Six-hundred year-old businesses are not rolling stones. Moss gathers. And in book publishing, no stone has thicker moss than the one representing the complex pathway that every single book follows as it moves from printer and manufacturer to ultimate consumer. (And, unfortunately, sometimes back again.)
While a picture may be worth the proverbial thousand words, this particular “picture” represents hundreds of millions of dollars in annual costs to book publishers, distributors and retailers. It gives a graphical view of the various “touch” points as books move – on palettes, in cartons, and individually – across all the stages and players in our value chain, ultimately to retail customers and library patrons. Most importantly, as a senior executive at a leading bookseller put it: “each touch has a cost.” The combined costs, including the costs of returns, puts an enormous, perennial drag on the profitability of our business.
Since, digital dreams notwithstanding, we won’t simplify this physical pathway any time soon, the goal is to speed passage through it; automate it if possible; use technology to reduce friction and thus cost. ISBNs represented an important first step. Bar codes have also made a great difference. But barcodes require human intervention, whether on items or shipping containers, because someone has to line up the reader with the bar code itself. Enter RFID.
RFID (radio frequency identification) works by radio waves, and like a car going through an EZ-Pass toll gate, a box or a book just has to move past the “reader” to be recognized. It happens automatically as the reader collects the information and then sends it electronically to a computer system, without human intervention. Potential benefits are multiple, and they are only starting to be understood. For example, advanced shipping notices among printers, publishers, distributors could be generated automatically as the palette or carton leaves a warehouse or loading dock.
While the ALA has been drawn to support the investigation of RFID technologies from the perspective of protecting the privacy of the individual, the Book Industry Study Group is tracking its possible benefits for supply chain efficiency. Jointly they are sponsoring the ongoing investigations of the RFID Working Group, whose meetings Simon & Schuster has hosted for the last three years.
In the case of cartons of diverse books, each with its own individual RFID tag, every book inside a carton is automatically read and recorded as it leaves the distributors warehouse, and automatically read and entered into the inventory system in a book-store – as in the case of the BGN bookstore chain in the Netherlands. By using individual RFID tags on individual books, the Dutch company is achieving essentially 100% accuracy in shipments since every RFID-tagged book tells its own story, identifies itself. This graphic was developed last February by the National Institute of Standards Organization (NISO) RFID Technical Committee. Originally set up to standardize how data would be put on the little computer chip inside each RFID tag, the committee soon realized that a gold standard of efficiency and cost-saving could be achieved if tags – used throughout the life of a book – were placed in each individual volume at the time of manufacture.
While several hundred US libraries, public, and academic, have already adopted item-level RFID technology, they are struggling with the problem of having to choose among different vendors who, up to this point, use proprietary, non-interoperable, RFID systems. This is causing great problems especially for the distributors and jobbers who must install 3 or 4 different RFID-tagging systems in their warehouses in order to affix the proper tags to the proper books depending on which RFID vendor a particular client has chosen. The risk of expensive confusion, not to mention the cost of maintaining multiple systems, is significant.
Libraries’ original desire to automate check-out and check-in and reduce repetitive stress injuries among the staff have led them to adopt RFID technology in ever greater numbers. They are now, however, coming to understand RFID’s full benefit: comprehensive ‘materials handling’ – from the moment the book first enters the library, throughout its entire lifetime. Whether in shelving, use by patrons, inter-library loans, inventory management, and the process can be enormously facilitated by RFID. In terms of book publishing as a whole, eventual use of RFID tags on individual books will not happen overnight. And that’s good. The industry needs time to understand and define the ‘use cases’ that RFID technologies can facilitate at each stage. In this way, the tags and data structures required to efficiently facilitate the passage of books along the supply chain can be developed. As one publisher put it: “the worst possible outcome would be multiple RFID tags on the same book.” Publishers and retailers already have experience of the headaches of multiple identifiers on books – ISBNs and UPC codes, re-stickering over printed price labels, etc. With properly-configured RFID technology in place, price changes could be done instantaneously and electronically.
Looking into the future, as one publisher noted, there would be benefit if RFID tags were to remain ‘live’ (with privacy issues respected) even beyond the point of initial retail sale. The price at which the book was actually sold could be recorded on each book, facilitating and making the returns process more accurate. A live tag could be equally useful for automatic used book pricing as a percentage of the original new book price. (And customers with large personal libraries could use live RFID tags for their own sorting purposes.) RFID technology has been called “an internet of things.” Properly tagged, a book might move through its life-cycle, gradually ‘writing’ its own ‘history’ as it passes from stage to stage and customer to customer.
Note: those interested in learning more about RFID in retail and libraries are invited to the BookExpo session on Saturday morning, June 2, 9:30am to 11:00am, in room 1E06. The principle speaker will be the CEO of the Dutch book company, BGN, Mathijs van de Lely, and a panel of respondents including publishers, distributors, and librarians will comment on the Dutch experiences to date.
PT thanks Lightspeed’s Jim Lichtenberg for this look into the world of RFID.
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