Ask a typical manufacturer what his returns percentage is and he'll probably tell you his profit return on sales. Ask a publisher and he'll seethe about the perecentage of books sent back to his warehouse by retailers.

I'm not sure which publisher uttered these famous words when conducting a visitor round his warehouse and seeing a parcel of books ready for despatch:

'Gone today, here tomorrow.'

Perhaps someone can enlighten me as the who and the when. I'm not sure the official histories of publishing identify the first person to say to a bookseller:'I know you don't think you can sell a dozen but take them anyway and, if you're right, I'll take back the unsolds and give you full credit.' Whoever it was unleashed a trade practice which not only decimates publishers' and booksellers' margins but it eats up retail space, diminishes the need for buying and selling skills, and doesn't do the environment much good either.

In Australia a few years ago, several publishers introduced backlist firm sale. This seems to be working fine and there is now a movement in the UK to do the same which I applaud. I also applaud Bloomsbury's returns limit on Harry Potter.

But what saddens me is that we seem to make no progress on the total elimination of returns. One of the arguments for the abandonment of retail price maintenance was that it would allow retailers to remainder without the absurdity of sending books back to the publisher, the publisher shipping them to a remainder merchant and the bookseller then buying the books back at remainder price for sale on the 'cheap' table. I ran an experiment with Waterstone's in the early 1990s where they were granted an extra couple of points of discount in exchange for no returns (except damaged books). It worked pretty well except that change of management and ownership meant it was discontinued. Why not try it again? We have nothing to lose except tons of credit notes, complexity, carbon dioxide and lazy buyers.