The Bookseller.com

20th July 2008

Andrew Crawford is m.d. of online retailer The Book Depository.

Double figures

03.01.08

This Christmas marked a decade of internet bookselling in the UK. Back in 1997, Amazon.co.uk didn't exist. Its predecessors, Bookpages (later taken over by Amazon) and the Internet Bookshop (acquired by W H Smith), were together shipping 1,500 books each day. Who could have guessed that, 10 years later, around 250,000 books a day would be shipped by UK online booksellers of all shapes and sizes? At The Book Depository, we dispatched 40,000 packages on our peak day (and night) this Christmas. Ten years ago, geeks like us were only selling computer-programming titles; now we are happily packing Kylie calendars.

The major booksellers and publishers—who ignored the internet a decade ago—are now refocusing their online efforts. But it is still early days for the net; the landscape will be unrecognisable in another decade.

Planning is crucial for both "bricks" and "clicks" sellers. Like typical high street shops, web vendors have to start preparing for Christmas in January. We moved to a larger distribution centre, installed new servers, trained more staff, and worked with publishers and distributors to streamline our supply chain. All this just to keep our heads above water in the run-up to Christmas. Not getting it right could destroy our reputation; it's critical that everything goes like clockwork.

No matter what you do, things still go wrong: servers fall over, staff get sick and customers panic. Then there are issues beyond your control: the Royal Mail strikes earlier in the year and the apparent credit crunch did not fill us with confidence. We were fully expecting a postal walkout, but thankfully that did not happen. We came out of the season relatively unscathed and another year wiser.

Fortunately, The Book Depository is not as seasonally led as most retailers. We focus on the long tail of odd and non-core titles. The million books we sold during the 2007 festive period comprised 400,000 unique titles, and our bestseller was Irène Némirovsky's masterpiece David Golder, not a celebrity biography. Very few of the industry's top 100 books were actually written by their so-called authors, but we managed to push some great literature in December, and we fulfilled gift orders from as far afield as Hawaii and Korea.

Of course, if some people have their way, in 10 years from now you won't have to worry about distribution centres. An online transaction to your e-reader delivered at 00:01 a.m. on the 25th December will be all there is to it. That might be "convenient", but I am sure many people still prefer to find a  beautifully gift-wrapped tome in their Christmas stockings. I certainly do.

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