While many retailers have been quick to establish Web sites in the post-Amazonian world, bargain book wholesalers, for the most part, have been reluctant to do so. There are exceptions, of course, but even the oldest wholesaler business-to-business (B2B) Web sites date back only four years. Some that sell both wholesale and retail, such as Book Depot in Ontario, set up separate sites for each type of customer at the same time. Others, like Daedalus Books in Columbia, Md., established consumer sites early on, but have yet to finalize a site for resellers.

For most booksellers and wholesalers alike, when it comes to Internet convenience, e-mail and Excel spreadsheets continue to be preferred. Remainder buyer Katie Parker at the Joseph-Beth Group, operating Joseph-Beth and Davis-Kidd bookstores in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee, buys more bargain books from Web sites than most retailers. Even so, she estimates, "I'm probably doing 20% of my buying off a Web site, and I'm still working with my rep when I do it." But that may be about to change, as more wholesalers become Web-ready and those who have been up and running introduce redesigns just in time for this November's CIROBE (Chicago International Remainder & Overstock Book Exposition).

May I Take Your Order?
Eleven-year-old Book Depot has one of the oldest and most sophisticated B2B sites on the Internet (www.bookdepot.com). It launched back in 1997, before much of today's software was even a glint in developers' eyes. "We were working with a beta product from Microsoft and we launched with that," says co-owner Bill Van Vliet. From the start, the company has updated its Web site daily and posted its entire inventory online. When a customer places an order, it's automatically taken off the inventory. This helps Book Depot maintain an unusually high fulfillment rate--98%, according to Van Vliet. As he sees it, "the Web site complements our business. It levels the playing field, and gives the small guy access to our product whenever he wants." But Van Vliet does not look at it as replacement for other sales channels. "We still go to CIROBE," he notes, "and we have sales representatives."

One of the ways that Book Depot is using its Web site to boost sales is to create specialized catalogues online. If a customer wants to look at a particular category of books, Book Depot will go through its inventory and group those titles together, then e-mail the customer a Web address where it can be viewed, complete with jacket art.

Although a Web site can have many advantages, it can also be expensive, not just to create, but to maintain. Book Depot has four full-time programmers on staff and has invested close to $1 million. "To be successful on the Internet," comments Van Vliet, "you have to go all the way. It's a constant upgrading of servers and security." He plans to unveil Book Depot's newest feature, profiling, at the company's Internet cafe at CIROBE. "It will allow customers to tell us how often they'd like to be notified of new titles in what areas," he explains.

Fairmount Books in Buffalo, N.Y., went online in 1999 (www.fairmountbooks.com), notes marketing manager Chris Myles. "Right now it's approximately 10% of our business," he tells PW. "The nitty gritty of what's in stock is updated every day. We put up titles as we receive them, and every month we post feature titles and special titles. When you place an order on our site, you get a copy of the order and a confirmation number. We want it to be as easy as it is to place an order with a rep." However, Myles is quick to note, his company has no plans to replace sales reps with online ordering anytime soon. "It's just another channel. The reps receive the same commission whether an order is placed online, by fax or through the rep directly." To supplement its site, Fairmount e-mails a monthly newsletter to accounts. To get out new book information even faster, that schedule will shortly move up to every other week.

Look, Ma, No Catalogues!
Finger Lakes Book Company (FLBC) in Canandaigua, N.Y., has been online for three years (www.fingerlakesbooks.com), but is not currently set up to take orders. With the redesign that will launch just before CIROBE, that will no longer be the case, says general manager Larry Bowe--"It will have a shopping cart, but it won't be in real time." He views the site as "our way of letting customers see a catalogue and a photo and detailed information." The site has enabled FLBC to keep up with changes in its business, which has evolved considerably over the past seven or eight years. In the early days, FLBC had far fewer customers and many more copies of specific books. "What happened," says Bowe, "is our customer base has grown 10 times, and we have 100 or fewer copies of most titles, so we couldn't afford to send samples. We just felt the Web would get the same information to more customers--that's all our site was ever intended to be, a catalogue."

CIROBE Online
From the start, the 11-old Chicago International Remainder & Overstock Book Exposition (CIROBE) has been more than just a trade show. Its annual directory and exhibitor's guide, which is distributed free at the show, offers booksellers and wholesalers a handy Who's Who of the key players to refer to year-round. Now visitors to http://www.cirobe.com can get that same information by clicking on the link to the exhibitor list on the front page. Since all the major players in remainder and promotional books attend the show, the CIROBE site contains the most complete listing of bargain book wholesalers in the U.S., plus many important foreign wholesalers as well. Last February, it even added a link from each company's name directly to its Web site.
According to CIROBE exhibits manager Chelsea Nash, who maintains the CIROBE site, the online exhibitors directory is kept up-to-date. "If somebody moves or their area code changes, it goes up right away." Her fears that consumers would use the listings and deluge wholesalers with individual book requests, have not panned out. The site itself, she adds, "is deliberately very, very bare bones. First of all, so all people can access our information no matter what kind of computer they're working on. The other reason is it's easier to keep it current. We feel the information we have is more important than pretty pictures. We prefer to concentrate on content."

