How to Order Books
from Algora Publishing

Unfortunately "B&N evolved from a bookstore to a gift shop . . . " Nevertheless, books can still be ordered through them.

We also invite retailers and libraries alike to order directly from us. Our state of the art order processing includes EDI and XML for just-in-time delivery.

We're not selling potatoes - although we do like French fries (just not "freedom fries"). We sell one book at a time, each one representing years of work and thought by dedicated thinkers, philosophers, historians, economists and writers. We are proud to publish and distribute these authors' thoughts and analyses.

Selling books used to be a simple process. The publisher issued a book, the wholesalers would order in bulk for their warehouses, and retail bookstores would put the books on their shelves. The customer could walk into a book store, fall in love with a book, pay, and take it home. The bookseller would pay the wholesaler and the wholesaler would pay the publisher. It would take a minimum of a year for the whole cycle to run its course.

That worked well as recently as 1980, when fewer than 25,000 titles were published each year in the United States. It ain't like that today! Nowadays books are sold on-line, there are print books and e-books, books printed by offset printing and on-demand. Book stores now sell less than half of all the books that are bought in the US. Is this chaos or fierce competition?

"Some 764,000 public domain and self-published books were published in the US last year, compared with 288,000 traditional titles, according to Bowker" writes John Gapper in the Financial Times.

Worse still, the wholesalers and the middlemen expect to pocket 50% of the list price for their archaic distribution systems. We think they are obsolete. We think the publishing industry does not need middlemen driving up the cost of books.