BilmBlog500

So what did it mean to have Amazon's "buy" buttons removed for certain Macmillan titles? I could do a really thorough Nielsen Bookscan research project and check 62 things, but I do have a day job so I'm limiting the investigation to books by my clients which I'd be checking anyway, though drilling down a little further into the numbers than I might do for just my ordinary Wednesday report card check. When we looked over the Bookscan #s for Week #4 ending January 31, all of us at JABberwocky cried, because it was a kind of depressing week all the way around. Numbers on most things were down. And that had really nothing to do with the Macmillan/Amazon dispute. That started at the very end of the week, and since Bookscan gets the figures based on when books shipped, pretty much the entire effect of the disput would be seen in Week #5. And overall, Week #5 was a stronger week for the JABberwocky list than week #4 was. So for the week when the full impact would h...

Eighteen months ago, I didn't care so much about what the Adult Fiction Boxed Set bestseller list looked like on Nielsen Bookscan. And then last year, the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse 7-copy boxed set became a stunning phenomenon, joined this year by an 8-copy version , and then by a boxed set of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy . So suffice to say I've suddenly become much more interested in that sub-category of the bestseller list. The Sookie sets again did very well, #1 on the adult boxed set chart. Not as big a thing as last year when True Blood went on the air in September, vs. this year when people have been buying Sookie in large quantity for a full year, but still a very very good holiday for the boxes. I wasn't quite sure what to expect with the Mistborn set, so I was very pleased to see it settle in as the #7 adult set for most of the holiday season, and then sneaking up higher in the final weeks. It's the sales trends in those final weeks ...

So Barnes & Noble reported a disappointing holiday season , with same store sales dropping 5.4%. Their expectation had been for a smaller drop of 1-3%, and as a result they have downgraded their earnings expectations. Nielsen Bookscan reported a 3% drop in unit sales at their reporting outlets, with most of the drop in adult non-fiction, and adult fiction down just 1%. In this environment I'll be curious to see what Borders reports, which I believe is scheduled for the latter half of next week. I did think Borders was better-positioned than B&N was, at least as far as my little JABberwocky corner of the world was concerned, but Borders also had a steeper uphill climb because of their challenges the past two years.

For those people who like to slam Bookscan for tracking "only" 70 or 75% of the market, I have some bad news. Come the New Year, they've added BJ's Wholesale Club, Meijer, and the Paradies Shops to their reporting outlets. BJ's I think most people are at least familiar with, but if not, they're the 3rd biggest warehouse club after Costco and Sam's, and they've certainly been adding more and more NYC outlets in recent years, though none real convenient for me. Meijer, I have fond memories of from my college days in Ann Arbor. Back then they were Meijer's Thrifty Acres, which was and still is an early version of a Walmart Supercenter with groceries and hard goods all under one roof. I never shopped at one when I was in college because they were on the outskirts of town, but the name still brings fond memories. I did pop in to one outside of Indianapolis to see what the book department was like, and in the same power center as a B&N. So the ch...