Filed under: Books

HarperCollins Publishers is establishing a new unit — it doesn’t have a name just yet — to be run by Hyperion founder Robert S. Miller.

There’s a twist: this imprint is looking to substitute profit-sharing with authors for advances and, even more interestingly, eliminate the practice of extending unlimited rights of return to retailers.

It remains to be seen whether they’ll get anywhere with that but if the publishing industry tightens up its liberal return policies, booksellers like Borders (NYSE: BGP), which is already in the outhouse, could find themselves in a world of hurt.

They’d have to take a hard look at their inventories and might have to stock less variety — which would make them less competitive with online booksellers and big-box retailers.

Still, I doubt that this will catch on. With booksellers struggling, publishers aren’t really in a position to extract more blood.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 9:13 am and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.