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| Hearsay: |
[This story was first posted on the morning of Monday, May 17, 2010 and has been bumped to add new material but maintain the flow of comments--new material below]
Monday, May 17
Hey, all. Readers wrote in over the weekend pointing to an issue brewing in the bookselling world and I’m hoping all y’alls can help me understand the intricacies of it.
As I understand it, Penguin had embargoed the sale of Stieg Larsson ’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest until its release date, May 25. Books are routinely shipped to stores ahead of their release date to be readied for sale on the day of release, but Indigo apparently jumped the gun eleven days early, ensuring that independent bookstores (remaining in a post-Chindigo world) that carry the title will basically have their sales eaten away by the heavily discounted big box offering flouting the rules.
Further, Indigo reportedly even changed the release date on their own website to match the date they started selling, May 14, as opposed to the date set by Penguin (which you can see Penguin is sticking to). Penguin sent a form to all stores asking them to sign that they would respect the embargo date, on pain of not receiving future titles ahead of release date, but apparently this doesn’t apply to Indigo. And I can’t really see how Penguin could enforce that, anyway. So, effectively, having killed off its competition and created a monopoly, Indigo can now ignore contracts and set their own terms. In the words of Indigo’s Star Wars counterpart, M. le Vader, “I am altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further…”
Reports are that Penguin will start immediately shipping to smaller stores this week, but the damage is already done, no? A full weekend (at least) headstart at a hungry readership…
Do we have any takers to properly contextualize this for me, the non-bookseller? Is this a big deal? Overblown? Par for the course?
Tuesday, May 18
After this story broke here on Bookninja, the real journalists at the Post got on the horn and contacted Penguin and Indigo, who both swore nothing was wrong, illegal or otherwise out of order in this transaction. For a moment, I thought I’d been punk’d, but it turns out that there’s an industry-wide (mis)understanding of what words like “embargo” and “on-sale date” mean, and the independent booksellers commenting on this thread (below) are furious, saying they’re being effectively held to a different standard than Indigo simply because of size. Commentors below identify as from indy stores such as McNally Robinson and Powells in Oregon. Anyone else have an opinion?
Wednesday, May 19
The ever-vigilant Steven Beattie has a roundup of the fiasco and some great analysis over at his blog, That Shakespearean Rag. There doesn’t seem to be much mainstream press coverage of this, though.
Even if there was not a signed embargo agreement, it was dirty pool for Indigo to release its stock more than a week before the publisher’s stated release date. As publishing moves further and further toward Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality, the first few selling days of a major release become more and more important, and independents that didn’t even have the title in their stores when Indigo put the book on sale lose out. One indie bookseller commenting on the Bookninja thread acknowledges that customers who had placed advance orders for the book called to cancel, saying that they had already picked up the title from Indigo over the weekend. Clearly, every lost sale hurts independent bookstores, which are already struggling in a highly inimical environment.
Penguin would be entirely within its rights to exact punitive measures against the big blue monster, such as restricting when (or even if) the chain receives stock of future titles. Naturally, Penguin will not do this. How can it? Indigo accounts for too large a slice of the bookselling pie in Canada. Penguin would be cutting off its nose to spite its face. It would be much easier to exact punitive measures against smaller independents, which may be ordering only 20 or 50 copies of a given title.
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May 17th, 2010 at 9:20 am
I worked at a Chapters last year and I remember at least one similar situation where a book went on sale ahead of an embargo date (Diana Gabaldon’s Echo in the Bone), but the reason there was because another retailer (Wal-Mart) had already flaunted the embargo and we were told that since they had done it first, they would get the fine and that makes it open season for whoever else wants to sell it.
This logic sounded dubious to me, and still does, so maybe it was just to keep us from asking questions. Anyone else know better?
This anecdote isn’t here to apologize for Chapters at all, but they seemed quite aware of the penalties for going against street date and policed it quite strictly.
May 17th, 2010 at 9:35 am
Speaking as a bookseller: this is par for the course.
