From Publishers Weekly:
Is it just me, or are damages out of control lately? By damages I mean the multiples of unsalable books that arrive from publishers and distributors alike—ones that are dinged and dented, with pages folded and jacket covers torn. If you don’t regularly work in the receiving part of a bookstore, then you may not be aware of just how much time and inventory is lost in the shipping and delivery process.
Here’s a summary of a Monday at my shop in a recent week: We received a total of 16 boxes of books from five publishers and one distributor. Two boxes were full cases of a book for an author school visit in the week. The others contained a mixture of new releases and backlist orders, as well as a couple of mixed-copy seasonal displays. In addition, our mail carrier brought three small boxes of ARCs and a couple of those giant envelope-type packages created by sealing two squares of cardboard on four sides around a book or two with an inch or two of adhesive. (For the record, if terrorists or spies ever want to smuggle sensitive material into the U.S. via our postal service, these hermetically sealed cardboard packages are clearly the most tamper-proof method, for it takes our staff a good 20 minutes, a case cutter, and a pair of shears to pry a corner of one open in order to liberate the single title inside.)
But let’s get back to the Monday box pile. Of the 16 boxes, nine cartons contained damaged titles. One entire case of paperbacks (in an undamaged carton) for the author event were unusable. Three other boxes each had eight or nine books with ripped jackets and badly dented covers. In our box from the distributor—in which the books were stacked on a cardboard base and then wrapped with plastic to prevent shifting inside the box—all four novelty books had crushed spines or ripped covers. Granted, board books with cutouts on the cover are tough to stack, but they can be layered with early readers or even packing paper to prevent damage—and shipping books, after all, is the distributor’s job. Four other boxes, all new releases, were unusable. Of course, given the Monday delivery, this meant that our Tuesday new-releases display was going to look a little anemic.
. . . .
Each of these publishers has a different method for us to report damages: some require emails, some require phone calls, and some request photographic evidence. It can take days to receive responses to these reports, during which time we must either store the damaged books, waiting for instructions or a call tag, or repack them and wait for UPS to return to pick them up. Then all of those titles must be credited, reordered, and we begin again, hoping as we wield our case cutters that the new boxes will contain undamaged merchandise to sell. All of that time is on the clock—increasing payroll for booksellers in managing the losses and tying up the customer service departments of our publishers, who are simply logging lost potential on phone calls rather than discussing new releases and placing backlist orders.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
PG will note that, although most reading in his household is done with ebooks, occasionally, Mrs. PG will order a hardcopy via Amazon. PG doesn’t recall any book arriving from Amazon in anything other than pristine condition, lately inside a light, generously-padded plastic envelope.
The OP raises the possibility in PG’s jaundiced mind that some book distributors are juicing their profits by reselling damaged books returned for credit instead of pulping or otherwise destroying the returned books.
I’ve seen substantial decline in the quality of packing from Amazon. No damage yet, but over-size boxes with a twist of crumpled paper that leave stuff rattling around are the rule now. Maybe AMZN is triangulating on the optimum of packing v damaged goods costs. If AMZN is, I don’t like it. The optimum will shade toward damaged goods because some folks swallow the damage without complaints.
As for books, I have no idea. I’m too cheap to buy paper books from Amazon when I can get them for a fraction of the price from the used book outlets. They are all packed well enough. As for books packed between sheets of sticky cardboard, a sharp jack knife works fine.
How the heck are people running a bookstore without any box-cutters?
I mean, sheesh, the things are almost as cheap as shears. Loading the replacement blades is a pain, but a bookshop doesn’t put nearly as much wear on a boxcutter as a grocery store does.
My guess is that the “case cutter” mentioned in the piece is what I could call a “box cutter,” but I’m not sure. But the claim that it took twenty minutes to cut open a box is a clear sign that this piece is hyperbole. I expect there really were some damaged books, but the style of the piece makes it impossible to judge how prevalent the problem is.
Mebbe they didn’t have a box cutter and had to gnaw the box open.
I’ve found that in extremis, a key can be a seviceable tape cutter. Wouldn’t want to do it too often but it beats wasting 20 minutes. Life is short.
Keys don’t work well on sticky cardboard packaging. Many obstacles in life can be overcome with a sharp jack knife. I’ve never found anything better in my pocket than a real Case knife honed on a hard Arkansas stone. But I agree with Richard; the piece is hyperbole.
I noticed the change when it happened, and I went into the order’s page looking for the button to “Leave Packaging Review” — something like that — and the “Packaging Review” button was gone.
Before then, there was always a button to leave a review on the packaging.
They abandoned the button when they stopped caring about shipping.
They abandoned the button when they stopped caring about shipping.
Meanwhile, Amazon is spending billions to implement one day shipping and set up their own fleet of trucks and planes.
