Book Manager

TBM BookManager Ltd. was created in 1986 in Vancouver, British Columbia by Michael Neill, then co-owner of a family run chain of bookstores. Today, BookManager is located in Kelowna, a city of 150,000 people situated on the beautiful Okanagan Lake in South-Central British Columbia, Canada.

BookManager was started originally as an integrated POS and bookstore management system, but has since grown to include bibliographic and publisher STOCK data. With the company's four-hundred plus clients they have also been able to collect sales and stock data to construct the BestSellers and Coming Soon lists for the Canadian demographic.

As retail markets drift steadily toward the heavy franchise businesses the services of BookManager have helped struggling independent stores grow into stability and profit.

Services

The company prides itself on maintaining a skilled and friendly support staff, capable of guiding its customers through the challenges faced in the book industry. Having come from the independent book market himself, Michael Neill makes continued efforts, both directly with the bookstores and with the suppliers, to ensure the continued success of this industry.

The subscription based data services include PubStock (a regularly updated database of the stock and prices made available by suppliers throughout the world) and TitleLink (a detailed collection of over five-million bibliographic records).

PubStock

PubStock is a result of the collective efforts of the entire book industry, headed by Michael Neill. Suppliers wishing to have their records shared directly with the booksellers are charged on a per-record basis and required to regularly submit their data in a standard format. Records are then cleaned and compiled by the data technicians oh staff before being updated and released every day.

Bookstores pay an annual fee to renew their subscription to this service and in turn are able to view the prices and availability of any title with over one-hundred suppliers, as well as the profit margin they stand to make by their in-store mark up.

The TitleLink database was built primarily on Baker and Taylor's extensive records, however BookManager has now moved on to collect its ongoing data from several other major suppliers. With regularly groomed bibliographic data those subscribing to TitleLink are able to search by Author, Title or Keyword to find ISBNs for order directly from known suppliers.

Sales Ranking

From the sales and on-hand records confidentially collected from its clients BookManager builds a reliable BestSelling list for all contributing bookstores. The BestSeller list is categorized into specific classifications so that specialty stores (Children, Christian, etc...) are able to quickly ascertain the profitability calculated for their markets. A number of publications, including newspapers also subscribe to this list which is featured weekly.

Forthcoming Rank

In order to predict oncoming market trends the sales rank also includes a negative rank which indicates that a title has yet to be released, but shows promise based on data collected from the ordering records of Canadian booksellers. The forthcoming rank is visible when a TitleLink search is run and sorted by demand.

BackList

The BackList is a detailed file available to those customers subscribing to TitleLink. It allows for a user to compare their own sales of an item with those of the Canadian demographic. In order to help booksellers more accurately determine the value of an item a comprehensive algorithm gives higher or lesser weight to different sources. For example, a children's bookstore selling hundreds of a local title due to a blowout sale would rank lower since it does not necessarily depict the item's value to the rest of the market.