I love the idea of electronic catalogs. I know I’m in the minority here, but what a great innovation whose time has come. I weighed six boxes of publisher catalogs I have at the store and it came to 60 pounds! Sixty pounds of paper that I’m going to recycle the moment those books are entered on my computer. Sixty pounds of paper whose journey to me was expensive, often redundant with needless multiple mailings and costly to the environment.

My store is small and only the two owners, Elizabeth and I, do the ordering for the kids’ and adult sections. We don’t have the organizational issue that many other stores have in terms of coordinating who needs to look at what catalogs. We just bring them home and share them. My biggest problem is remembering to bring the catalogs back to the store when it’s time for the meeting. Forgetting the catalogs at home and making the rep than run back to the car and scrounge another set of catalogs is not the best way to start a sales call.

There are two ways to find publisher catalogs on the web. The first is a website I stumbled on out of desperation when I needed a catalog I couldn’t find. Earlyword.com is an amazing site for librarians that has a downloadable link for a pdf or a direct link to the publishers themselves, for this current season’s catalogs for 80% of the publishers I deal with. Knowing I can find catalogs on-line means I spend less time tearing up the office and my house trying to find where I’ve put catalogs. The downside is I can’t order from the site — the upside is you don’t have to sign up to use the service.
   
The second is a new innovation called Edelweiss, from the folks at Above the Treeline which offers more interactivity than earlywords.com, but you must sign up in advance to use it. John Rubin, CEO of Above the Treeline, is offering it as “an online, interactive catalog system that will work across participating publishers so that booksellers need learn only one system.” I have yet to play with this, but from all accounts it could revolutionize buying. So far, 13 publishers have signed up to have their catalogs in the program. You can create orders and have them in a downloadable form for your POS. If it works the way they hope, with Edelweiss you’ll look at the catalog, make and read notes and then create the order right there, without once duplicating your work by having to manually add titles to your POS.

What’s led me to easier ways to find catalogs online is when I lose them, which happens a lot, I would try to go to the publisher’s websites. You’d think it would be easy to find catalogs at the publisher’s sites — well, not so much. I’ve found that most publishers’ sites make it hard for booksellers to find the bookseller’s portion of the site; it’s as if we need a special code to get in that secret section. I’ve tried to find catalogs at Random House and their bookseller portion of the site has a link for catalogs, but it leads to a byzantine search screen, and there’s no listing for Summer 2009 catalogs. I’ve had similar results with most other publishers.

HarperCollins is the first publisher to eliminate paper catalogs. Beginning with its Fall 2009 list, Harper will offer a full-service website for digital catalogs instead of paper catalogs. I’ve spent a lot of time on the site and I like it. It’s got all the information of the catalog with more features. One of the good things about it is you can click on the book and add to your list, so when you’re ready to order you’ve got them right there without having to skip past pages of titles you’re not ordering. There is a notes section for each title, which is a great idea if multiple staff members are logging into the catalog to make comments. I particularly love the backlist feature, though it’s not. as deep I’d like to see, and would be perfect if the book links were live, so I could add the books to “my list” For stores without computer access Harper is offering a booklet that will have the catalog information.

For me, someone who is literally and happily, attached to my laptop, my iPhone and the workstation at the store, e-catalogs are a godsend. I always know where they are. My staff and I can make notes on titles and in the case of Edelweiss, I should be able to make an order that can be converted right into my POS, saving me hours of data entry. The digital catalogs I’m looking at online are totally current. No more add-on sheets with every meeting.

I don’t know how many trees are used to create the average fall catalogs or how much carbon is used to print and transport these catalogs, but the cost savings the publishers can realize by not shipping catalogs to every store could be enormous, which maybe could go into co-op. I know booksellers can be resistant to change, especially when technology is involved.  However, I think it’s time we started thinking about the waste our industry produces, and embrace technology that can ultimately help us be more efficient booksellers who can spend more time selling books.