Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
On the other hand, if it encourages Borders to be more frugal in orders, resulting in less waste, that would be a good thing.
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No, it will just encourage more "ordering to the net," which is killing midlist authors right now. It's a death spiral, with stores ordering fewer and fewer copies of each new title, with less prominent display of new books (one or two copies instead of a nice face-out display of a bunch). Plus, Borders already isn't carrying a lot of new titles, and this is likely to make them even more risk-averse in trying new writers.
It's not all bad: the returns system is flawed, too, and is hurting writers, as well. I don't know what the right answer is, but it has to be a system-wide change. Maybe an elimination of returns coupled with bigger discounts to the stores. This may be a useful experiment, but I think it could hurt some people in the short term.