Harvard
Business School Press has made a "long-term extension" of its
distribution agreement with Perseus Distribution Services, the future
name of Perseus Books Group's CDS subsidiary. Harvard Business School
Press said that "in a generally flat business market," it had "robust
double-digit growth in each of the last three years."
The Press has been distributed in the U.S. by CDS/Perseus for seven years. Press
director David Goehring called the company "a consistent and reliable
partner."
The contract extension is a nice vote of faith in Perseus
Distribution Services, which will be officially created March 1, when
the warehousing, customer service and financial operations of
Consortium are merged into the Perseus/CDS warehouse in Jackson, Tenn.
Some booksellers have expressed concerns about the merger. As Barry
Rossnick, senior buyer at Books Inc., with 11 stores in California, put
it: "Consortium is really good at what they do; CDS is not. If they
were absorbing CDS into Consortium, I'd feel a lot more confident."
Lamenting many shipping mistakes made by CDS over the years, Dale
Szczeblowski of Porter Square Books, Cambridge, Mass., said that CDS's
customer service department "while not unfriendly are usually
ineffectual and often it's my Perseus sales rep that has to intervene."
Another bookseller took the long view, saying that she hopes "CDS
learns from Consortium" and noted the potential advantage of
dealing with so many publishers through one operation rather than
individually.
Perseus has called its Jackson warehouse a "state-of-the-art"
facility and stressed that in the period before the March 1 merger, it
has "significant time to plan a smooth transition."