THE FOLLOWING STORY FROM THE BOOKSELLER HAS NZ BOOKSELLERS WORRIED

Penguin has relaunched its website after a year of qualitative and quantitative research. The publisher worked with readers, watching how they used the site, and quizzing them on what they expected from it.

"Some of it was quite soul-destroying stuff," said online marketing director AnnaRafferty. "We've stopped benchmarking ourselves against other publisher websites. What is really interesting for us is putting ourselves against other online destinations."
The Penguin site, at http://www.penguin.co.uk/, now features a completely new look, a new navigation and search system, and a "look inside" widget allowing readers to see short extracts from certain titles. "Our research told us that readers expect to be able to read a sample of a title," said Rafferty.Podcasts and author features on offer have been made much more prominent, as has the Penguin blog, and a new section looking at which Penguin titles celebrities are reading—"Penguin Favourites"—has been added. "We have been collecting [mentions of Penguin titles] from the media," said Rafferty. "We thought people would be interested—they are going to want to know what Gordon Brown's favourite book is."

The Penguin website gets between 250,000 and 300,000 unique visitors per month with over two million visitors last year. Online sales volumes and revenue were up 46% and 22% respectively in the first half of 2007. Rafferty is interested in introducing more special editions of titles for the website, but added that the site would never discount titles by more than 25%. "This will never be a price point website," she said. "We will discount for certain titles when it is appropriate but this will never be by more than 25%."

The Penguin blog gets about 5000 visits per week, while Penguin's e-newsletter goes out to over 80,000 opt-in subscribers."We are now talking to readers and saying ‘this is what we've done, now what next?'" she said. "The key thing is that this is the birth of the site; now we will grow and develop it."

Seven indie booksellers have already written to Bookman Beattie concerned that this Penguin UK direct selling initiative might be copied by Penguin NZ.

While another put it this way:

I Love this, a publisher who avows that they will never discount titles sold to the public by more than 25%!!
Fantastic.

They say not a price point website..?

Why would booksellers want to list Penguin titles on their own sites in competition to the publisher?

Penguin use a retailers profit margin to beef up their wholesale price and hopefully make more gross profit in the process.
Just as bookshop buyers at present have to guage a book offered as being an option for the chains to discount and factor that into their ordering, they will now have to ask the question as to whether the publisher will discount the retail price of the title offered on their own website.
Amazon will never open a retail store to compete with booksellers as it is another set of business skills.yet retailers and publishers see the need to compete with Amazon with their own 'token' websites.
A publisher such as Penguin is better able to compete with 'exclusive' books on their own website, and measure the success of sales.

Retail booksellers will rarely have 'exclusive' books to sell but feel they must compete with special discount offers to satisfy the expectations of consumers.
It is a dangerous trend to increase expectations of web consumers that they will always get it cheaper on the web rather than in a book store.