Monday, April 23rd, 2007
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| Moments In Time II Monday, April 23rd, 2007 |
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Sydney folks:
For Immediate Release The Discordian Society, in line with previous acquisitions, welcomes the arrival of Limbo into the fold. We look forward to giving the place a clean sweep, a good polish and a nice redecoration. We'd like to thank fellow Pope* Benedict XVI for making this opportunity possible. We'd also like to offer the hand of friendship to those tenants of Limbo who chose to stay. We assure all who do wish to stay that they are welcome to continue to reside in the manner to which they are accustomed, however we will also be undertaking a rolling series of improvements over the coming eons, which should see a marked increase in liveability benchmarks. There is no word yet as to what purposes, if any, the Discordian Society plan to put Limbo to, however opinion is divided amongst the Discordian faithful. (* Discordians believe that every man, woman and child is a Pope.) 11 comments | post a comment
Ziggy The Toowong Bagman hits MeFi...
Here's Kim Sweetman demonstrating incredible ignorance when it comes to the Book Trade... Don't miss out on a copy Here's an employee of an Inner-Sydney Genre Fiction Store rebutting it... Harry Potter and the Gouging Bookseller That AU$22 is probably still making a big chain lots of money. Let's pull some numbers out of my butt and have a look. Say the book's RRP is AU$35. Small bookstores which stock, say, 10 copies or less are going to be paying about AU$26 per unit. That gives them a profit of less than $10 a sale. They pay about $350, make about $90 on those 10 copies. If they sell them all. For a small bookshop, that will take a few weeks. If the small bookstore figures it can sell more copies (keep in mind that Woolies and Target and K-Mart are selling them for less than the small bookstore is buying them), it can prolly get a volume discount from the publisher, and end up paying... you guessed it, about $21-$22 per unit. (This is about the discount level that the big bookstore chains operate on, btw. But we're looking at small bookshops here.) So, the small bookseller buys a carton of, say, 20 Harry Potters. They spend $440. They sell them at the same price as Kmart. They make $20 in total on their outlay, if they sell them all--which is not a given. Out of that $20, they pay site rental, wages, insurance, super, etc etc... Hard to make a profit, really. Which is why small bookstore owners always look worried. And always make their own coffee. What about Kmart? They're probably buying them at a 60% discount of RRP, like Amazon. That means that they're probably buying 50,000 units, paying $14 per unit*, selling at $22, making about $400K in sales. The lion's share of the profits goes to the Supermarkets. Harry Potter's real benefit to small bookstores is in the repeat trade of kids who realise that there's more to reading than just one series, and that there's far better out there. Himself, Harry Potter is the book trade's Loss Leader, however you cut it. (* per-unit print cost to the publisher is probably around $12.) 6 comments | post a comment
For Australian Voters:
Dang, I missed his Birthday! |
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