Things change. That's a given in any industry, just as it's also a given that for those involved, the changes seem greatest at any present moment when compared to a halcyon past.

The bargain book trade has clearly not been immune to change. Both to track some of those changes and check in on the current state of affairs, PW caught up with two men whose long histories in the business suggested insights and possibly some uninhibited opinions. Richard Fisher was for more than 20 years an independent sales rep for remainder books on the West Coast, while Joe Fortin has spent 18 years as the sales director of Book Sales, the promotional publisher and remainder wholesaler in New York City. Fisher officially retired the last day of BEA this past June; Fortin will leave Book Sales at the end of this year.

PW approached both men with the same short list of questions, and found that their answers seemed at times to be describing two different industries. But these disparities reflect an industry large enough to have aspects that intersect but work differently in the marketplace.

Richard Fisher started in the book business in 1964 as the manager of a Womrath's in Hoboken, N.J. At the time, Womrath's was New Jersey's largest book retailer, and Fisher bought both new titles and some remainders for his location. By 1972, he was the showroom manager for A&W Books in Manhattan, assembling remainder and promotional assortments for department stores. Here he experienced the first truism he registered in the bargain trade: anything good went quickly out of stock, never to be seen again. In 1984 Fisher moved to Berkeley, Calif., to work for the remainder wholesaler Western Books. He soon left to go out on his own as a sales rep whose bag contained a few small lines of mostly regional books. New York contacts suggested he help sell remainders, and from there his course was set. For the next 20 years he sold only remainders for such companies as Daedalus Books, Texas Bookman and Powell's Wholesale.

Joe Fortin entered the bargain business after years on the trade side. At Macmillan in the 1970s, he oversaw the promotion of such blockbusters as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. As a director of special sales at Macmillan and, later, Fodor's, the sale of remainders and a few hurt skids fell under his job description almost by default. When Fortin came to the bargain trade, he was involved mostly with promotional publishers and remainders—an important but secondary part of what he did. Since 1990, he has been at Book Sales, a company that—especially since the demise of Outlet Books as a competitor—took the lead in promotional publishing during the 1990s.

Fortin reports that the first major change he adjusted to in the bargain market had to do with pricing. The complicated calculations taking into account author advances, editorial, plant operations, paper, printing and binding were collapsed into simpler prerequisites based on cost. “The margins were different,” he says. “You bought the product and determined a price.”

For Fisher, pricing structures at A&W came as a shock. Books were selling for between 20¢ and $1 and, not surprisingly, “The books I was handed were so inferior to what I had been able to buy for the store.” He recalls a small shock wave around 1972 when Mel Shapiro, who would become Fortin's boss at Book Sales, had the audacity to price a previous hardcover bestseller at $2.98. But it sold.

Of the market's many changes, Fisher reports more seismic shifts than Fortin. But Fisher has been in the field, where retail markets have radically altered. “Most of the stores I sold to over the past 24 years are gone,” he says. Book Sales' core business of promotional publishing has been much more stable. “When I entered the business, we were doing The Complete Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and a lot of art instruction books. Those books remain in print.” When necessary, they change with the times. Book Sales' newest art instructional books are more customer friendly, with interior spirals that lie flat, but the content does not differ radically from books 20 years older. And, of course, topics that reflect changing tastes have come and gone.

As technology has made promotional books almost indistinguishable from trade titles, Fisher has seen less resistance to them from customers who once wanted only the top end of trade remainders.

Any discussion of industry change has to consider the effect of chains on book retailing, and here the longevity of both Fortin and Fisher provides insights. “We always sold to chains,” says Fortin. “There was Pickwick and Doubleday, Lauriats, Kroch's and Brentano's, B.Dalton and Walden's. They helped us determine print runs [for promotional titles.] Now there are Borders and Barnes & Noble. The rise of chains has made our job a lot easier. We've been able to forecast print quantities where the majority of the first printing is allocated throughout the chain groups and trade wholesalers.”

Fisher says the rapid expansion of the remainder industry in the 1970s allowed “many of us to feed at that table for a long time. By the early '80s [chains] began to put many smaller independents out of business, but the total number of independents was still growing. The rise of the superstores changed all that, and independents began closing faster than they opened.” He also saw his business shrink in the 1990s due to the Internet: “Used bookstores began to disappear. In the early '90s they had been half my customers.”

Fortin voices his share of doom and gloom over the developing situation. “The American Booksellers Association [ABA] flourished in the 1990s; they had 8,000 members.” That figure is currently around 1,500. But here he sees the Internet as a positive force, bringing the instant sale of just about any book to any customer 24 hours a day.

Both men also see positive changes in the industry. Fisher is enthusiastic about the merchandise itself. “The quality of the books on most sale tables is frequently as high as the frontlist stock surrounding them. This gives independents one area of the store where they can really differentiate themselves from the chains.” But even this glut of quality books, fueled by the number of hurts entering the market, has a downside. “The supply of good books exceeds the demand, and with limited space, spectacular books are driving really good books off the tables, and many good books are not being seen at all.” He adds, “There is a glut of unsalable merchandise building up around the industry.”

Fortin has a more nuts-and-bolts answer to what hasn't changed. Pricing, he says, is too low. “Have you noticed that we are still selling remainder fiction at $6.98 and mass market paperbacks of the same caliber go for $7.99 and $9.99?”—this from the departing sales director of the company that shocked the industry with the $2.98 novel 30 years ago.