Friday, December 10, 2010

STANDARDISING DIGITAL SALES REPORTING

One of the biggest challenges we have in BIC is persuading publishers of the need to automate and rationalise the way in which they process digital business in their systems. After all, if digital is going to provide incremental income - or worse, if it's going to make up for lost physical revenues - the systems for dealing with invoicing, sales analysis and royalties have got to be as efficient as they have generally become for printed books. There's nothing to be gained from setting up parallel processes which cope with a short-term problem but add to costs.

It's more than two years since BIC published a business case for standardising sales reporting; but the arguments are still as valid as ever. For a long time not much happened - and it was clear that publishers were manually processing sales reports from various vendors and intermediaries in a bewildering range of formats - and with equally bewildering variations in timings and reliability.

However, the profile of this issue has been dramatically raised in the US earlier this year with the coming of the 'agency model', making those publishers which had adopted it suddenly and brutally aware of the new obligations on them to account for the digital sales made by their 'agents'. As a direct result, our colleagues at EDItEUR have been working with the Book Industry Study Group to update the EDItX Sales Report message - which we have been recommmending as the industry's standard digital sales reporting mechanism - to take into account US needs. When the new version is released in the early part of the new year, we shall be renewing our efforts to raise awareness of this issue and encourage the industry to coalesce around a single standard for reporting digital sales.

We believe it's one of the most important issues there is for the digital supply chain.

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