Sale-or-return book business under threat -- are single copy mags vulnerable?

There are rumblings in the book trade about the possible doom of the 80-year-old practice of book returns. And, for a business like magazine publishing where the single copy sales system follows much the same model, only with much higher returns, this may give pause.

Starting in the Depression, publishers eager to keep booksellers in business and stocking their titles allowed bookstores to return books for credit. The business soon, and ever since, got in the habit of shipping large quantities of books to fill up stores, knowing that many of them -- 30% or more -- would be returned and many of those would end up in landfills.

According to a story posted on Bloomberg.com, publisher Robert Miller, who announced last month that he was leaving Hyperion, the Walt Disney Co. book unit he created, to start a new imprint at HarperCollins with some newfangled ideas.

Not only is he targetting the "surreal" returns system -- he wants to sell his books on a non-returnable basis; he also says he'll experiment with profit- sharing for authors instead of the typical advance/royalty arrangement, and bundling hardcover, nonfiction books with e-book versions of the same titles. But it's the returns policy that got everyone excited.

``Let's face it, returns are bad for everyone, and things have to change,'' Miller said in a telephone interview last month. ``The only way to make it happen was to start something entirely from scratch.''

In 2005, roughly 1.5 billion books were shipped in the U.S., according to the Association of American Publishers. Of those, 465 million, or 31 percent, were returned to publishers.

``In this age of global warming it's insane to be shipping books back and forth across the country for no good reason,'' said Margo Baldwin, president of Chelsea Green Publishing Co. of White River Junction, Vermont. ``It's just a waste of energy and, not only that, it still encourages the overproduction of books -- many of which end up in landfills.'' Baldwin, a publisher of titles about sustainable living, has started a ``green partnership program,'' signing up 30 bookstores that have agreed to take books on a non-returnable basis. In exchange, she gives them extra discounts and priority access to her authors for readings and events.

``We'd like to see them reduced, not only for the environmental impact but for the fact that pulling returns, boxing them and shipping is one of the most time-consuming things our employees do,'' said Allison Hill, president and chief operating officer of Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California,Hill .

Of course there's a lot of scepticism in the book trade about Miller's newfangled ideas and a lot of inertia to overcome. But were this idea to catch on, wouldn't there be huge pressures (from the public and environmentalists at the very least) for the newsstand business to reform, too? Gawd help us if the public were ever to catch on to the fact that we print 100 copies and pulp 60 to sell 40, shipping bundles of magazines all over the country. Just as book publishers have always done...