However, a worrying trend is emerging. Whilst the ‘newcomers’ to the book trade, such as Amazon, are grasping the concept of POD quite well and, in fact, revelling in it as it fits exactly their ‘just in time’ attitude to stock management, the ‘old school’ – Gardners in particular regard POD as merely an alternative source of titles.

A particular recent event demonstrates this. One of our authors, having put in an immense amount of effort, persuaded dozens of individual branches of Waterstones to stock her book – produced by us in POD format. Waterstones ordering policy requires all product to be sourced via their wholesalers so a series of orders hit Gardners, who responded by consolidating their Waterstone orders to us and adding on some more copies ‘for good measure’. Whilst sales were good, indeed, probably exceeding the author’s expectations, there were still many unsold copies on Waterstone’s shelves following the Christmas Book Buying Frenzy and before the New Year New Titles (due to over-ordering by the branches)
so these went back to Gardners.

Despite our ‘no returns on POD’ agreement with Gardners they made a serious attempt to persuade us to take back the bulk of this ‘overstock’ and it took some serious negotiating to persuade them otherwise.

So, who is at fault here? Should the author be blamed for enthusiastic promotion? Should the various Booksellers be blamed for wanting to provide choice for their customers? Should the wholesaler be blamed for making bad stock management decisions?

I think the real culprit here is the delivery medium itself – the book. Even in the early days of AOnL, I disliked the concept of sitting at a computer to read a book. I campaigned vigorously on the side of the universally convenient paperback novel but eventually common sense prevailed, particularly with my proofreading work, and I became accustomed to reading offscreen. I now use a combination of my mobile phone and laptop to store (and edit) the books and aside from a somewhat limited supply of electronic material for personal enjoyment reading, I can’t imagine needing to read a paper book again. Real life continues though, and sadly it is unlikely to change dramatically in the remaining twilight years of my life but at least I’ll be able to keep myself warm in front of an open fireplace burning……..books?