Andrew Crawford: Wagging the long tail
As booksellers' mission statements go, "All Books Available to All" is about as bold as it gets. But since its launch in 2004, The Book Depository (www.bookdepository.co.uk) has rarely been short of ambition.
While chains and supermarkets try to shift higher numbers of fewer titles, TBD takes the opposite approach by selling less of more. It has its eye on what founder and c.e.o. Andrew Crawford calls the "long tail" of books‚the million or more titles that are never likely to trouble the national bestseller lists but which have clear audiences. "For some reason we've cornered the market in books on knitting in Australia," says Mark Thwaite, managing editor, as an example of the niches it has carved out. By themselves, these are tiny markets, but put together TBD estimates the long tail is worth some ¬£300m a year.
Making it look easy It's not the only thing that makes the company different. TBD claims to be the only online bookseller to offer free delivery anywhere in the world. And most surprisingly of all‚for a company that claims to supply any of 1.7 million books within 48 hours‚it keeps a virtually empty warehouse. Instead of holding stock ready to be picked, it waits for customers to place orders before using its e-trading systems to work out the optimal way of sourcing the required books, whether from publisher, distributor, wholesaler or another retailer. Apart from a small number of popular titles, its Gloucester distribution centre stands empty at the start of each working day until the EDI (electronic data interchange) orders it has placed arrive in the mail, to be repacked and posted. "We've become experts in sourcing the books and getting them out fast," Crawford says.
"Anyone who walked into our warehouse would think it's the most simple operation they'd ever seen." But behind it lies a complex logistical system, winner of the Nielsen BookNet Supply Chain Initiative of the Year at The Bookseller's Retail Awards in 2006. It is led by TBD's chief technology officer Emad El Deen El Akehal, who oversees IT and other functions, which are outsourced to his native Egypt. TBD now employs more people in Alexandria than it does in the UK. The Egypt office is also leading TBD's efforts to resurrect books that have fallen out of print and copyright.
Around 150 titles a week are currently being digitised, re-published and printed by on-demand printers Lightning Source. "So much of the world's knowledge is in this twilight zone of 'out-of-print'," Crawford says. "Just because a book doesn't sell thousands of copies a year doesn't mean it doesn't have a market."
Compete or co-operate? While TBD has so far concentrated on mastering its supply chain systems, it is now investing in its website. Thwaite has expanded its reviews, interviews, news and blog sections, and has added a Publisher of the Week feature spotlighting an interesting company, which is often small and independent.
"We're making sure the site has a strong voice, and we want publishers to know that they're really important partners in what we're doing," he says. TBD's obvious rival is Amazon, and both Thwaite and Crawford have spent time working there: Crawford joined after selling his online Bookpages business; he believes there's room for both Amazon and TBD to flourish. "We complement Amazon more than we compete with them," Crawford says. "We're competitive on price on the top 100 books when we have to be, but it's not our main focus."
Instead, TBD's efforts to hoover up sales of the long tail make it more of a threat to specialist or second-hand booksellers. As it both buys and sells books from other retailers, TBD has to walk a fine line between co-operation and competition. But so far its strategy is working. Turnover has risen 11-fold in two years, to £24m in the year to end-June 2007, earning the company a place on the shortlist for the Online Business of the Year at the 2007 Startups Awards. And it has some large-scale plans to continue growing.
Books and only books International expansion is top of the list, with a schedule to launch into North America, Australasia and the Middle East. Another priority is Espressio, a project to help people produce their own books without the high upfront costs normally associated with self-publishing. Customers will upload their manuscript, design a cover online, then pay only for the printing, at rates from £4.99 a copy. The most ambitious project of all is BibDib, a vast store of information about every book ever published, with links to reviews, discussion forums and so on.
"We think of it as a cross between Wikipedia and [film database] IMDb for books," Crawford says. "Amazon and Google can tell you a bit about a book, but we want to become the de facto place to find out about books." TBD also wants to move into trade sales, sourcing long tail titles for booksellers to sell. But wherever it heads in the future, Crawford promises it will stick closely to its mission statement. "We really do want to make books and book information available to everyone. Whatever we do, we're not going to go off and flog kettles in a few years' time‚ we're passionate about books."
