Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 15:15:57 -0400
From: Kelly Wood (Davidson College) <kewood_at_davidson.edu>
Subject: Standing order vendors - FINALLY excerpts from responses
I'm so sorry to be so long in posting these responses to the list. Several
people expressed an interest in my sharing responses. Here they are ...
some of them shortened.
Here's the question I posted a couple of months back:
I would like input from those of you who use Yankee Book Peddler, Coutts,
and/or Emery Pratt for standing orders. We are in the midst of streamlining
our workflow and are trying to find the best match for our needs. Davidson
is a small four year liberal arts institution with 1600+ students. Have any
of you used these vendors for standing orders? If so, can you give us any
tips on them and how one might meet our needs better than another? Some of
our standing orders are foreign but many are domestic. Please respond to me
personally. Thanks.
Kelly Sink Wood
Davidson College Library
===================================================================
Responses:
1. We use Academic Book Center for our standing orders and have since
gosh, I guess the mid-80's. Of course, Academic is now part of Blackwells
Books Services, but even after Academic was bought, the service did not
change and they have maintained the Academic offices and staff. We have
enjoyed top-notch service all these years and really think they do a good job.
Last year we started doing "shelf ready" standing orders with them and
this has been a great success. At the present this is the only
"shelf-ready" we're doing, but we're thinking about expanding into
doing it with our approval/firm order vendor (Yankee).
2. We use YBP for our domestic standing orders. We are pleased with their
service. My advice to you is to be very clear with them regarding what they
do and do not cover. We had some confusion early on due to exceptions like
loose-leaf materials. Their Head of Continuations visited us a couple of
years ago and we had a very fruitful discussion. If you have specific
questions, I can try to get answers from you. I will also say that--whenever
we have had a problem--YBP has been very responsive.
3. We use EBSCO for our standing orders. I find myself claiming volumes
regularly. And we often receive duplicate volumes of those titles that I
don't claim. Seems like there must be a better way.
4. Would you be willing to share your responses. We are not using any of
these vendors and our standing orders are behind and keeping up with the
reports, etc. is time consuming. We seem to be telling them that a lot of
the titles have published as we get monographic orders for the series. I
would be interested in other's experiences with the mentioned vendors. Thanks
much! We use Dawson UK for the few foreign s.o.'s we have and they are
satisfactory.
5. We use Emery-Pratt for standing orders and have generally
been quite pleased. They don't tend to forget much, and they send
little half-page faxes every now and again when a series is ending
and they won't be sending any more.
6. We consolidated our domestic standing orders with Yankee Book several
years ago. Although transferring standing orders always seems to me
to be more complicated than it ought to be, they were very helpful
through the process. One thing to keep in mind is that you are
likely to have cancellations with your old supplier that don't 'take'
and you will receive the next volume of a title from that old source.
In these cases we've called Yankee who 'blocks' their copy of the
volume so it isn't sent to us and then contacts the old supplier to
tell them again that the order has been cancelled. All in all, we've been
pleased with their service. I would recommend using them for standing
orders and for monographs (we use them for many of our mono orders, too).
Can't speak for the other companies. We used Coutts years ago for some
monographs, but I don't know what their service is like [for standing
orders]. We've never tried Emery-Pratt.
7. In standing orders, I like to look for a vendor's thoroughness and
comprehensive access to presses & distributors. Another quality element
that I prize very highly is a vendor's capacity to keep from letting
standing orders fall through the cracks. This becomes especially important
in two scenarios: 1. intermittent standing orders ; 2. standing orders for
esoteric, sporadic monographic series in which the volumes' publishing
sequence and actual appearance date can fluctuate wildly & deviate from
"normally numbered sequencing." Also, if you value a vendor's ordering-data
analysis, that would also need to be factored into the equation of vendor
choice.
I notice your choice of three possible standing-order vendors -- all three
are rather confined to US and some Canadian imprints in their supply
capability. Yankee Book Peddler is good & steady; Coutts is good for US and
Canadian imprints. I have never bought standing orders from Emery
Pratt, so I can't comment informedly. I notice that all
these vendors you're considering focus primarily on the routine North
American market. Are you contractually confined to these vendors? If
not, I highly recommend Blackwell Book Services for your standing orders.
This vendor is very thorough and can handle North American and British
imprints, as well as an increasingly enlarged number of non-NorthAmerican/UK
distributors with remarkable ease. They're also good at reliably handling
intermittent standing orders (for example, if there's an annual publication
you want only every three or five years) -- better than any other
North-American vendors I've bought standing orders from. (www.blackwell.com
for items published or distributed in North America and also
www.blackwell.co.uk for strictly British imprints)
Here's my advice for a vendor-choice battleplan:
1. Take inventory of the standing-order titles' publishers (as well as
geographic locale)
2. See which of your dealers under consideration can handle the largest
percentage of these publishers.
3. Also see which of the vendors you are considering for standing-order
consolidation have access to foreign distributors
(Continental Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia)
Since you also have some foreign titles:
1. It's important to bear in mind that Yankee, Coutts, Emery-Pratt, and
Blackwell are best at supplying English-language titles. It's best to let
the English-language standing orders come from one of these four and let the
non-English-language titles, especially those published in Europe or Latin
America come from a vendor based on those areas. I think specialisation is
best in purchasing instances, and there is no "absolute"
all-things-to-all-people.
2. If you have a staple of a few, say, French, Spanish, and German standing
orders (especially in support of language programs), here's my litany of
foreign-standing-vendor recommendations:
+ German language -- Otto Harrawitz www.harrassowitz.de
+ French -- Aux Amateurs Livres www.auxam.fr
+ Spanish (mostly Spain but including some Latin American [mostly of
Mexico] imprints) -- Puvill Libros SA www.puvill.com
+ Spain & Latin America -- Iber Books
http://www.iberbook.com/ingles/inicio.html
+ Latin America -- Latin American Book Store www.latinamericanbooks.com
+ Italian -- Casalini Libri www.casalini.it
+ an international mix (e.g. Africa, Asia, Continental Europe): Martinus
Nijhoff International (they're good at hunting down hard-to-find imprints):
www.nijhoff.nl
8. We also are a small institution that has a mix of foreign and
domestic titles. We have recently (past 3 years) used Book House as our
standing order vendor. They are very helpful, especially with those
hard to identify and find foreign theology titles we need. I'm pleased
with their service people, and we are satisfied customers.
We do business with Yankee and Emery for fixed orders, but bypassed both
to send our SO business to Book House.
Received on Sun May 20 2001 - 15:24:46 EDT