backed up with a threat to ban any seller who fails to comply from selling on Amazon’s sites.

Most independent online booksellers sell their books on several different websites to generate sufficient sales. These often include aggregator sites like Amazon, Alibris, Biblio etc and, in many cases, their own independent websites. However, for many sellers, Amazon – as the largest and best known marketplace of its kind – generates a significant proportion of their income.

Aggregator sites usually generate income by charging booksellers commission on any sales generated through their sites and, in some cases, from monthly subscriptions. A typical ‘Pro-Merchant’ subscription to use Amazon’s UK website for instance costs £25 per month plus commission on any sales made.

This means that the costs faced by many booksellers to sell books via Amazon are often higher than on many other websites and often substantially higher than selling books through their own independent websites. However, under Amazon’s new policy, booksellers are forbidden from reflecting those differences in costs by pricing items cheaper on websites on which they are charged less to list their books. In addition, under this policy, booksellers would be forbidden from, for instance, having a 25% off sale on books on their own independent website as this would breach Amazon’s price parity ruling and risk the seller being thrown off Amazon and hence losing a substantial proportion of their income.

It seems to us here at the IOBA that Amazon’s policy of forcing sellers to reflect the higher costs involved in listing items for sale on Amazon across all websites is likely to be bad for book-buyers by generally increasing the cost of books, and is likely to be particularly damaging to smaller, cheaper aggregator site competitors to Amazon’s market dominance.

This policy also removes the freedom from independent booksellers to set the prices that they want for books on their own independent websites and, as highlighted above, to offer sales and other special offers to their own customers on their own websites.

As a result, the IOBA believes that this latest move by Amazon is dangerously anti-competitive, designed to use its market dominance to undermine smaller competitors and independent booksellers and will inevitably lead to a worse deal for book buyers.

Hence the IOBA would like to call on the relevant authorities in the UK, France, Germany and the European Union to examine this latest move by Amazon with a view to ruling on the legitimacy of the site to use its market dominance in this way.

Thank you for taking the time and trouble to read this letter. If you have any further questions then please feel free to contact me at this email address.

Yours faithfully,
Karin Isgur Bergsagel

President, Independent Online Booksellers Association

www.ioba.org



>> 'til next time - DW <<

Amazon Sales Rank
What Does It Mean


The Amazon sales rank, in and of itself, tells you approximately when the last item of that type sold. For books, you can look around on the Amazon forum or other places and get values which I have condensed in the following table

	150,000 or less	Within the last 12 hours
	150,000 to 750,000	Within the last 3 or 4 days
	750,000 to 1,500,000	Within the last two weeks
	1,500,000 to 2,000,000	Within the last month
	2,000,000 to 4,500,000	Within the last year

Now those numbers by themselves don't really mean a lot. As they say in the stock market "past performance is no guarantee of future performance". A book that sold 10 minutes ago may not sell for another three years and another book that hasn't sold for three years may sell in 10 minutes.

If that's the case, what good are the numbers? Well, if you add tracking to the mix, you can get some useful information. Suppose, for example, you look at a book with an Amazon rank of 10,000. A short time later you look at it again and it is 30,000. Continuing, you see the rank 'go down' to 50,000, then 75,000, then - well you get the idea. But about 16 hours or so since you started watching, you see it at 10,000 again and, watching this for a week or so you see this same pattern [a low rank going up to about 150K or so, then dropping to a low rank again] repeat itself every 16 hours or so. That data would indicate the book sells about 10 copies a week. If you are the type to be interested in actual data, you might want to look at A time series analysis of Amazon sales rank which presents some data for a particular book which shows just that kind of behavior [with different rankings].

Getting back to that 10 copies a week in our own example; is that a good number? Well, Morris Rosentha seems to think so and presents some results on his Amazon Sales Rank For Books page where he talks about the number of copies sold per week (or per day for the lower ranks) compared to the Amazon rank.



