I rather liked this cartoon from the New Yorker.

In the 1990s when I worked at Reed International Books my office was in the spectacular art deco Michelin House building in Fulham Road. Apart from the publishing businesses, the building also housed (and still does) several other businesses. When we first moved in there was a deal with the Conran Shop whereby our employees got a discount at the shop and theirs got a discount on our books. Terence Conran rapidly realised he was getting the worse end of the deal and cancelled it. On the first floor was the glamorous Bibendum restaurant with a less formal Oyster Bar on the ground floor. Outside there is a fishmonger on the left and a florist on the right. It transpired that by far the most profitable and most stable of all the businesses was the florist which exceeded its budgets through the booms and busts of the economic cycle and all the other vagaries of retailing. Is there a lesson?

In those days the production director of the trade division (Heinemann, Secker, Methuen etc) was Peter Kilborn. He convinced me of a publishing rule which I now know to be immutable. If you want a thorough and sensible analysis of any publishing-related problem (or maybe any problem at all) ask your production director. Anyway, since then he has worked constantly in the book trade and is now head of the Book Industry Communications organisation which we all know as BIC. BIC is the unsung hero of the book trade and it has been responsible for the successful implementation of many of the most significant industry initiatives. He has been following a number of the debates on this blog and is convinced that solutions lie in improving efficiencies rather than trading insults. I agree. He sent this contribution and I hope that this might move the debate from the sterility of differential discounts to the real gains to be made from technological investment and implementation.

Richard – and Macmillan Distribution - have long been supporters of electronic trading and I'm grateful to him for the offer of a guest blog on e-commerce and BIC’s e4books campaign.

As an industry we have a good record of exploiting new technologies. Which publisher, small or large, doesn’t use email or sell from a web site or use desktop publishing or use computerised accounting? Why then does supply chain e-commerce provoke so much hostile attention? Why are telephoned orders and paper invoices the sacred cows of our industry?

For instance, readers may be interested to look at Simon Edwards’s article in last week’s Publishing News (I cannot link to the article direct because the archive search isn't working properly - ed) about the costs and complexities of running a telephone hotline. This is a huge expense for distributors, both in terms of personnel as well as disruption to working patterns, yet they still feel the need to offer them for fear of upsetting both booksellers and their third party clients. And one of the biggest users of telephone hotlines is also the bookselling chain which has put the most resource into persuading its suppliers to trade electronically!

Nielsen’s recent decision to stop sending out thousands of Teleorders by fax or post – to publishers who may or may not even still exist – and set up an order collection web site instead has met with a mixed reaction. This has to be a step in the right direction but sadly Nielsen can do little to persuade the thousands of publishers who still keep title records and product information in manual (even hand-written) form to submit it electronically.

There are many similar examples of old practice which give our trade a much higher than necessary cost base and of course lower profits. As an industry, we need a much better understanding of what the real cost is of doing business inefficiently - and how easily this cost can get neglected when it comes to negotiating booksellers’ discounts or the terms under which distributors contract with their third party client publishers. For example, it is perfectly possible for one bookseller who trades electronically, returns very little and is altogether a model customer to get lower discounts than a bookseller who orders on paper, pays late and has high returns. Armed with some cost-to-serve analysis and a willingness to question the way we do business, much could be done to make the book trade more efficient, more profitable and more resilient.