Vulture.com: picking the bones of campus booksellers

Beleagured campus booksellers should not look to publishers for help as Internet booksellers consume their core market, David Taylor of Swotbooks warned delegates at the APSBG. A self-confessed terrestrial bookseller turned vulture, Mr Taylor extolled the virtues of academic bookselling online and warned that many more campus outlets faced closure within the next 18 months.

Shifting metaphors, he maintained that "the campus bookshop model is holed below the waterline in its current form, and I believe that a number will close in the next 12 to 18 months. The loss of the Net Book Agreement, which opened the floodgates to discounting, started the rot. Now, the emergence of an alternative source of supply via the Internet is the final straw.

"Publishers will not support the campus model with extra discounts. If anything, they will reduce discounts. Internet booksellers will capture 10% of the paper textbook market within two years." The financial realities, according to Mr Taylor, were that a shift in textbook sales of between 5% and 10% would push many campus shops into loss and that a loss of margin of 3%-plus would do the same.

His belief in the online model stemmed from its simplicity, its low operational costs, its niche offering backed up by the ability to widen the offer with little extra investment, and the fact that the retailer did not have to handle the books—"that's the expensive bit, you get others to do that for you" (Swotbooks uses wholesaler Gardners). The golden rule was "outsource everything".

For the student market, Mr Taylor argued that "price, price, price, beat everyone" was central to capturing market share. "Students are increasingly in debt, textbooks are seen as expensive. Internet bookselling enables cost to be taken out and therefore enables discounts to be given to the customers. And students are Internet savvy."

Establishing market presence is very expensive for e-tailers, but Swotbooks.com had, through its affiliation with the Universities Central Administration System, gained brand profile comparatively painlessly, avoiding a huge marketing drain on the fledgling company's bottom line. Mr Taylor did recognise that the dotcom vultures themselves would be fighting to survive in a changing climate, with a proliferation of the letter "e" in front of everything. While he comforted himself, and his audience, with the thought that "The paper textbook will continue to be the dominant medium for many years", he also conceded that "e-books and e-chapters (bits of books supplied electronically in response to customer demand) will become a fundamental part of the Internet bookseller's offer. E-books will be priced at up to 50% below the paper equivalent."

Dotcom vulture he may be, but Mr Taylor was on-side with terrestrial booksellers in asserting that, even in this brave new "e" world, "Publishers will realise that they still need booksellers to sell this product." However, he then ruined this brief expression of solidarity by declaring that "Online booksellers are the natural venue for selling e-books and e-chapters."

That Mr Taylor left with his scalp and knee-caps intact was as much a reflection of the growing resignation among the campus booksellers to the financial realities they face as to their innate good manners.