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A Global Bookseller Forum
by Bob Nardini, Senior Vice President & Head Bibliographer

If booksellers from fifteen countries spent a day together in a room what would they talk about? YBP was one of the booksellers who spent a recent day in a room in Heidelberg, Germany, home of Springer, whose room it was and whose idea it had been to find out what the booksellers would say.

Global industry trends, captured by marker, card, pin, and easel.

Some of these twenty-two booksellers sold to libraries, some sold to stores; others sold to both. Some also sold journals. Not too many of the companies at what Springer called the Global Bookseller Forum would be familiar names to North American librarians: YBP and Blackwell's, Rittenhouse, and maybe Dawson. Some of the other citizens of the bookselling world gathered that August day in Heidelberg, though, were Lavoisier S.A.S. (France); Maruzen and Kinokuniya (Japan); Solochek Libros SL (Spain); International Publishing Service (Poland); Huber & Lang (Switzerland); Houtschild International Booksellers (Netherlands); plus booksellers from Germany, India, Denmark, Italy, Greece, Norway, and Jordan.

Some were competitors. Others had never heard of one another. Two things in common for all, though: everyone was a customer of Springer, and everyone had some English, the currency of the meeting. Even native German speakers, when talking to one another, spoke English.

Heidelberg is a city of about 135,000 in southwestern Germany. It's under an hour's drive south from Frankfurt, whose airport was the point of entry to the country for most of the booksellers. Their room was a light-flooded conference room on the fourth floor of Springer's headquarters--about halfway to the top, that is--a geometrically-shaped building of concrete, glass, and steel on the edge of the scientific campus of the University of Heidelberg, an institution founded in the fourteenth century whose older buildings are in the medieval city center, several miles away. Booksellers who took breaks outdoors on the balcony adjoining the meeting room could see the city and the River Neckar, which flows through Heidelberg before joining the Rhine at a nearby point to the west. Breaks and work alike were fueled by coffee, tea, juice, water, fruit, bread, cheese, cookies, and, from tin boxes placed throughout the room, gummi bears.

Booksellers at work.

Assigned seats at rectangular tables for six or seven made everyone in the larger group also part of a smaller group. The tables were arranged like spokes in the slightly semi-circular room, which was also a crowded room. Booksellers who leaned back in their chairs were likely to make contact with the chair of the bookseller behind them, seated at the adjoining table or spoke. A moderator led the group all day in structured discussion. The idea was to identify market trends. A recorder for each group wrote down in red or black marker the table's ideas on white cards of a size a little larger than what you would buy from Hallmark. The cards were then pinned in rows to easels, for comparison and discussion among tables; then the easels were photographed with a digital camera, the shots imported into a PowerPoint file, and the file loaded onto flash drives for everyone to take home.

A few of the trends captured by marker, card, easel, camera, PowerPoint, and flash drive were:

Budget forcing changing focus

Libraries struggling w/ their future roles

Collaborative Trend of Libraries

Even twenty-two booksellers from fifteen countries who spend an entire day together in a room, then, won't necessarily identify market trends that most everyone didn't know anyway.

Or, that don't seem more like questions than trends:

Google-Amazon Digitization: Implications?

Library a Store of Info? Or a Place to Process Info?

How to stay Relevant? As a Library Supplier

The room did agree that eBooks would become more important than they have been to date and some booksellers believe the shift is about to happen quickly. What would be the role of traditional booksellers? Would there be one? What kind of business model would work? Can combinations of print books and eBooks be sold? How can eBooks be sold to library consortia? Does the idea of "book" break down when users access content across an electronic collection?

More booksellers at work. Bob Nardini, YBP, foreground; Andrew Hutchings, Blackwell’s, background; James Chin, Springer, center.

More questions, once more, than answers. But, everyone reminded Springer of the importance, even in a hi-tech world that nobody has quite figured out as yet, of good customer service. Publishers should receive and fill orders efficiently, hire staff who understand the business, and give booksellers accurate and timely information.

Agreement beyond these basics was harder to find. What would be timely? Twelve months ahead of a book's publication, said the Japanese. No, four months would be enough, said the British and Americans. What kind of price? Give us a single world price in dollars said one bookseller. No, said others, we need a price in euros and a price in dollars.

Maintain the quality of the Springer imprint and keep prices reasonable. Here booksellers agreed. Springer is not only a global company, publishing in 19 countries--on hand from Springer were sales representatives from offices in London, New York, New Delhi, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, not to mention Heidelberg, and, thanks to the 2004 merger of Springer with its former Dutch competitor, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht-- but speaking for the publishing business, a very large company, with 1,500 journals, 5,000 new English or German books each year, a backlist of 40,000 titles, and databases and other online services; also, business lines not aimed at libraries at all. Librarians are suspicious of large companies. Don't risk the Springer reputation. We need it to sell your books.

Booksellers on break.

An evening social event preceded the meeting day, held in a large tent erected in Springer's backyard. For booksellers and local Springer staff too--over one hundred people in all--a barbecue was on. That meant, in Germany, pork cutlets grilled over fire with a choice of sauces, chicken on skewers, fried shrimp, roast corn and potatoes, salads, an array of appetizers, and anyone's beverage of choice.

Booksellers talked to other booksellers, whether friends, competitors, or strangers from across the world. Also they talked with physics editors, math editors, and other members of the Springer staff. Chances to see more than one's own slice of the book business don't come often. It was a convivial combination. Near the end of the night everyone stopped to applaud a Japanese bookseller who was turning handstands on the lawn, just beyond the edge of Springer's tent.

In following days, most of the booksellers shared return rides to Frankfurt. In one cab a bookseller from Thessaloniki, Greece, who wore a shirt from Hawaii, shared the ride with an American who had never been to Hawaii. Business in Greece was very good the past several years, thanks to special money for higher education after the country's entry into the European Union. But as new companies have decided to go after the same money, competition is now stiffer. Five or six booksellers try for the business of the universities in Greece. Discounts are up. Some vendors have failed. The special EU money will end in another year or two anyway. Then what? "The problems are always the same," said the Greek, and his fellow Frankfurt-bound passenger from America understood.

Springer time was over and so a cell call taken in the cab was not conducted in English. "It's all Greek to you," said the Greek when the call was done. Which it had been, although the business questions, whatever they were, would probably, again, have been familiar ones to the American.

American booksellers don't live only in America. One of Springer's guests had grown up in Los Angeles and had spent his freshman year long ago at the University of Oregon. There he had been on the football team for the year before transferring for the rest of his undergraduate career to the University of California, San Diego, where he earned a B.S. in biochemistry before next earning a Ph.D. in literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "I can understand the books I sell, anyway," he says. Today he sells them in Spain, for his own company, one based in Madrid, the city his wife is from. For fun he plays drums in a group called Memphis, which has a few bookings each month in Madrid clubs, where the group's three Spanish singers perform sixties and seventies favorites, such as Ricky Nelson hits, in English. "Years ago, if you had asked me," he said, "I never would have dreamed this life."

Most of the booksellers who found themselves together that day in a room in Germany would probably have said the same thing.

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