>> 'til next time - DW <<

Searching For Information on a Book


O.K., you want to find out about a book. Well sometimes the search is easy, you just put the title in Google or Yahoo or one of the other search engines and you can get all of the information you want, in fact too much. However, that isn't what I'm going to talk about today. What I'm going to talk about is finding information out about a hard to find book. Here the information is sometimes a little harder to come by. The easiest way for me to talk about searching for the information is to take you through a search for something - at least partially. That something will eventually have a page on our site, so finding out about the book could be a little easier after that happens. But for right now, let's try to find out about

Title: Slovenly Peter's Story Book Publisher: Mcloughlin Brothers, New York Date: Undated Illustrator: Edward P Cogger Binding: Hardcover; An illustrated terra cotta (reddish) cover, embossed in red and gold with a black background Pages: Unpaginated: [1] leaf, [48] p. : col. ill. ; 18 cm. Condition: Fair/no Dust Jacket; Ex-Library Size: 12 mo (about 5 by 7 inches or 12.5 by 18 cm)

Not suspecting this is a hard to find book, I go to viaLibri and put in Slovenly Peter's Story Book. I get three entries for the Print On Demand title Slovenly Peter's Little Story Book which is not what I want and two entries by the same seller for what looks like my book. The price? A very nice $1750 on the ILAB web site and an even higher price on the multi-dealer listing site ABE. [As an aside, this is typical of a lot of dealers. They charge more on those sites which charge them to list their books and then also take a commission on the sale - in this case about 13.5%]. Well, since the dealer is a member of the ABAA [Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America] I figure this is a pretty legitimate price so I had better do some research on the book if I want to get a fair price for it.

First, I go over to the dealers web site. Sometimes a dealer will have something extra on their own web site about items which are not carried over to the multi-listing or search sites. In this case they don't have any more about the book, but they do have a couple of images which goes a long way to convince me we have the same book. They also give the author as Heinrich Hoffmann and the date of 1877. So maybe I've found out some additional information about my book.

A nice resource for all kinds of information is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Looking up Heinrich Hoffmann [the author], I find that he was German and wrote Der Struwwelpeter, an illustrated book portraying children misbehaving. That sound like my book but it certainly isn't in German. I try a Google search for Hoffmann Struwwelpeter Slovenly. We find out from Wikipedia that "The first English translation appeared in 1848. Mark Twain's English translation of the book is called 'Slovenly Peter.'" Wikipedia even gives a link to the english translation of the entire book The Project Gutenberg EBook of Struwwelpeter. BTW: Project Gutenberg is a great place for free ebooks. So we have a little bit of history about our book.

We've seen that there appears to only be one copy for sale of our book, but what about other copies. Another good site for finding out about books is WorldCat, the OCLC World Catalog Program. Searching for slovenly peter's story book we get two results [and two results for slovenly peter's little story book]. This gives us some more information about the book and indicates that there were at least three printings of the book. Which one is ours? There isn't enough information to say yet but we're still looking. Although one of the entries says there are quite a few copies available around the world, looking at the actual entries of quite a few of them shows that the libraries have a copy of a different book. It appears there are not many available in libraries around the world. So we now know it is a rather hard to find book in general.

The last place I'm going to mention is the American Antiquarian Society and their online catalogs. If we go to the, particularly the AAS Basic search and search for Slovenly Peter's Story Book we see some of the same notes we saw on OCLC and some additional information.

Well, I've lead you thorough a few of the places to look for information about a book you might be curious about. There are certainly more places to look including the Library of Congress page for gateway access to LC's catalog and those at many other institutions, the Science Fiction Internet database, Fantastic Fiction, Bibliomania, and many many others. Hopefully this will get you started on developing resources of your own. If you find some good ones, you might even add a comment with the information.



>> 'til next time - DW <<

An update. I've put together a page for the book on our sight. There's a little more information. If you are interested and would like to see some images, see Slovenly Peters Story Book on White Unicorn Books

What is a proof? A proof copy is what it sounds like or at least used to be. That is, proof that the book has not been unduly trimmed, see A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology for a fuller definition. In the recent past, basically, after the printer was satisfied with the layout (from the printers proof), a 'few' copies would be run off as Authors proofs. One (or more) was sent to the Author(s), the editor might get one to look at, etc. Although not what some would call rare, there were generally very few of them.

