ATL Begins Online Catalog Test
by Claire Kirch -- Publishers Weekly, 10/31/2008 7:25:00 AM
Above the Treeline will roll out its newest initiative this weekend, an interactive online catalog, in collaboration with eight major houses and the endorsement of the American Booksellers Association. The online catalog, called Edelweiss, is designed to cut publishers’ printing costs and improve the effectiveness of their sales force, while providing booksellers with an alternative to handling unique paper catalogs from different publishers.
Publishers participating in ATL’s six-month test of the Edelweiss application include Chronicle Books, HarperCollins, John Wiley, Penguin Group, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Thomas Nelson and Tyndale House. ATL will be working with these publishers for the next two months, loading data for the catalogs into a freestanding online module, and training reps to use the system. Select booksellers will start testing Edelweiss after the holidays.
Edelweiss will streamline communications between sales reps and buyers by allowing reps to electronically highlight individual titles with retailer-specific suggestions, comments and tags, and transmit their mark-ups to individual accounts either directly through the Edelweiss system or else via printable pdf versions of the catalog.
On their end, bookstore buyers will able to manage their mailings in an online library, and filter catalog views by category, custom tags, pub dates, and other relevant details, rather than only by publisher. Users will able to customize the elements they’d like to see concerning titles in a manner similar to a My Yahoo or an iGoogle home page: widgets such as ‘Illustrations’, ‘Publicity/Marketing Info’ or ‘Notes From Reps’ may be placed on the page according to user preference -- or hidden altogether. Drop-in title information and other title updates will be made available to both buyers and reps in a central area or as RSS feeds.
“It’s right within our ‘sweet spot’ in terms of what we want to do, how we see ourselves, and in terms of our capabilities,” ATL CEO John Rubin said, “With what we already have in our system, we were going that route anyway. It’s what our role is: improving efficiency between publishers and booksellers.”
After the six-month testing period, Edelweiss, which Rubin said is subsidized by the publishers, will be made available without charge to book buyers, as well as other end-users of publishers’ catalogs, such as publicists and agents.
