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Jeffrey Williams Editor as Catalyst: An Interview with Niko Pfund Niko Pfund began his publishing career at Oxford University Press in 1987. Since 1990, hehas workedat New York University Press, currentlyas director. Jeffrey Williams: Academic publishing, university press publishing, has changed immensely of late, as has commercial publishing. What do you think of these changes and what should be done? Niko Pfund: I think U you wanted a barometer of how much things have changed in the past five years, you need look no further than the AAUP [American Association of University Presses] meeting in Kansas City this past year, specUically the directors' meeting which preceded it. There had not been such a meeting for several years, apparently , and the directors of around sixty of the eighty-odd presses showed up, which was a fairly remarkable turn-out. I was told that the primary issue on the agenda at the last meeting had been whether or not tomove the head offices outof New York, given thehigh cost of real estate, orjust to leave them in the city. The notion of that being an issue worthy ofdiscussion in that particular rare forum at this point is laughable given the myriad problems we're facing now. People are now talking about e-books, amazon.com, internet warehouses, Barnes and Noble, why we're going through a returns crisis, when it's going to end . . . JW: This past year has been particularly bad, as I understand it, since the massive orders from the explosion of chains gave a false sense of prosperity, and now the chains are returning everything. NP: It's been pretty dismal, although the worst seems, at least for the time being, to be behind us. JW: What is the internet warehouse at Barnes and Noble? NP: This is Barnes and Noble's way to try to beat out Amazon. Amazon stocks ? number of the most active titles in their warehouse. To save on warehousing costs, they don't stock those that are not active, but simply order direct from the publishers, and the publishers then fill the order and bül Barnes and Noble. 120 the minnesota review JW: They ship it straight from the publishers, so they'rejust an invoicer then? NP: Right. And Barnes and Noble is hoping to store, say, three hundred thousand "top-selling" titles, with only a few copies of all but the most active titles, thereby being able to fill those orders more quickly and be less reliant on a publisher's turnaround time. But there are a host of issues to consider for us publishers, including discounts, returns, and so on. JW: This past year the returns were something like forty or fifty percent , which is fairly devastating. NP: Well, those figures sound more like trade press figures. Which is why a more efficient ordering system was so important to both the trade houses and the chains. University presses are less exposed in that regard. Our returns at NYUP ran at about twenty-three percent in 96-97, but we were up in the low teens as recently as three or four years ago. That number now seems to have stabilized somewhere between eighteen and nineteen percent of gross sales for us. Even so, when you're talking about a business that has the kind of single-digit margins that we do, it's not good. On the subject of trade vs. university presses, there seems to be this assumption now that university presses are just going to step into the void left by commercial presses. But that's much too facile. The fact is that we're not going to pick up many books that fit their basic profiles. People who were selling five to six thousand hardcovers of their university press titles were suddenly able to command, say, fifty-thousand dollar advances. But net sales for such trade titles, especially Basic Books and Free Press type policy books, can be deceptively low, even when the books get widely reviewed. If you're paying fifty-thousand dollar advances for these books, and you're selling them for $21.95, and you're promoting the hell out of them, and you ship...

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