For Nash, the CIROBE site has been "a work in progress" ever since it first launched as just a front page in 1997. Two years later, CIROBE added more information. "Since so many people were online," explains Nash, "we thought the time was right to tell them about the bargain book business." Obviously the site supports the trade show, and all exhibitor forms and housing information are online. But it also gives bargain book newcomers an introduction to the business as a whole. A link to learn about bargain books offers viewers definitions of such key terms as white sale, bid list and hurts.

No new plans are in the works for the CIROBE site. However, notes Nash, "we try to review the material every year. We're very open to submissions of content, and we modify the site based on questions."
--J.R.

Jeff Press, president and CEO of World Publications Inc. in North Dighton, Mass., also views his company's site (http://www.wrldpub.com) as a catalogue substitute. "We used to have regular printed catalogues; we stopped them this year," he says, adding that World continues to create specialized packets for resellers by printing out all applicable jacket scans and information. The World site, which has been up for close to three years, has scans of almost every book that comes in, but doesn't contain inventory data. "It changes so rapidly," Press explains. "If something's a short quantity, we don't even post it." With both a New York and a Boston showroom to service large accounts, Press still finds it advantageous to be on the Web: "A lot of smaller stores and, what we're seeing increasingly, a lot of foreign accounts order that way."

Frugality is part of what made the Web so attractive to Marie Roukas, president and owner of Warehouse Books Inc. (in Norfolk, Va.), which was known for many years as JLM Remainders before Roukas purchased it last November. During the nine years that she was with JLM, the company was so careful with expenditures that it recycled all its boxes and never had to buy a single one for shipments to customers. After deciding that the Internet is the most cost-effective way for her to reach the most customers, Roukas set up www.warehousebooksinc.com within a matter of months. To help sell the quantitites that are too small to post online, Roukas opened the Little Bookstore, a 350-square-foot outlet carved out of her warehouse.

Although it's too soon to tell how the Warehouse site will do, so far Roukas is pleased. It has already saved her several thousand dollars in film developing costs alone for the photo decks that JLM used to mail to customers in lieu of a catalogue. With book information, including cover art, on the site, Roukas just makes a few photo decks to take along to trade shows like CIROBE. Just last month, she listed the Web site on a search engine, and within days she had two new orders from resellers. Although Warehouse's site is geared to ordering in real time, like other wholesalers, Roukas has found that the Web is no substitute for personal contact. For now, her goal is to concentrate on developing her customer base: "I don't want to get big. I just want to get more customers." At the same time, she continues to improve the site and will add customer profiles close to the start of CIROBE.

Bonnie Kaufman, owner of four-year-old I-Deal Books in Hallandale, Fla., may prefer the personal touch, but she's found that her site (www.idealbks.com), which she launched a year and a half ago, has brought her new international clients that found her solely through the Internet. She typically stocks some Spanish-language books and foreign-language tapes in addition to English-language titles, which make up the bulk of her inventory. Lately, she has received orders from as far away as Nicaragua and the Philippines. As a working mother, Kaufman has time to update the site, which includes listings of carton quantities, only once a month. "Eventually," she says, "I hope to update it daily. When I get something in, I do a personal e-mail with the information. What usually happens is people will go through the Web site and e-mail me questions and orders. We do our domestic business via e-mail." Although Kaufman doesn't like Web site advertisements as a rule, she was so taken with the work of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children that she linked to its site.

According to Daedalus president Robin Moody, the company's six-year-old consumer Web site, www.daedalus-books.com, which can also be accessed from www.salebooks.com, "has steadily grown. We expect it to be a large part of our business." For him the main impediment to setting up a B2B Web site has been that "the Internet is wonderful if you're looking for a particular book, but you can't browse." To try to counter that problem, Daedalus is upgrading its database so that booksellers can search via many more fields than simply title and author. "I don't think we're going to put up stock quantities," he says of the B2B site, which will go up some time next year, "but you will be able to click on what's new." So far, Daedalus has been in no hurry to set up a separate bookseller site. "A lot of booksellers use our consumer site," says Moody. "They fill out the order sheet and fax it or e-mail it to us. We just enter it like a typical order."

