Publishers Weekly reported that in a speech to the Association of American Publishers last week, Borders CEO Greg Josefowicz questioned whether the time for returnable sales to bookstores was over. Noting that the system arose during the Depression, when publishers were looking for a way to reduce the risk for booksellers, he asked, '...I wonder if it is the best way to run the book business in 2003 and beyond.' He estimated the costs of the returnable system at hundreds of millions of dollars, which go to non-productively moving books from publisher to store and back again. Josefowicz suggested that money could be more productively spent on marketing, where the book business is getting buried by advertising for other entertainment media.
Borders CEO Raises the Question
Posted by ICv2 on March 4, 2003 @ 11:00 pm CT