Slide 1
Welcome and thank you All for our your enthusiasm towards this presentation. I’m gonna tell you about the power abuse in distribution in Empik. Before I start I would just like to say, that most of the info was gathered from Paweł Olejniczak, a translator at Waneko Books and an owner of KIK, a small bookstore located on św. Marcin. He also teaches Japanese at WSJO J I hope you will find the topic interesting. So, let’s start, shall we?
Slide 2
First, let me tell you what I’ll talk about in my presentation. First of all, I’ll tell you a little bit of Empik and show you its’ history. Than I’ll go on to talk about difficulties that Empik creates for the publishers. Than I’ll provide examples of publishers, who are either in or not being sold in Empik. Than I’ll talk about the drawbacks and finish with a quick summary.
Slide 3
Empik is a company with a long tradition, spanning for over 60 years. Empik started out as a Klub Międzynarodowej Prasy I Książki, where everyone could come in and read all sorts of magazines, newspapers, books and such, both Polish and foreign. Those clubs also sold coffee and sweets for the enjoyment of the readers. There were also popular for cameral concerts and artistic meetings. Empik played a tremendous cultural role in Poland, where it provided entertainment and knowledge during hard times of communism. Currently Empik stores are under NFI Empik Media & Fashion. There are 137 stores in Poland.
Slide 4
Empik is not completely fair, when it comes to distribution. Empik certainly helps young authors and small publishers sell their books, but the costs are overwhelming. Taking about 40# of off by the labeled price is a pretty common technique and every store does it, but Empik moves a little too far. Basically, when a new book is sold in Empik, they try to charge extra for everything. In order to get it on the internet site, a 5% or so is taken form original price. Same for the magazine Tom Kultury, where a similar fee is paid in order to be printed. The list goes on…The most interesting part is that the publisher have to pay for a specific stand or even a way that the book is presented. If it faces up – fee, when it’s on the side – fee, when it’s on the top – 5%. Another ridiculus policy is that Empik is allowed to return anything from the publisher, so if for example somebody comes in to an Empik, reads a comic novel, destroys it a little and puts It back – Empik can send the whole delivery back without paying a single penny for the whole batch.
Slide 5
Small publishers, like J.P. Fantastica, Waneko, sell their products in Empik, but they also do so by their own internet site. By omitting all the Empik regulations, those stores often lower their prices even by half. That’s how they encourage their customers to omit Empik and buy from the publisher’s site. Another small company, My Book only sells their product on a their online store. They also sell their books in the PDF format.
Slide 7
There are many drawbacks of the system in Empik. Not only the publishers have to raise their prices (which affects everybody - does anybody buy new books?), which of course lower the sales numbers. Empik tends to monopolize the industry that way. They can technically manipulate the prices and choose what to sell. Empiks are everywhere and many people buy books only there, which adds to the prestige and pressures the publishers to distribute in Empik. This kind of blind circle isn’t good for the book industry and makes it difficult to sell books in supposively the best bookstore chain in the country.
Benius