It used to be that proofs were not to be confused with an Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) which were printed before general publication for reviewers, bookstores, magazines, etc. for publicity purposes but the line between the two is much finer today and, in fact, some ARCs are used as proofs [or proofs are used as ARCs]. The result is that some proofs today exist in (very) large numbers.

BTW: If you are interested you might check out our copies of ARC's/galleys/proofs at White Unicorn Books.

>> 'til next time - DW <<

Hi All

I wrote about the time of delivery below [March 15] and got a few e-mails talking about some of our deliveries to Canada. Well I checked into it and it turns out all of the e-mails were from the same area. On further investigation I think I've found the problem. The Canada Post delivery employee was new to the neighborhood and had to ask directions so they kept falling behind. I've written Canada Post and asked if the employee could get some extra training so that the deliveries would be made in a more timely manner. I haven't heard back yet, but I'm pretty sure the situation will be corrected fairly quickly. Either the employee will get the training or learn the delivery area better.

I actually got a video of the employee asking for directions and thought I would share it with you so you can maybe see where the area is [this will download a wmv file for Windows Media or some other video player].

BTW: White Unicorn Books ships almost anywhere in the world and has a large selection of books for you to choose from.


>> 'til next time - DW <<

You see a lot written about the textbook market these days. The textbook market and international editions. Alibris has recently changed their policy about dealers listing used International edition textbooks there because of the recent court case Pearson vrs Liu.

As pointed out several places around the web, this decision doesn't really seem to answer the question entirely and there will probably be another few rounds before the present publishers loose their battle for cheaper textbooks. This case seems to say that the first sale doctrine is still alive and well and it is only the importation of goods for sale which is illegal. Google answers has a nice writeup on the question of Legality of Selling International Edition Textbooks

So what does a student do to cut down on textbook expense besides getting an international edition? Saving money is like other efforts in life. You generally have to work at it to make it worth doing. In this case, start early. Don't show up the day before classes and expect to find inexpensive copies. The earlier the better. Can you get a list of the books needed from the prof before you register? Maybe the list from prof A is cheaper than the list from prof B. Shop off campus as well as on line. Comparison shop. Do you know someone 'ahead of you' you can buy from? Is e-books an option [don't forget to take into account that you generally can't resell an e-book]?

Oh, and finally, don't forget to look at those international editions. Sometimes it's cheaper to import a copy for your class than to buy a 'geographically correct' copy. Since you are buying it for use in your class, you are still protected by the first sale doctrine and can resell it at the end of the semester. I expect though, that anything over one or two copies brought into the US and later sold in a moderately short time frame might be interpreted as importing with the intent to sell.

>> 'til next time - DW <<

What about that time of delivery you get when you order an item off the internet. What does it actually mean? Well I can't speak for all businesses but for those in the book business, the delivery times on site are an estimate of the delivery time and not a hard and fast rule. Also, they are 'business days' and not 'calendar days'. That is weekends and holidays don't count.

The estimates tend to be fairly accurate. In fact, it is not all that unusual for the time to be at the short end of the estimate. Suppose you got an estimated delivery time of 7 to 14 days. Then it would not be unusual for the item to arrive in 10 days to 2 weeks actual elapsed time. However, it can happen, and does more than one would like, take at the upper end or a bit more than the estimated time - in this case 3 to 4 weeks.

The actual delivery time can also be dependent on just where the item is coming from. I used to mail my Mom books when she lived about 75 miles or so from here in Dallas. If I mailed by about 5 pm at the main post office, she generally had it the next day (USPS gives an estimated time of delivery of 6 days). Mailing books to a friend in California typically took about 5 days although once it took about a month and a half (USPS gives the same estimated 6 days).

Generally I think it is a good idea to give the delivery say, an extra 'few days', and then write the dealer asking about the package. You should hear back from the dealer within several days. I'm speaking here about media mail. If your package was supposed to be shipped priority or expedited, that 'few days' might be as little as one.

To turn 'business days' into 'calendar days' just add about 2 days for each 5 business days at the short end and 4 days for each 5 at the long end. So an estimated 7-14 days deliver really means about 9-26 calender days. Even then, remember that it is an estimate and not a hard and fast rule.

>> 'til next time - DW <<