Book club

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A book club (also book club or book club ) is a distribution system for books , exclusively or at preferential rates to members sold the book club. In addition to books, phonograms and other media are often sold in book clubs.

description

A book club usually operates as a publisher or part of a publisher. Smooth transitions are possible here between explicit book communities and media distribution systems that effectively function as book communities within cooperatives , trade unions , parties or religious communities . In contrast to stationary book retailing, the book club is defined by the membership and the mandatory purchase of a minimum amount of books or sound carriers in a certain period of time. The parallel editions appearing in the book club differ in their lower price, the publication date and the book layout, which vary from the original publication. The legal basis for this is the Potsdam Protocol.

The book club has the advantage of a cost reduction compared to the regular publishing business, in which the publisher must allow the book trade to profit margins of up to 50%: the publisher or the already organized group that publishes for its own use distributes the goods directly the members. The book prices does not apply to book clubs. The sale can take place through advertising in association organs , through catalogs or through a fixed subscription . As a rule, special purchase modalities are agreed: The community member undertakes to purchase one or more titles monthly or annually or to purchase books for a certain amount. Loyalty rewards , gifts for long-term members, rewards for new advertisements can increase customer loyalty . At the same time, the book club can calculate for secure sales via membership , license titles or even, thanks to the security of sales, publish them especially for members.

history

The beginnings of the book clubs lie in the association system of the 19th century : The diverse religious, social and political oriented associations created, together with certain publishers, a means of supplying the respective members with information material and materials for ideological orientation. In this context, the rise of Bertelsmann began even then .

The first large book club was the Association for German Literature , which was founded in 1873. A heyday of book clubs in Germany began after the First World War during the Weimar Republic in the 1920s . The outstanding book club at that time was the Volksverband der Bücherfreunde (VdB), founded in 1919, which self-published books of high quality in terms of content and design in various book series; from 1924 the German Book Association (DBG) was also important. In addition, trade unions and Christian circles (through book communities) also tried to educate the simpler sections of the population, such as the printing trade union with its Gutenberg book guild, which is still run independently today . Thanks to the relatively high level of organization and integration - especially in the unions and political parties - the members could be expected as book customers. Two exemplary communities for this are Der Bücherkreis and the Gutenberg Book Guild .

With the dictatorship of the National Socialists, the publishing activities of the book clubs were cut off first by means of conformity and then by prohibition. Of the historical book communities, only the German Book Community, the Gutenberg Book Guild and the German House Library (which later became part of the German Book Association) survived the Second World War. The Gutenberg Book Guild then went into exile in Switzerland; their Swiss branch retained a certain degree of independence until the end of the 1990s.

The book club's organizational form experienced a second boom when, at the end of the Second World War, sales via catalogs and subscribers filled the gap that book retailers in the war-torn country could not close so quickly. Book clubs took advantage of this in opening up the rural population and the lower classes as customer groups. From 1950 onwards, numerous smaller book clubs emerged, some of which survived until the early 1980s. With an aggressive marketing directed against the local book trade, the then Bertelsmann Lesering of the later Bertelsmann group succeeded in the 1950s in gaining a prominent position in the field of book clubs - the internal organizational form, which guaranteed subcontractors profit sharing, was particularly advantageous here. The Holtzbrinck publishing house, which founded the Stuttgarter Hausbücherei in 1948 (from 1959 Deutscher Bücherbund), worked in a similar way to Bertelsmann. Both groups pursued a policy of taking over smaller book clubs and let more and more competition and the qualitative differences between book clubs and book clubs disappear.

The heyday of book clubs ended from the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s , partly because of the concentration (Bertelsmann eventually took over the book clubs of the Holtzbrinck Group) and as a result of the expansion of bookstores such as Hugendubel , which entered a new mass business and thereby the book clubs are surpassed by a wider range of prices and offers and the disappearance of purchase obligations. The new marketing concept was more that of the department store, in which the customer can move freely, read into books, move within a mass of other customers, between whom he does not stand out unless he is looking for advice.

The remaining book clubs such as the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt and the Book Guild Gutenberg stabilized themselves with high quality offers that reach an interested customer base through extensive commented catalogs. The business was expanded to include the distribution of CDs and furniture (preferably shelves ) as a complementary business to all of the companies. The Gutenberg Book Guild also made a name for itself with artistically high-quality books.

In the GDR , the series buchclub 65 , published from 1965 to 1990, was the only book club that was essentially based on productions by the publishers Aufbau-Verlag , Mitteldeutscher Verlag , Rütten & Loening , Verlag Volk und Welt / Culture and Progress, and Verlag Neues Leben . This was preceded by the series Book of Youth (1960–1964) and Book of the Month , which continued to exist in Book Club 65.

List of book clubs

Germany

(in chronological order)

Great Britain

Italy

  • Euroclub , Brescia (Italy), founded in 1975 by Mondolibri SpA

Austria

Norway

Portugal

Switzerland

Spain

literature

  • Michael Kollmannsberger: Book clubs in the German book market. Functions, services, interactions Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1995 (book scholarly contributions from the German book archive Munich 49) ISBN 3-447-03628-1
  • Mathias Giloth: Customer loyalty in membership systems. A contribution to customer value management, illustrated using the example of book clubs Lang, Frankfurt 2003 (Writings on Marketing and Management 46) ISBN 3-631-50529-9
  • Urban van Melis: The book clubs in the Weimar Republic . With a case study about the social democratic workers' book community " Der Bücherkreis ." Hiersemann, Stuttgart 2002 (Series title: Bibliothek des Buchwesens Vol. 13) Zugl .: Mainz, Univ., Diss., 2000 ISBN 3777202371 (table of contents: PDF )

Web links

Wiktionary: Book club  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fixed price criteria for book club expenses ( PDF ).