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Doubleday Beefs Up Nonmember Site
Steven M. Zeitchik -- 2/28/00

For the first time in its history, Doubleday Direct is selling books without requiring club membership. Through CheapReads.com, casual browsers can buy books without any further obligation. Several hundred titles are currently offered across a range of categories, including fiction, health, religion, parenting and science fiction.

The books are sold at reduced prices, but Doubleday Direct said that d s not indicate lower quality. "These are books that were worthy of us at one point in time," explained Doubleday Interactive CEO Seth Radwell, who is administering the Web strategy for all Bertelsmann book clubs. He explained that these are either titles remaindered by publishers or books for which Doubleday Direct owns direct-marketing rights.

Book clubs have long eschewed a non-member model because they thought it undermined their ability to market directly to consumers. That this precedent would be broken testifies to how online bookselling has changed the marketing climate. "This serves two strategic purposes," Radwell said. "It's a way to get new potential readers and a way for us to monetize inventory that we have."

As a Web strategist, Radwell has overseen other Net programs. He told PW he's looking to ramp up banner advertising throughout the Net to draw traffic to the clubs and also plans to launch an affiliate program in the next two months. "The book club model and the Net are perfect," he noted. "Until now, book clubs have been a marketing tool. On the Internet they could truly become clubs, by facilitating member-to-member communications."

Among the new marketing possibilities are those created by Bertelsmann's investment in Barnes&Noble.com. The two companies have initiated a cross-promotion program that runs in two directions. If customers search for titles on a Doubleday site that the clubs don't carry, they will be referred to BN.com. Conversely, if customers order a baseline number of books from BN.com, they will receive e-mail ads from comparable clubs. "We've just been experimenting with it, but it could be huge," said Radwell.
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