Re: History
<a href="http://www.sff.net/archives/newsgroups/sff/workshop/critters-volcano-bar-and-grill/00000068.html" target="_new">Originally posted here</a><HR>
This overview will be so abreviated and simplified that it'll almost count as a parody of the real story, but this is it.
Cast back your mind to those thrilling days of yesteryear. We're looking at the 1930s now, the Great Depression. Books were a luxury item, mostly available in the "book department" of department stores. There were fewer than a hundred bookstores in the USA, located only in major cities. The Book-of-the-Month Club provided reading material to those who subscribed in the heartland. Public
libraries, supported by tax revenue, provided the other source of books that most people could find.
But there was another source of reading material, one which was available in every town. Those were the newspapers and magazines. And the newspapers and magazines were put on newstands, in drug stores, in bus stations, by what were called Independent Distributors, or IDs.
Now the IDs handled time-sensitive material. Yesterday's newspapers are fishwrappers. Last week's copy of Life, you couldn't give away. The IDs would pick up the day's papers from the printing plant, and drive them out along their circuits. They paid the printer for so-many copies. But there's always some left over. You don't want people to come to your drugstore and not find a copy of the Herald and this week's Time, would you? And the IDs didn't want to pay for stock that didn't sell. So they got credit for the unsold copies. To prove that a copy was unsold, they would tear off the front cover of the magazine, or the masthead of the newspaper, and return only that (the rest going into a Dumpster).
The grocery, or drugstore, or bus station, or newsstand, owner wouldn't have to worry about stocking periodicals -- a guy in a truck would show up every morning, or every Monday, pick up the unsold stock from yesterday or last week, and leave today's, or this week's, stock. The store owner only paid the driver for the ones that sold, and didn't have to pay to have stuff on his shelves. Easy source of cash for everyone.
Now, in those days of the late 1930s, there were giants in the earth. And some of them were Max Schuster, Dick Simon, Ian Ballantine, and others who noticed that there was this distribution system already in place. At first the paperbacks were lower-cost reprintings of existing hard covers. Later came paperback originals. But these fellows saw that by making paperbacks available through the ID system, they could make a bundle. And so they did.
This also made paperbacks strippable. Unsold copies would have their covers torn off and returned for credit on the next order of books. They were treating books exactly like magazines. The ID system wasn't set up for returns, and so there were no returns. Those books that didn't sell were stripped and replaced by others that might sell better. Think of a paperback as a funny-looking magazine and you'll get the right idea.
Paperback covers reflected this, too. You were wondering about all the girls with large bosoms and scanty clothing? The covers were being designed to appeal to truck drivers, the guys who were actually choosing which books to put on the racks. (There was also standard advice to paperback writers in those days to show up at the warehouses where the IDs picked up their stock at four in the morning, bearing coffee and donuts, so that the drivers would remember Joe Author as a good guy, and maybe take another carton of his books around. Remember: people don't buy what they don't see.) Books were all the same size to fit the standard wire racks.
These were mass market paperbacks. Mass market, as opposed to "the Trade," that is, the bookstore trade. Trade books were whole-copy returnable. Hardcovers are trade books. Trade paperbacks are whole-copy returnable (they're sent back to the warehouse, restocked, and shipped to other bookstores).
Printing a hundred thousand copies of a paperback brought the per-unit cost of a paperback down so that you could still make money if you threw away half of the books you printed. The IDs provided a way to put a hundred thousand copies in front of potential buyers. The IDs varied in size from some that owned fleets of trucks and covered half a state, to others which were one guy in a stationwagon who covered one side of town. The IDs tended to know their markets pretty well, and knew to stock more romances in the drugstore next to the beauty parlor, more action/adventure in the bus station near the Army base, more science fiction at the news stand by the high school, and so on.
(Please note that for the IDs books were never more than a sideline: They were far more interested in making sure there are multiple copies of TV Guide beside every supermarket cash register in America than selling Jay Random Writer's books -- books were there because the IDs were already sending a truck to these different places, and the truck might have some spare room after the copies of that morning's newspapers were loaded.)
This happy situtation took us through the forties, the fifties, and the sixties. Books went out in great numbers, were sold in great numbers, and everyone was happy, more or less. Yes, the books had shelf-lives that depended on whim of the truck driver, but whaddya want? And there were turf wars, and Mob influences, and much that was less than Kosher, and the books had covers that you wouldn't want your mother to see you reading. But this is America!
Several things started to happen after that -- the rise of the malls brought bookstores right to mid-size towns. You no longer had to look for books at the grocery store. Maybe Waldenbooks wasn't that great, but compared to a wire-rack at the bus stop it was heaven.
The malls made Piers Anthony a best-seller, with the lease-line dumps offering pre-teen porn at lunch-money prices. Their time came, and departed. Now we are seeing the rise of the superstores. We've all heard of Amazon.com, right? All of Amazon's sales equals that of just two Barnes&Noble superstores. Put not your faith in princes, nor yet in on-line sales. If you can get your book into Amazon but can't get it into Barnes&Noble, it's game over.
Then the world changed for the IDs. Out in Seattle, the Safeway corporation was dealing with some forty IDs for various books and periodicals at its various store locations. So one day the Safeway chain said to the IDs, "One month from today, we will begin doing all of our business with only one of you. Start bidding."
"You can't do that!" said the IDs.
"Watch us," said Safeway.
And soon enough, rather than the patchwork of IDs in Seattle, there was only one, the rest bought out or bankrupt. And this wave spread across the nation, so that where there had formerly been hundreds or thousands of IDs, there are now perhaps a score; near bankruptcy from their fight with the other IDs for survival, less profitable because they had to offer deeper discounts to the stores to be the one that would be given the contract. And they didn't know their markets well, and instead of hand-selecting which books went into which slots where, turned to safe and reliable choices -- big name authors, reprints of best sellers -- and the implosion continued. Grocery stores couldn't compete with mall bookstores on books. The grocery stores have been going back to what they do best -- selling groceries. There are not only fewer IDs filling wire-rack spinners, there are fewer spinners for them to fill.
We are now coming out of that period of flux. The mass market paperback has been wounded, some say mortally, but the trade has expanded, so that we're now seeing rack-sized trade paperbacks -- that is to say, they have exactly the same trim size as those paperbacks designed to fit the wire-rack spinners, but are whole-copy returnable. Impossible to tell at a glance from mass market, right
down to the glossy lurid covers.
This story, you may notice, has little to do with techology -- the ability to print many cheaply -- and a great deal to do with distribution. Recall the adage that amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics? It's the same in bookselling. Amateurs talk printing, professionals talk distribution.