Treeline Tips and Tricks: A Simple Tool for Keeping Track of Drop-Ins

Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly version

By Joe Foster, Edelweiss/Treeline Education and Outreach Coordinator

In a recent conversation at BookExpo America, I was reminded of my participation, along with a number of other buyers, in an ABA Digital Task Force meeting (way back in 2008) aimed at creating a document that expressed booksellers’ requirements for a functional digital catalog. This meeting was in response to the initiatives of a number of publishers who were either exploring this idea or actively creating, even finishing, their first pass at a digital catalog. During this conversation and the follow-up conversations shortly after, it became abundantly clear that we bookstore buyers were about to be inundated with a large number of various sorts of digital catalog ideas and would shortly be spending our time learning 200 new ways to buy from each publisher each season. If you were a buyer at this time, you likely remember this: everything from a few publishers simply sending you a PDF and gauging your reaction through their sales reps to those few publishers with fully realized sites. At the Digital Task Force meeting we talked, in scoffing “not in this lifetime” terms, about how great it would be if publishers could all work together to create one system. That was obviously not going to happen.

And suddenly, Edelweiss.

While Edelweiss clearly accelerated the transition from paper to digital catalogs (whether to your delight or chagrin), it also clearly saved you from a world of relative chaos. I’m often surprised by veteran buyers who forget that period.

One thing that did not change in the transition from paper to digital catalogs is how annoying drop-ins can be. It still makes me twitch a little when I see a publisher’s drop-in catalog show up the same day as their seasonal catalog. There are, of course, reasons for such things on the publisher side, but it still scalds a little. 

Edelweiss has a pretty simple tool to help ensure you see these drop-in titles each season. It’s a very simple tool, really, but as with most tools, it only works if you use it. You can find a complete tutorial here. We call it Catalog Subscriptions, and it records the last time you looked at a catalog and then lets you know on the Edelweiss homepage if a title has been added to that catalog since you last looked at it.

Simple.

Aside from being simple, it is also customized to your own catalog viewing activity, independent of what is happening elsewhere. There are buyers who pay close attention to this spot on their Edelweiss homepage and use it to their great advantage, but there are many more who ignore those alerts and so have three-year-old lists of 20,000+ drop-ins. This clearly qualifies as “not using the tool.” If this is you, you don’t have to go through these tens of thousands of titles to clean up your view. You can easily and quickly start fresh by simply resetting your “subscription baseline” to today, with a solemn promise to yourself and your sense of workplace satisfaction to remember to look at these alerts every now and then from here on out.

As usual, feel free to contact us at [email protected] with any questions you might have.