Borders Group will buy all books from HarperStudio on a nonreturnable basis with a higher-than-usual discount, the Wall Street Journal reported. Borders will receive discounts of 58%-63% instead of the usual 48%, the paper noted, and likely will sell "unsold" stock in-store.
"The idea of taking inventory and then shipping it back isn't a good idea for anybody," Robert Gruen, Borders executive v-p of merchandising and marketing, told the paper. "We're open to all publishers to discuss alternatives to the traditional return model."
Founded earlier this year by Bob Miller with a mission to operate in untraditional ways, HarperStudio begins shipping books this spring (Shelf Awareness, September 11, 2008). Since introducing the imprint, which aims to be distinctive in other ways, too, Miller has talked about instituting terms that are unusual for the large New York houses, both with authors--who will receive smaller than usual advances but share more in the book's revenue--and with retail accounts.
The current economic climate makes such approaches all the more appealing--in the case of selling books on a nonreturnable basis, a firm sale is indeed a firm sale and avoids the costs of processing and shipping titles back and forth and back forth. And it's not as though publishers don't have experience selling nonreturnable: most sell books on a nonreturnable basis to nonbookstore accounts and some offer nonreturnable options to booksellers. At least one mainstream publisher experimented selling exclusively nonreturnable to bookstore accounts: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich nearly 30 years ago.
If selling nonreturnable spreads and everyone isn't too exhausted by the effort, perhaps the industry will then re-examine another of its "quirks": the manufacturer's suggested retail price printed on the book.