May 17th, 2010 at 9:39 am
Par for the course for booksellers or for Chindigo?
May 17th, 2010 at 10:00 am
So if Wal-Mart’s set a rule to break “street date” conditions as a matter of policy…?
Sidebar question: Is it just me, or does it seem as if Indigo’s looking to slowly set aside the Chapters brand altogether over the last few months?
May 17th, 2010 at 10:00 am
Why don’t you call Penguin?
416-925-2249
It would have been much quicker than writing this barely veiled attack piece on ‘Chindigo’.
May 17th, 2010 at 10:23 am
You’re not from around here, are you? My attack pieces aren’t veiled at all.
May 17th, 2010 at 11:48 am
It’s par for the course for Chapters/Indigo. No other bookseller would be able to get away with it, as they have done for years.
May 17th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
All that unfettered hate must be a joy to carry around.
May 17th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Oh, it’s fettered. Fettered like THE WIND.
(And don’t you think “hate” is a strong word for a blog that has one foot in reporting and one in satire when trying to find a creamy middle to the concerns and interests of book industry? Maybe you have a hard time distinguishing tone because of some diagnosis I don’t know about? Or maybe someone cut you off on the way to work today? There are pills and yoga for these things, just fyi. Anyway, I hope you feel better, whatever it is, and I’m glad this free, one-unpaid-man service was here to allow you to get something off your chest.)
May 17th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Rob is right, this is more of the same.
For what it’s worth, the wholesaler North 49 has copies for indies and we’ll have ours today or tomorrow. They say to go ahead and sell them, and Penguin is looking into the matter.
BD, this has nothing to do with carrying around hate. I’m just pissed off at the chain for their lack of respect for Canadian publishers, given their sloganeering over the years about the world “needing more Canada.”
May 17th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
I know this sort of jumping the gun has happened a few times in the States, with high-profile books becoming available at big-box bookstores and/or places like WalMart or Target before the publisher’s official release date (it happened with the paperback of Eclipse, the final Harry Potter book, et cetera). In those cases, I think several indie bookstores tried to get their industry association to take it up with the publisher. Perhaps Canadian indies can get the Canadian Booksellers Association involved?
I was eagerly awaiting the release of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, but I’ll wait and buy it at a local indie bookstore.
May 17th, 2010 at 6:05 pm
Looks like the actual reporters have done their job and contacted everyone involved: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/05/17/indigo-denies-defying-embargo-on-the-girl-who-kicked-the-hornets-nest/
I’ll get you next time, Laura Ingles! (P.S. I’d like to personally thank the small booksellers who contacted me and told me they had to sign an embargo…. Um, guys?)
May 17th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
That article? It’s a merry wander into distinction-without-a-difference land.
It’s called an “on-sale date” for a reason.
May 17th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
I totally don’t understand this. What’s ACTUALLY happened here? Are we talking semantics around the word “embargo” or is there some quasi-legal breach of ethics here?
May 17th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
I’m not at work, so I don’t know if we signed an embargo agreement or not.
That, however, is immaterial. An on-sale date is an on-sale date. Period.
Amazon hasn’t shipped the book, so far as I know. Indies don’t even HAVE the book. It’s not to be sold before the on-sale date. Full-stop.
May 17th, 2010 at 6:23 pm
So I’m not a COMPLETE idiot, and neither are the people who emailed me? This is good. So there will be no repercussions around this for Indigo because “technically” no contract has been broken, and yet it is effectively as though an embargo has been broken because no one else even HAS the book. Correct?
May 17th, 2010 at 6:25 pm
In a big, stinky nutshell, yeah.
Welcome to “being an independent bookseller, 2010.”
May 17th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
I don’t know a thing about bookselling, so this may be a very foolish question, but why would Penguin send the books out so far in advance? Can’t they time them to be delivered only a day or two before the on-sale date?
I work a bit in PR, and we have embargo rules for media outlets. My understanding (I’m on the fringe of PR, so not exactly a fount of wisdom here) is that if an outlet breaks an embargo, they do face fines and what-not, although I don’t know who actually fines them.
