At the Winter Institute, John Rubin, founder and head of Above the Treeline, the sales tracking system that many booksellers credit with greatly improving their turns and margins, gave an update of Edelweiss, his company's interactive online catalogue project that is currently being tested by 10 publishers and "a good number" of booksellers. The 10 publishers consist of eight general trade publishers and two Christian houses.
Announced last year (Shelf Awareness, October, 30, 2008), Edelweiss contains all the information in a publisher's print catalogue and allows the material to be customized in a variety of ways by reps and booksellers and allows orders and other material to be integrated into point-of-sale systems. The catalogues will be free for booksellers and can be used by retailers that do not use Above the Treeline.
Rubin outlined a range of advantages of the electronic catalogue. Among them: savings for publishers on the millions of dollars they spend every season on printed catalogues; the e-catalogue is much more environmentally friendly than printed catalogues; an e-catalogue improves the breadth and timeliness of the information contained; there are an unlimited number of illustrations that can be loaded; the e-catalogue can have links to authors' websites. In addition, all kinds of information, including jackets and titles and more, can be updated easily.
E-catalogues also "improve how reps and booksellers communicate," Rubin said, in part because reps are not "just presenting bibliographic material." They are creating specific mailings for accounts and are looking at it all "asychronistically," Rubin said.
For booksellers, a major advantage of Edelweiss is the ability to manage catalogues in one place instead of having stacks of hardcopy catalogues. Booksellers can also "slice and dice" the catalogues, whether to see "all June titles, all children's titles, all fiction," etc.
Although one audience member feared that reading catalogues on a computer could require more time than reading printed catalogues, Rubin said that customization makes the buying process occur faster. "Our goal is to make this a better experience than hard print catalogues," Rubin said.
"We're learning a lot," Rubin said of the test, which has been running since November 1 and will end May 1. Edelweiss is loading catalogue data and reps are sending mailings to booksellers. All of these steps are "a new process," particularly for publishers.
Among other aspects, during the test, Edelweiss is configuring how the e-catalogue would work for stores with multiple locations. It is also addressing POS and ordering issues.
Rubin said that in terms of training, Edelweiss is more "intuitive and straight-forward" than Above the Treeline.
Because some reps and booksellers want printed catalogue material, Edelweiss is working with Lightning Source on making hard copies of the electronic catalogues for those who want them. Rubin noted that using flexible pdfs, booksellers can also print out what they want.
Possible future applications include making Edelweiss e-book friendly and using it to help receive coop funds.
An application that was received enthusiastically by booksellers but with some wariness by publishers is an area where buyers can blog about books in the catalogue, a place all other buyers would have access to and publishers could see but not be able to edit. "Likely we'll have to regulate this," Rubin said.
Asked why the program was called Edelweiss, Rubin said that the alpine flower blooms above the treeline.--John Mutter