Rick Simonson

E(eek) - The Catalog
May 21, 2008

Among the things to look forward to at next week's BEA is surely HarperCollins' announced preview version (they're not calling it a beta yet) of an electronic, online sales catalog - intended fully, it appears, to replace the printed one.

They seem receptive, both in terms of soliciting comments directly (Josh Marwell in their statement) and via ABA's efforts (Oren Teicher) to get advice and input. Good.

Since this is the season - catalogs are being used to their fullest as we speak, looking up sales histories, marking notes, comments, quantities, new titles, isbn corrections, price revisions, event possibities, and everything else - a few thoughts come to mind here that might not while amidst the din and hum of a convention hall.

For starters, when there is a beta version ready to go, one hopes that it is worked with on a computer loaded with all the other things most of us who buy (or organize readings, look at coop, any of the countless reasons people might look at a catalog). 

Ideally, there would be beta versions of a few-score (or more) other publishers' online catalogs. If Harper can make this fly, everyone would do it, no? I'll leave aside my kind of semantic/definition problems with words like 'catalogs' when this is all online, but to say, when doing Harper, would there still be 'separate' Morrow and Harper Collins and Hyperion catalogs?

On this same beta-version terminal, besides the Harper and other publisher catalogs, you would need to have a bookstore's own data (sales, buying, returns, sales and turnover analysis); you would need the internet (as we all have reasons to see/do things there); the other tools (word processing) for writing memos, looking at spreadsheets, everything else.

That right there seems a daunting amount to put on/into one device - a not very-portable or transmittable device (for many purposes) at that.

It also makes for a hell of a lot of sitting. For all the talk about carbon footprint (which has its place, though the bookworld suffers far more for all the throw-it-at-the-wall, let's-try-and-make-the-numbers publishing that goes on, now as much, if not more, than ever), there is also the matter of booty print.

The serious point there is that a computer-bound desk, given all the other things one does sitting at a computer, is the last place I would want to look at a catalog. Those best get read the way our any of our best reading gets read - somewhere else - the bus, train, bar, bleacher seat, back porch, BEA hotel room, home, out in the garden, in bed, bath, wherever. In the store, it might be at the front counter or back at the information desk - one person looking at the new Harper catalog becomes others - exclaiming that there's a new Neal Stephenson or Francine Prose. It might be sitting over on the side in the readings space, doing some idle grazing as an author talks - let the eyes do some other walking. It's a rep in selling us Harper, but looking over when there's an interruption, and riffling through to see what Norton is doing.

Let's look at a few of the working practicals. In the Harper statement, Josh Marwell mentions the importance of booksellers needing to be able to annotate whatever catalog is being used, and that it be forwardable to other booksellers in the future.

To that statement, a few things: outside of marking an order (quantity, section designation, and special discounts for quantity/pre-pack) the biggest marking in a catalog for me comes from looking sales information up for earlier titles by an author. This is fairly easily done now - catalog and computer can be side by side. How would we be looking for/at our stores' databases when we have the publisher catalog pulled up on our screen? I don't even have the words to describe what that going back and forth is like, but having to flip screens - sounds utterly impractical to me. I also can't imagine keeping track of my place in the slow way through a big/series of big catalogs, as I can now. There's more here, but that for starters.

The forwarding part to other colleagues: that first assumes that everyone who should see a catalog has a computer for the catalog (whole or part of) to be forwarded to. Sorry to say that is not so.

Then all the little reasons to send catalogs (or portions thereof) off to others, for the different people who buy - calendars here, a cluster of children's books there, perhaps a sequence of mysteries or science fiction that someone else should see. We have it all the time - it might be a section of a larger catalog (Drawn & Quarterly within Farrar) or its own catalog (Fantagraphics within the Norton pack) - if the person among us best suited for ordering the graphic novel/narrative books is around - it's easiest to walk the catalog to her for her to go over wherever and however she might. She might be at the counter, working on it between helping customers.

And this isn't even getting into how it works in the stores where people working with different sections do all manner of marking in catalogs.

The forced bondage that seems implicit - you must go to computer to do this - seems to have the who-is-serving-whom equation ass-backwards here (speaking of which, because of our computer set up, I'd be doing whole appointments Miles Davis-style, back to the rep, eyes on the prize of my screen), playing to them that way. Everyone's eyes will be screenbound ...

Josh Marwell and the Harper people back east that are working on this are to be commended for airing this out in such a way that they invite input. When he talks of wanting to understand how customers use and process information, I hope they take it upon themselves to go into some stores and see for themselves. Let's not sit in convention halls and talk about trees without ever stepping outside and looking at a few. 

Posted by Rick Simonson on May 21, 2008 | Comments (0)