May 17th, 2010 at 7:15 pm
Looking for ethical business practices from Heather Reisman? That’ll be the day.
May 17th, 2010 at 8:48 pm
Hey George, usually the stuff that isn’t-to-be-sold-until comes in boxes with big stickers on them that say so. Perhaps someone could check the receiving department at their store and see if there’s a case of Larsson 3? And maybe take a camera phone pic? (I’d do it myself, but I’m on vacation for a month.)
May 17th, 2010 at 9:18 pm
I’m all for this. Booksellers? Pics? Sigh.
May 17th, 2010 at 10:30 pm
I’m a bookseller at Powells Books in Portland, Oregon. Previously, I worked for Borders. Embargo means strict on-sale date, street release date, etc. No one is supposed to sell the book before that date (in the case of midnight release parties, at 12:01 am). These dates have been established by publishers to equalize the playing field – big retailers who purchase thousands of copies shouldn’t be allowed to sell the book before the independent bookstores receive their carton of 20 (or whatever). In reality, many retailers break the embargos – I’ve seen distributors send copies of street-release titles to stores without stating the street-realease date, and these get sold without notice to customers. I’ve also seen big retailers break the embargo with no repurcussion, because seriously, is the publisher going to withhold future titles from Indigo, Borders, B&N, Amazon over a street release violation? No – there’s too much money involved. Even the leaked political books work in publisher’s favor by raising interest ahead of time. The biggest loser – as always – is the consumer, closely followed by the independent bookstore.
May 17th, 2010 at 11:02 pm
I’m with McNally Robinson in Winnipeg. Apparently the Chapters locations had the book out for sale yesterday… we got a store email today letting us know that Penguin Canada would be shipping to us immediately, so that we could (crossed fingers) be selling it on Thursday. We definitely signed something stating that we’d abide by a strict on-sale date. Chapters was apparently able to jump the gun by having the books delivered by courier. Obviously, that costs substantially more than indies are able to spend. By the time we get the title, Chapters will have had it on shelves for four days. Penguin apologized and is “looking into ways to prevent this from happening in the future” etc. etc., but we have definitely lost quite a few sales. It’s frustrating – they’re going to get away with it, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do.
May 18th, 2010 at 12:23 am
I find my indy store often has big name books out a week or so before the sell date. I am willing to pay the extra $10 to get it a week early and help out the local shop.
May 18th, 2010 at 7:18 am
Well, is there a misunderstanding about what the word “flaunt” means? (It doesn’t mean flout.)
May 18th, 2010 at 7:44 am
Thanks for the classy note!
May 18th, 2010 at 8:23 am
Maybe this whole mess is part of the (evidently successful?) marketing campaign for book four, The Girl Who Fucked With the Calendar.
May 18th, 2010 at 8:25 am
(and also, and seriously, if the commenters from Powells and McNally would start a blog of their own, I’d be completely transfixed by what they’d surely reveal. Just saying…)
May 18th, 2010 at 8:35 am
Why anybody would want to read the Steig Larsson books is beyond me. I tried, I really tried–read the first 100 pages of the first one twice. But no, this series isn’t worth the time.
Too bad he died before it became so successful and it’s a bitch that his partner appears to be cut out of the profits and the family from which he is estranged is profitting. But the books? Come on…
May 18th, 2010 at 8:38 am
Further, Indigo reportedly even changed the release date on their own website to match the date they started selling, May 14, as opposed to the date set by Penguin (which you can see Penguin is sticking to).
It appears as though Chapters/Indigo switched the date back to May 25th on their site.
May 18th, 2010 at 8:46 am
chapters guelph bricks and mortar have 159 in stock right now. we have none….i am phoning penguin this morning but of course expect a non-reply reply.
May 18th, 2010 at 8:51 am
As an employee responsible for merchandising said books over the weekend, I can say for certain that the title had no “Strict Onsale Date” listed on the carton, nor a warning not to merchandise them until the onsale date (which is the case with embargoed books). It happens every day that books are put out ahead of their onsale date. If we waited to release them all, we would need another store to hold the stock coming into the receiving room.
