Book of the Month Club

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The Book of the Month Club (founded 1926[1]) is a United States mail-order business, customers of which are offered a new book each month.

The Book of the Month Club is part of a larger company that runs many book clubs in the United States and Canada. It was formerly the flagship club of Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc. That company merged with Doubleday Direct, Inc., a company owned by Bertelsmann, in 2000. The resulting company, Bookspan, was a joint-venture between Time Warner and Bertelsmann until 2007 when Bertelsmann took over complete ownership. Approximately six weeks after it acquired complete ownership of Bookspan, Bertelsmann initiated a major overhaul of the book club business, a process that will eliminate 280 positions, or about 15% of its workforce of 1,900. Many of the specialty book clubs such as American Compass are being eliminated.

The company operates a number of non-general book clubs including:

  • American Compass, a club primarily aimed at American conservative readers.
  • InsightOut, a book club featuring books of topical interest to gay and lesbian readers.[2]
  • Mosaico and Circulo, two clubs offering Latin and Spanish-translated selections.

Contents

[edit] Membership terms

The most common terms of membership involve a "negative response" system whereby a member is shipped the monthly selection on a particular date if the selection is not declined before that date is reached. Customers have the option to respond declining the selection or opting to order another book or books instead.

Potential members are often offered a selection of books to select from at an arbitrarily low price (for example "4 books for $4.00 each") with the stipulation that once they have accepted this initial shipment, and decided they wish to join the club, they must then purchase a certain number of books within a certain period of time (for example, 2 books within the first year) to complete their obligation to the club.

The Zooba format requires a 3-book commitment and allows the customer to build and manage a book list similar to a mail-order DVD rental queue. The customer is charged $9.95 monthly (plus any applicable taxes) and is sent the first available book on his or her list. Additional books not on the monthly cycle are also $9.95, and the web interface makes maintaining gift addresses easy. The service usually has an impressive selection of current hardcover bestsellers and is freely browsable to non-members.

[edit] History

Harry Scherman was a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in 1916 when he set out to create the "Little Leather Library". With his partners Max Sackheim, and Charles and Albert Boni, Scherman began a mail order service that offered "30 Great Books For $2.98" (miniature reprints "bound in limp Redcroft") and sold 40,000,000 copies in its first five years [3]. Sackheim and Scherman then founded (1920) their own ad agency devoted entirely to marketing books.

The problems of building interest in a new book led Scherman to create, along with Sackheim and Robert Haas, The Book of the Month Club in 1926. As Scherman explained it, the Club itself would be a "standard brand". "It establishes itself as a sound selector of good books and sells by means of its own prestige. Thus, the prestige of each new title need not be built up before becoming acceptable," he explained later, [4]. After starting with 4,000 subscribers, the Club had more than 550,000 within less than twenty years. The size of the club did, in fact, create the Book of the Month Club as a brand. Being a "Book of the Month Club" selection was used to promote books to the general public.

[edit] Clubs operated by Bookspan and affiliates

  • Black Expressions
  • Children's Book-of-the-Month Club
  • Círculo de Lectores
  • Club Mosaico
  • Crafter's Choice
  • Discovery Channel Book Club
  • Doubleday Book Club
  • Doubleday Large Print
  • The Good Cook
  • History Book Club
  • Home Style Books
  • InsightOut
  • Kids' BookPlanet
  • The Literary Guild
  • Military Book Club
  • Mystery Guild
  • One Spirit
  • Quality Paperback Books
  • Rhapsody Book Club
  • Scientific American Book Club
  • Science Fiction Book Club
  • Book-of-the-Month Club
  • Stephen King Library
  • Zooba

[edit] See also

  • DVD club
  • The Hidden Public; The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club by Charles Lee (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958) provides a history of the club, the book selection and membership procedures, and a list of all selections, dividends, and alternates from 1926 to 1957.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Radway, Janice A. A Feeling for Books The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
  2. ^ Arnold, Martin (2001-05-01), "MAKING BOOKS; Transition Time For Gay Works", New York Times, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F00E0DF123BF933A25756C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all 
  3. ^ "Harry Scherman," Current Biography 1943, pp669-671
  4. ^ Id. at 669
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