Tuesday, August 14, 2007


THE FOLLOWING STORY FROM THE BOOKSELLER HAS NZ BOOKSELLERS WORRIED
Penguin has relaunched its website after a year of qualitative and quantitative research. The publisher worked with readers, watching how they used the site, and quizzing them on what they expected from it.
"Some of it was quite soul-destroying stuff," said online marketing director AnnaRafferty. "We've stopped benchmarking ourselves against other publisher websites. What is really interesting for us is putting ourselves against other online destinations."
The Penguin site, at http://www.penguin.co.uk/, now features a completely new look, a new navigation and search system, and a "look inside" widget allowing readers to see short extracts from certain titles. "Our research told us that readers expect to be able to read a sample of a title," said Rafferty.Podcasts and author features on offer have been made much more prominent, as has the Penguin blog, and a new section looking at which Penguin titles celebrities are reading—"Penguin Favourites"—has been added. "We have been collecting [mentions of Penguin titles] from the media," said Rafferty. "We thought people would be interested—they are going to want to know what Gordon Brown's favourite book is."

The Penguin website gets between 250,000 and 300,000 unique visitors per month with over two million visitors last year. Online sales volumes and revenue were up 46% and 22% respectively in the first half of 2007. Rafferty is interested in introducing more special editions of titles for the website, but added that the site would never discount titles by more than 25%. "This will never be a price point website," she said. "We will discount for certain titles when it is appropriate but this will never be by more than 25%."

The Penguin blog gets about 5000 visits per week, while Penguin's e-newsletter goes out to over 80,000 opt-in subscribers."We are now talking to readers and saying ‘this is what we've done, now what next?'" she said. "The key thing is that this is the birth of the site; now we will grow and develop it."
Seven indie booksellers have already written to Bookman Beattie concerned that this Penguin UK direct selling initiative might be copied by Penguin NZ.
While another put it this way:
I Love this, a publisher who avows that they will never discount titles sold to the public by more than 25%!!
Fantastic.
They say not a price point website..?
Why would booksellers want to list Penguin titles on their own sites in competition to the publisher?
Penguin use a retailers profit margin to beef up their wholesale price and hopefully make more gross profit in the process.
Just as bookshop buyers at present have to guage a book offered as being an option for the chains to discount and factor that into their ordering, they will now have to ask the question as to whether the publisher will discount the retail price of the title offered on their own website.
Amazon will never open a retail store to compete with booksellers as it is another set of business skills.yet retailers and publishers see the need to compete with Amazon with their own 'token' websites.
A publisher such as Penguin is better able to compete with 'exclusive' books on their own website, and measure the success of sales.
Retail booksellers will rarely have 'exclusive' books to sell but feel they must compete with special discount offers to satisfy the expectations of consumers.
It is a dangerous trend to increase expectations of web consumers that they will always get it cheaper on the web rather than in a book store.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bookman take a bow. The Penguin UK blog gets about 5000 hits a week and according to your stats report last week you had 3000 hits.
I reckon you should feel mighty pleased with yourself.
And as one who works in the NZ retail book trade may I say how much your blog is appreciated. You do a great job in keeping us informed on what's going on around the world and in keeping out community informed.

Anonymous said...

Seconded. Those who wish to stay up to date with developments in the trade now have an excellent resource. Take a bow Graham!

I can't help feeling somewhat dispirited by these stories of publisher/distributors becoming retailers. If it works in the UK & the US, then head offices will no doubt think that their far-flung offspring should follow suite. If they do, then our various efforts to provide a local digital presence will look (and be) fairly insignificant.

I think a restorative would be in order. Cheers!

Tim Blackmore

Anonymous said...

Looks like all the big UK publishers are doing this now and 20-25% discount is the going rate - this one is Random House www.rbooks.co.uk and this one is Bloomsbury's www.bloomsbury.com/bookshop/