[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Blue Tyson

I agree with most of what you say - but not sure I agree with this part. In this example, kid gets a toy - often kids get toys I believe, so if they have one that has contributed to making authors, publishers and bookstores money I don't think that will automatically be a negative.

The reason it's a negative is that you have a customer already inside a bookstore -- and not just any customer, but a child who has the potential to become a lifelong reader (assuming for the sake of simplicity that the role of the parent here is just to set the budget). That child can buy something that will reinforce the reading habit (a book) or something that will not reinforce the reading habit (a T-shirt).

By and large, the more people read as children, the more they will read as adults. So it would be in the bookstore's best interest (and the publisher's, etc.) to sell as many books as possible to that child, in order to develop him or her as a reader. The more books you sell to that child, the more you will sell to that future adult. Selling T-shirts, stuffed toys, candy, and whatnot, will not have the same effect. You're encouraging the habit of consuming clothes, toys, and candy, which can all be satisfied in places other than a bookstore, and with products unrelated to publishing.

It's short-term thinking again. "Hey, we can get $X for licensing fees, and we don't have to do any work!" And since the licensed items are usually tied in to a super-popular property (Harry Potter, Twilight, etc.), sales of those specific books will not suffer. Instead, its the money that might have gone to buy a different book in the same genre (i.e., "if you like this book, try that book") and thereby broadened the reader's interests, which is crucial to maintaining them as a reader once the Super Series du Jour ends, is lost to the sales of kitsch.

There has been considerable concern that the "Harry Potter effect" which boosted children's interest in reading for the first time in years applied only to the Harry Potter books themselves. I think a significant part of this was the explosion of spin-off merchandise. Just as movies nowadays seem to be just a two-hour advertisement for action figures and video games, the HP books were used as advertisements for everything under the sun. This diverted money from the household budget that could have gone to other books to spin-off merchandise, and it diverted the message from "reading is fun, buy more books" to "Harry Potter is fun, buy more Harry Potter stuff." Except that publishers are in the business of selling books, and training their customers to buy clothes or toys is redirecting them to a different market segment entirely.

Nice short-term profits, no doubt ... but that's exactly what I've been ranting about: The publishing industry is trading long-term customers, with their much greater profit, for short-term profits to satisfy speculators who care only about the very short term rise in stock prices, and care nothing at all for the long-term profitability, or even survivability, of that company.

I used to work for a company that decided to trade the slow but steady profit from customers who had, in some cases, been customers for 50 years or more, for quick short-term profits based on fads. Of course, fad customers are as fickle as butterflies, and when they moved on to the next fad and the next flower, the company didn't have either group of customers anymore. Nor, within a couple of years, did they have a company. It was a smaller industry with much less inertia than publishing, but that only means that the same thing will take longer, not that it won't happen, if the publishing houses make the same mistakes.

Bookstores need to sell kids books. If you're a bookstore, and you've got the kid in the store, you want to send him out with his hands full of books, so that he'll keep reading and come and buy more books from you. Sending him out with something he could buy at Toys-R-Us builds their market, not yours.