It has been firmly stated now by both Indigo and Penguin that there was no embargo on this title. As to the “damage done” to smaller stores? Given the demand for this book, I don’t think that Indigo selling the books a weekend early has retracted from any store’s sales (and in any event, we sold out by Saturday mid-day – they went out late Friday – half a day’s sales). Everyone will have a chance to sell the book, and plenty of it! With this and the Book of Awesome, Penguin is having a very good year!
May 18th, 2010 at 8:53 am
Mary @29 – Really?
Millions of people around the world clearly disagree with your assessment that they’re “not worth the time”.
May 18th, 2010 at 9:52 am
Hmmmm – and yet the embargo on the release of all the Harry Potter books was very strictly enforced – and complied with – by all booksellers.
May 18th, 2010 at 9:52 am
Millions of people thought the Da Vinci Code was good, too. At least I found I could read that…
But then as my first boss (an old newspaperman who I think would find Larsson’s view of print media as bogus as I do) used to say: “Ah, differences of opinion: that’s what makes horse races.”
May 18th, 2010 at 11:31 am
In the UK a book is put out on sale as soon as it is received in store regardless of the publication date, unless you have specifically signed an embargo agreement. As a side note, I am surprised that a book this highly anticipated that has been available in hardback since last October and in paperback since the 1st of April in the UK is only being released in North America now.
May 18th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Check out Indigo Milton’s Facebook wall. On May 14 @4.05pm they announced, and I quote, “HOT NEW RELEASE! Just taken off our strict on sale list…Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. We can sell this book to you TODAY!”
Interesting.
May 18th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
I just took a screencap of it, for those who aren’t on FB. It’s here: http://www.bookninja.com/indigoscreencap.jpg
May 18th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
I work for a (small) independent bookseller, and my understanding was that there was a difference between a “strict” release date and the looser ones. We sell stuff ahead of release dates all the time (we just shelve books as we receive them), but not if we’ve had to sign something (like in the case of Harry Potter). I’m not clear from this discussion which category the Larsson book falls into – it’s not the kind of thing we carry.
May 18th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
To my understanding, there are three levels for on-sales.
First is the general release: a book is a May title, it arrives, it goes on the shelf. No fuss, no muss.
Second is a title with a stated release date: a book has an on-sale date of, say, May 25. Random House is very helpful, with stickers that say explicitly “Do Not Sell Before 5/25/10″ or the like. There is no embargo or contract on these titles, but the expectation is that the release date will be heeded, and that there may be repercussions if it’s not.
Third is an embargoed title (ie, Harry Potter & The Vanishing Booksellers): booksellers MUST sign a contract stating that they will not sell the title before the specified date and time.
The Larsson was of the second level.
May 18th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
(all the usual caveats: generally speaking, there may be exceptions, I’m not a doctor, etc.)
May 18th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
I work at an independent bookseller in Canada, and last October we got the following e-mail from Random House (not Penguin, but it gives you an idea of how large publishers treat on-sale dates): [see link in name above]
Interestingly, the e-mail subject was titled “Fwd: Sensitive On Sale Dates letter for Independents.” Evidence for the idea (or, in my experience, the fact) that big chain stores are held to different standards?
Of course Penguin isn’t going to admit that Indigo shouldn’t have put out the books. They simply can’t afford to piss off a chain like Indigo. And they’re not really suffering a loss as a result of Indigo’s actions — only other booksellers are.
Incidentally, the wholesaler North 49 had their copies as early as Indigo did, but even when they found out what Indigo was doing, they wouldn’t release the books to us, because they didn’t want to break the on-sale date; it was only when it became clear that Penguin wasn’t standing up to Indigo that they agreed to ship.