Suggests they’re not happy relying on their partners, doesn’t it? Maybe they got tired of dealing with USPS.
I’ve had the same experience as many above. Books ordered for gifts arrive with corners bashed after being dumped into a book. My wife and I have about given up ordering books from Amazon for this reason.
Damaged books? A minor concern. After all, they’ve been curated.
eBooks don’t suffer damage in shipping.
Just sayin’… 😉
You can’t sell e-books to people at book signings.
I’m SURE – insert madly insane giggling here – that the publisher FULLY takes the financial hit for the unusable books, rather than further reducing the author’s take.
I kid, I kid.
Think about it. The publisher gets the credit from the distributor, but counts that as a returned book (unsold). The author is dinged for the return, and that reduces further their pitiful share of the money.
Why should the author be penalized for the printer/distributor/mailer mistake of insufficiently protecting the product? Yet, I would bet they are.
This leaves even less incentive for the publishers to hold their distribution chain to account.
Why should the author be penalized for the printer/distributor/mailer mistake of insufficiently protecting the product?
He’s not. The author’s contract says royalties are paid on sales.
My experiences with Amazon are completely different. Sure the books I order for myself come undamaged. But the author copies I buy from Amazon to resell at events are a completely different matter. Createspace was normally good. KDP Print has major shipping issues. Many writers I know have had the same experience. An order of 20 books is split into six different packages. Many of them a flimsy envelope lined with bubblewrap. The books come bent, battered and abused. Unsaleable as new. And their shipping is slow as molasses in winter. So the books arrive just before an event and the choice is to sell them as is, at a discount or return them and not have enough for the event. This has been happening all year long. I’ve complained. Others have complained to Amazon as well. Still, they don’t seem to be pulling their act together. I understand they’re trying to get things out quickly, but they have a lot to work on in the author end of their shipping.
Amazon book orders used to be pristine, but for me nearly every book order in the last three years has had damage.
Whereas they used to shrink wrap them to a piece of cardboard the size of the box so it wouldn’t slide around, these days they seem to just throw them loose into whatever oversized box is around. They are banged up, pages bent, etc. Usually , it is minor enough, I’m not willing to hassle with reporting it for replacement, but it is continually annoying.
I’ve actually stopped ordering books from Amazon, because 7 of the last 10 have arrived in damaged condition. Don’t have this problem with any other products from the big A (and I buy a lot of stuff from them), and they are great about returns (as convenient as can possibly be expected, and replacements arrive FAST, even w/o Prime), but it got to be a real pain, constantly sending books back.
That sounds like most of the stuff that I’ve been getting the past year from Amazon.
– They will sit on multiple orders for a month then dump them all into one big unpadded box where they start mixing up. I will often find one book inside of another.
Or
– They will put some books in a flimsy paper mailer, no padding, with the order getting all jumbled up in the mostly empty bag.
Bent corners and pages have become standard.
Cynthia said: For the record, if terrorists or spies ever want to smuggle sensitive material into the U.S. via our postal service…
Cynthia is not paying attention. HA!
The Post Office always cuts a hole into the box or bag to run a fiberoptic camera through to snoop at what is in my order, but that’s what they’ve done to me for decades. They use Xray to see the contents, but need the camera to read the titles.
They used to do that to my credit card bill, until BofA changed their format, now that doesn’t work. Plus, they now have direct access to all accounts so why be inefficient snooping paper bills.
One time I ordered the complete DVD set of Man From U.N.C.L.E., that came in a fancy box, like a tool box with a handle. When the Postal guy handed it over to me at the counter, he asked what was inside. I guess their Xray machine could not figure it out, so they wanted me to guess. Think about that. It was in a cardboard shipping box and the guy was asking me to guess what was in the box.
Then there was that time that my friends kept joking on the phone(landline, not cell) about whether the radium for the dirty bomb had arrived, and a bit later I had a team of contractors run a box on me to see if I would rabbit. They were so blatant, multiple cars, four person team — two couples, older, obviously working their own firm — following me and making sure that I saw them taking pictures. The Feds can’t afford that kind of coverage on regular budget. Clearly contractors.
I can’t say that I will ever get used to it, but welcome to the 21st Century Panopticon Society in all its glory. Everybody wave. HA!
The OP raises the possibility in PG’s jaundiced mind that some book distributors are juicing their profits by reselling damaged books returned for credit instead of pulping or otherwise destroying the returned books.
And here I figured that was standard procedure.
Sounds like an inside job to me.
And Publishing Weakly missed their ADS for a change.
(“We think Amazon is paying book distributor packers an extra $15 an hour to destroy the competition’s books!” 😉 )
Could be they’re skimping on shipping and going with JOE’S MULE TRAIN, instead of UPS. 😉