Activity Across the Pond
In England, B2B wholesaler Web sites are also starting to come into their own. Thirty-year-old Roy Bloom Ltd. in London, one of the U.K.'s largest remainder houses, tried jump-starting its Internet sales by purchasing librisweb.com in March. Originally established as a consignment-style Web site for publishers to sell their overstock to trade buyers, listings are free. Librisweb, however, does charge a brokerage fee when books are sold. "Currently," says managing director Adam Bloom, "we are in the process of moving it away from remainders and more into publishers' white sales. The process is ongoing, and we are in discussions with publishers to include their product on our site."

Using technology from librisweb, Roy Bloom set up a "sister site," www.roybloom.com, in August. While librisweb is "aimed at customers who may be a little scared of remainders, but open to exploring the world of publishers' discounted books," roybloom.com more closely resembles many American wholesaler sites. For Bloom, "the advantage to being online is that anyone who is hooked up can view the list at any time. We update on a daily basis, and in particular, our overseas customers seem to be very pleased with the site."

Grange Books PLC in Rochester, England, which was started in 1972, established an outpost on the Web just over a year ago (www.grangebooks.com). "We decided to go on the Web not only to be ahead of the game," says managing director Stephen Ash, "but also in lieu of producing expensive, four-color catalogues that are virtually out of date as soon as printed." Mailing costs were also an issue, given that Grange has customers in 60 countries. If anything, the Web has only strengthened Grange's customer base, which now includes several resellers in Russia and Iran. "We're getting hits from countries we don't visit. These are brand new customers," notes Ash, adding, "90% of orders and inquiries are from overseas." Being online has also helped Grange reduce the number of samples it sends. "It lets us target people who are interested in the books," says Ash.

Ash's goal for the site has been to make it as user-friendly as possible. The site is updated every Friday, so customers do not see real-time inventory. Orders are processed upon receipt, just like fax and e-mail orders are handled, and payments are accepted in Sterling, euros and U.S. and Canadian dollars, as well as by credit card.

What Do Booksellers Want?
Despite ordering and inventory upgrades at many bargain wholesaler sites, most booksellers still aren't ready to take the plunge and stop ordering through other avenues, especially CIROBE. As Parker at Joseph-Beth notes, "CIROBE is even more valuable than ever."

Web Wish List
According to the accepted wisdom, nobody's perfect. By extension, that must include Web sites, as discussed here. So what would make these sites--and others to be developed--perfect, we wondered. Herewith, a few bookseller responses.
"I always want the original ISBN, the original price and the original publisher," says Katie Parker, remainder buyer at the Joseph-Beth Group. Steve Kelly, co-owner of After Words in Ann Arbor, Mich., wants easily accessible book information. "I need all information in one place. Most of the Web sites I've been to are not user friendly. You have to do too much clicking to get to a book."

"I would like a site that gave me the option to download onto an Excel spreadsheet, so I don't have to work online. I would like to know new arrivals within the last month," opines Bob Sommer, remainder buyer at Changing Hands in Tempe, Ariz. Matthew George, remainder buyer for the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, would like "any kind of extra information that wholesalers could provide, such as awards and reviews."
--J.R.

For Jerry Justin, remainder buyer at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., the issue is not computers, per se. "I know how to write code for computers, but I have a thing about people selling me books," he says. "There's something about going to a Web site that bothers me. I'm very visual." By just looking at a picture online, he adds, "I have no idea what price the books are or how old they are. I still prefer talking to people, if I'm going to buy from them. I still believe selling books in a bookstore is about people." Even when Justin spots a book that he wants on the Internet or on an e-mailed remainder list, he calls. "I call up the dealer," he says, "so it's almost like having a sales call."

Similarly, Matthew George, remainder buyer for all six Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee, Wisc., finds "there's no substitute for having the book in your hand, for holding it like your customer would." He buys very little from Web sites, although he makes three-quarters of his purchases using Excel spreadsheets.

The fact that many wholesalers are not set up for ordering on their sites is not a significant impediment for most retailers. Many buyers prefer to use Web sites instead of catalogues, which can quickly become dated. That's the case with Bob Sommer, remainder buyer at Changing Hands in Tempe, Ariz., who probably buys only 10% of his bargain inventory online. "Out of the Web sites for remainder wholesalers," says Sommer, "90% of them are not functional enough to let me order online. But they are excellent for letting me know what's available."

Unlike other technological advances such as e-books or print-on-demand, Web sites are clearly having an effect on the bargain book business. They may represent only 10% of most stores' purchases at present, but as more and more wholesalers go online that number is bound to grow. While Web sites will never replace face-to-face book buying, they certainly have begun making inroads, not just for international accounts, but incrementally on domestic ones. A few years back, e-mail was still a novel way to get remainder lists and now some bargain book buyers do as much as 75% of their ordering that way. Web sites may just be one more channel of distribution for now, but as they continue to grow more user-friendly and information-laden, there's little doubt that they could become one of the biggest channels available.