Calculating Net Book Value

Book lovers and business efficiency experts alike are raving about the benefits of letting keyboards do the shopping. This month, WWWiz’s R. Net Fisher ignores the glowing hype, conducting his own investigation to discover the secrets of an industry that is growing 20%-40% a month. In the end, it’s tough to dispute his conclusion that although you can’t find a couch, sip a cappuccino, or meet an author face-to-face, there are compelling reasons for believing the cyber book emporiums are bound to prosper and grow!

All of the hype around the Amazon.com   IPO and the feud started by Barnes and Noble  as to who runs "The World’s Largest Bookstore" has brought a great deal of attention to a wonderful service: buying books online. It isn’t a totally new idea, but the graphic nature of the WWW, combined with its powerful search capabilities, has made it a highly recommendable alternative to the traditional paths for obtaining books. In many ways, it’s simply a case of time and money.

What’s it worth an hour? Your time that is. $10, $25, $50, $150? It’s your call, but no doubt your time is very precious to you—and very limited! Most of us are finding it necessary to be very proactive in our fight to keep or win back our time. The Web can help! In fact, as a WWWiz reader, you’ve probably read a lot for both business and pleasure, and online bookstores should definitely be added to your time-and-motion-conservation "toolkit."

More to the point, now there’s a better way to handle those occasions we’ve all experienced. That is, developing an interest in a book and wanting to immediately get our hands on it. Taking action before we forget why we want it, before we lose the note, or before we get caught up in more pressing concerns.

Help has arrived with the convenience of the online book merchants. This is now a wonderful method to acquire books with immediacy and, depending on how you value your time, great economy. Once you have a profile set up in one of these systems it takes about five minutes to locate and purchase a book. All that’s left is to wait a couple of days for it to hit your desk with the rest of the mail.

Don’t take this the wrong way. Although one can wonder how the mega-bookstores currently popping up all over can survive, this is not an article predicting the demise of these behemoths, or even the local bookshops they threaten. The idea is obtaining more discretionary time! Time for an overstuffed chair tucked away in a quiet corner of the stacks, or for a Saturday morning croissant and cappuccino while leafing through the latest best-sellers.

The goal is to be efficient the other ninety percent of the time, thus making that sort of indulgence possible. Conserving time by quickly and efficiently acquiring that hot new business advisory cartoon reference, latest "partnership gone south" in Brazil novel, breathtaking Himalayan cliff hanger, or even a long-out-of-print reference book.

Partial proof of the concept’s viability is the fact that cyber bookstores are springing up like mushrooms after a summer rain. According to Michael Shatzkin, president of The Idea Logical Co., consultants on electronic commerce and publishing, "Selling books is now the second-largest electronic commerce product emerging on the Web." One reason is that shopping for books has historically been a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and one that can quickly wrap up a lot of time and energy.

Most bookstores carry 25,000-35,000 titles, with the growing number of superstores carrying upwards of 200,000 titles. While this may seem like a lot, it really isn’t when you consider that they all have basically the same titles. If you go to a bookstore looking for a certain book and they don’t have it, you can pretty much count on the other major stores not having it as well. That’s frustrating, and there’s a much better way.

Finding things fast is exactly the kind of challenge that computers and the Web search engines are best equipped to handle. As a result there are now online bookstores that carry upwards of 1.4 million titles and, since they’re online, they’re available to browse 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These bookstores and their customers can be anywhere in the world. In fact, about 50% of the orders coming to U.S.-based services come from abroad. This holds true for foreign sellers, as well.

Shatzkin identifies four main attributes by which these new stores should be judged:

1. How many books are offered (can be millions)

2. Price including postage and handling (pretty standard)

3. Actual speed of delivery (you will be pleasantly surprised)

4. Service and information (additional value added to process)

Regarding this last point, online bookstores can be chock-full of added value that absolutely eclipses anything a traditional bookstore could ever hope to offer. Included are everything from audio discussions by the authors, to affinity group recommendations and personalized Web "agents" with names like "Benny the Book Hound," and "Virgil the Virtual Clerk," who will keep a careful watch on all new titles coming in. Just tell them the subjects or authors you like to read, and they’ll watch out for you and send you an email when something arrives that fits your chosen attributes.

The chart is a good representation of the situation. The prices are consistently lower for the online shops. You must add shipping, but again that’s about half, offset by the lack of taxes. The bottom line plays out about equal from an out-of-pocket cost standpoint.

However, getting back to the basic question of the value of your time...

Although it’s tough to find a couch, sip a cappuccino, or meet an author face-to-face in these cyber book emporiums, give them a try. Perhaps when you get around to calculating net book value you might even convince yourself that books bought online are almost free!