I can also testify to losing sales as a result of the Larsson fiasco: so far several of our customers who had pre-ordered copies have called to say that they no longer want the book, having picked it up at Indigo over the weekend. I can only imagine how many spontaneous sales we’ve lost. Really it’s not much different from a movie theatre being denied their film for opening weekend.
This kind of underhanded behaviour is the reason that independent bookstores are going out of business.
May 18th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Heard from Penguin today that they shipped Chapters warehouses last week ahead of time as per normal…usually it takes 3 to 4 days for books to get to individual stores but to Penguin’s dismay Chapters couriered all of the books to their stores…at great expense….Penguin is peeved…but we all know that nothing will happen to the unfriendly giant…
May 18th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Any contract is only as effective as your ability or willingness to enforce it. A single indie can be punished by a large publisher for breaking an embargo by pulling stock and denying them further shipments (and I believe this was once done by Raincoast to a bookseller in BC years ago for breaking a Harry Potter embargo), but with a chain the size of Chapters/Indigo, even a publisher the size of Penguin can’t do much to them if they break an embargo. What are they going to do, not ship books to their largest customer? This is the power of Chindigo’s monopoly.
May 19th, 2010 at 8:26 am
I ordered my copy of the third Larsson book from Amazon UK and received it three days later. Easy. Indigo/Chapters/Coles is ‘good enough’ in a ‘need to be excellent and great world.
May 19th, 2010 at 10:29 am
“Penguin would be entirely within its rights to exact punitive measures against the big blue monster…”
Isn’t Penguin, owned by Pearson PLC, also a, “big blue monster?”
May 19th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
From an Amazon POV: most books have what in-house Amazon calls publication dates, which are loose (they ship ‘em when they get ‘em).
Some books (Harry Potter, etc.—sometimes an occasional more obscure title as well) have hard release dates. When Amazon gets these, they enter them into their system, and they are then unable to ship them early (I believe they ship them the day before the release date). Also, they don’t show as “in stock” on Amazon until the hard release date. Amazon doesn’t jump the gun if they’ve been notified of the hard release date—pubs tend to check the book’s detail page.
I like how Robert Wiersma went from “That, however, is immaterial. An on-sale date is an on-sale date. Period….It’s not to be sold before the on-sale date. Full-stop.” to “there are three levels for on-sales…” Way to back down from an untenable position.
Also: ‘flout’ not ‘flaunt’.
May 19th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
First off, do me the courtesy of getting my name right, would you? I sign everything I write, and stand behind it: if you’re going to attack it, at least watch your spelling.
Secondly, I admire your reading comprehension. In fact, my post with the three levels of on-sales was to clarify the different categories for people who might not have twenty years of bookstore experience. You’ll note that the “on-sale date” is the second level, which corresponds directly to my earlier “It’s not to be sold before the on-sale date”. No backing down, nothing untenable about the position: it is what it is, and it’s different from the first and third levels.
But then, nobody else complained about the clarification. Maybe the miscommunication is on your end?
May 19th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Oh, Rob. No need to upend the table…
May 20th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Everyone always says publishers “can’t” ask Indigo to follow the rules. Well, actually, some publishers have done so, and with good results. And why? Because independent bookstores (and the internet) are still viable channels for selling books. Indigo will never play by the rules if there are never any penalties — and, eventually, neither will anyone else.
May 22nd, 2010 at 12:39 am
The weird bit is that this isn’t even the whole big kerfuffle, really. The thing with Random House and Hornet’s Nest is that according to the New York Times, a lot of smaller booksellers were playing nice and NOT ordering UK editions of it, despite the availibility. They could have been selling it like hotcakes months ago, if they had wanted, but apparently playing by the rules doesn’t mean a darn thing. [see link above]
May 24th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Sorry–what does “crowdsource” mean? (Sigh. I’m so distressed over the oil spill that I can hardly focus my eyes to read the anti-spam numbers.)
May 25th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Crowdsourcing means cutting the costs of your enterprise by convincing gullible souls to do the work for you for free. Example: Wikipedia.
May 28th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Crowdsourcing means using the “crowd” as a “source” to obtain information.