By Eugene Schwartz (ForeWord Magazine) -- Close to three hundred key operations and distribution professionals from among publishers, distributors, wholesalers and booksellers gathered for the second year to confront the many seemingly intractable title maintenance and marketing information challenges that have beset the industry. Perhaps, also, to inspire and encourage each other in their efforts to surmount a deluge of data.

Jeff Abraham, Executive Director of BISG opened the session, and announced that the details of the presentations will be posted on the BISG web site (www.bisg.org) worth a visit by any of our readers concerned with title listings or information management. He also rightly expressed some satisfaction in the continued growth and reach of BISG as a neutral forum and safe place for industry collaboration in the solution of common operational problems.

Ted Hill, President of THA Consulting and BISG business solutions committee Chair, introduced a panel of executives from Books-a-Million, Baker and Taylor, Barnes and Noble, John Wiley and the University of Chicago Press for three hours of hard copy examples of what Hill described as small items that can have a big impact on business outcomes. Or, how to go from billions of bits of data to information and then to knowledge, as Susan Harwood technology VP of Books-a-Million noted. She gave examples of how incomplete or mistaken bar code information can result in titles and inventories either disappearing or re-appearing disguised as other than intended.

In an age of loading bay and cash register scanning by workers who have no reason to know what it is they are scanning, publishers need to pay close attention to quality control in the imprinting of bar codes, ISBNs and EANs. That done, the codes can have limited value in the analytical information flow, unless timely, complete and accurate title data is provided in ONIX format for use throughout the industry.

Now that the new 13 digit ISBN/EAN standard is being implemented throughout the industry, Jeff Abraham, Executive Director of BISG responded to some questioners by confirming that initiatives may be emerging to create item and source (title and author) identifiers that would serve as master ids for the disparate ways in which authors names and book titles are listed and catalogued (a sort of content and creator social security number).

Although one of the smallest industry sectors in size (even at the new scale that BISG has in effect asserted in its new report see Under the Radar above), publishing distribution channels manage more active SKUs than virtually any other retail channel. Of 5,627,889 titles in the B&N data base, 1,462,195 SKUs of the 3,497,347 active titles are in the supply chain according to Joe Gonnella, inventory management and vendor relations VP at Barnes and Noble. In 2004 they sold 1,351,185 discrete items.

Industry capabilities of managing and analyzing data can now quantify the scope of the industrys inefficiencies, such as the high turnover of in and out of print and out of stock titles, and the deadweight (from a business point of view) of marginal titles as well as the sheer volume of the skus that need to be accounted for.

Publishers (and authors) seem to take it for granted that industry distribution channels will somehow find a way to handle all the volume. Yet, when Joe Gonnella revealed that from one year to the next, 260,493 titles accounting for $396,684,500 and 53,763,905 units in sales at B&N had gone out of print or out of stock in the following year, presumably due to absent data, even this audience gasped.

Accuracy of data can affect sales, inventories

These metrics lent considerable weight to the examples of the ways in which each speaker showed how reliable title information, including cover graphics, in the hands of industry data bases, can boost sales, reduce pricing and ordering errors and support effective inventory management. Gonnella gave an example of how adding cover graphics to the data base for 19,222 titles increased their sales by 60%. Yet 63.7% of all titles and 36.4% of active titles in their data base lack title commentary data (including covers).

At the other end of the scale, Don Collins President of Chicago Distribution Services, which handles the lists of forty scholarly presses in addition to the University of Chicago Press, provided some startling, but not surprising, data. For example, of the 30,000 ISBNS they distribute, 10% account for 80% of sales, and 50% account for 1% of sales. As a general rule on average, scholarly presses attain 43% of the sale of their first printings in 90 days, and after three years, inch up to 54%. The cost of compiling this data would have been almost unaffordable ten years ago.

Collins, as well as other speakers also addressed the problems of returns and returns credits the common practice of booksellers and wholesalers applying arbitrary credits to invoices that sometime even exceed the value of the original purchase, and that often come months in advance of the actual return of the books themselves. And the books returned are not necessarily the ones sold to the returnee. To the ears of this reporter, no one seems ready to go beyond hand-wringing and take on this widespread practice of returns abuse, which has been going on for decades.

Jean Srnecz, B&T senior merchandising VP continued to advocate for attention to the nitty-gritty of the business. She compared the worlds of the buyer of yesterday in possession of what the buyer felt was pretty good information, and the buyer of today, awash in data. We are able to compare sales and trends of the same and comparable titles and authors. Yet, unless title data is complete and accurate, these comparisons can be faulty and misleading.

Srnecz introduced the concept of an investment resume. The investment being the stake we have in each title. The resume being the descriptions furnished completeness, spelling, syntax and numerical accuracy: e.g., the BISAC category codes, the completeness of the title, the spelling of the authors name. She noted that in 2,004 resumes for 203,000 new products were added to the B&T data base (90% of them transmitted electronically,) and 1.2 million records were updated at least once.

Not one to narrow the scope of her message, Srnecz issued a call, Sales and marketing people, reclaim your birthright give every new title a complete resume! Her injunction was echoed by Dean Karrell, Wiley VP of trade sales, who gave a series of humorous examples of ways in which the positive intention and impact of a sales effort was reversed by poor or inaccurate information, or lack of information control: wrong discounts, pricing errors, pub dates delayed, and the nightmare for sales people, reconciliation of differences between invoice, returns and statement documents.

Jean and her colleagues see in data more than metrics. It is an art form. Properly managed, it will lift us out of confusion. It inspires metaphors, The Holy Grail is in the Details. Or, as Gonnella put it in his opening remarks, we dont have one devil we have hordes of devils in the details. Accurate data will shine light on darkness. This panel and room full of people who manage numbers for the industry are clearly on a mission to Nervana perhaps a Sysyphean task to recover the names of the lost and the missing titles, according to Gonnella. But the rest of the industry is indeed fortunate that they are so inspired and that they continue to try and scale the glass mountain.