New Firm Plans to Forecast, Track Book Sales

by Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 2/15/1999

A new company has been formed to take a crack at using point-of-sale information to help reduce book returns. Publishing Solutions Inc., based in White Plains, N.Y., announced last week that Barnes &Noble and Penguin Putnam have agreed to take part in a three-month pilot program that will test PSI's ability to track a book's sales and to do forecasting. The test is set to begin in early March and will involve 50 fiction and nonfiction Penguin titles.

According to David AvRutick, a former senior v-p at HarperCollins and current president and CEO of PSI, the new service will forecast a title's sales at aggregate, regional and store levels. After gathering POS information from B&N and tracking the title's sales along the three different levels, PSI will issue a report showing differences between actual sales and the forecasted sales. "The payback for publishers will be to allow them to make better printing, inventory, distribution and marketing decisions," noted AvRutick.

Following the conclusion of the pilot test, PSI plans to add POS information from a broad spectrum of retailers. Eventually, PSI hopes to move the system to a Web-based environment that will link together all the players in the publishing supply chain.

J. Kirby Best, PSI chairman, said the company's long-term goal is to "create a responsive interactive link between the publishers and their trading partners." Before helping to form PSI, Best ran T.H. Best &Co., a book manufacturer, as well as Royal Book Manufacturer.