Value for Money
The UK's Public Libraries procure foreign-language books from Books Asia, CILLA (a consortium of 7 Indic booksellers), and a handful of other specialist suppliers.
Buying from Books Asia can save your library over £2000 per annum. That's equivalent to an extra 200 Urdu books or 300 Gujarati books for your readers.
CILLA* |
Books Asia |
|
|---|---|---|
Languages - Indic |
6 |
7 |
Languages - Non-Indic |
1 |
10 |
Catalogues - Availability |
Subscription Only |
Without Subscription |
Catalogues - Updated how often |
Quarterly |
Weekly |
Catalogues - Fee (subscription) |
£1,333 +VAT |
FREE |
| Catalogues - Cumulative Booklist |  |
 |
| Catalogues - Full Stocklists (PDF and XLS) | |
|
| Stock Summary (with Average Prices) | |
|
Marc Records - Fee (subscription basis) |
£697 +VAT |
FREE |
Marc Records - Fee ('per record' basis) |
£1.40 per record |
FREE |
Marc Records - UKMarc |
|
|
Marc Records - Marc21 |
|
|
Marc Records - Dublin Core RDF-XML |
|
|
Marc Records - Customised Tags |
|
|
Marc Records - Human Readable Summary |
|
|
RFID - Barcode Encoding (4Q-2010) |
N/A |
FREE |
Regional Book Review Meetings |
|
|
Physically view and select books |
|
|
Industry-standard pricing for books** |
|
|
Free Quarterly MI Reporting |
|
|
Free Transliteration Slips |
|
|
| Full Shelf-Ready Servicing | |
|
| Free Delivery to UK Libraries | |
|
*CILLA details compiled from CILLA brochures and OCLC, v3fm and LASER Foundation websites.
**Consortia websites The Book Centre, Star Books and Ruposhi Bangla also used as reference.
The above chart is a useful tool to compare any supplier with Books Asia. We believe we offer the best combination of languages, library services and value in our sector.
How To Order
We offer various methods for stock selection. A combined approach is often used:
We operate on a Supplier Selection basis for many of the UK’s libraries. The library provides a detailed profile and budget for each language. We then use our expertise, and the knowledge of our suppliers to procure stock.
The library has the option to review and approve the selection before we start to process the books. We supply the library on a monthly or quarterly basis.
As expected, the profiles from most libraries have much similarity across genres and popular authors. This means that the stock we procure is very relevant to the needs of the UK’s communities as a whole.
Titles can also be supplied on Standing Order. For example, we could supply you with 10 new Urdu, 10 new Gujarati and 5 new Bengali titles every month.
Many of our libraries subscribe to an extremely popular range of Indic Magazines and Digests on a standing order basis.
You can also select titles using the Stocklists. Just note down the Sequence Numbers, and how many copies you need, then drop us an email.
Excel versions of the stocklists have also been provided, allowing you to save the spreadsheet and apply filters/sorts/highlights to make your selections.
In addition, you are always welcome to view and select your titles at our office in Bradford.
We keep you in the loop
We know what it's like to receive a large number of boxes, when you're not quite ready for them. We use four brief emails (in-line with EDI processes) to keep you in the loop:
1. We've received your order;
2. We've selected the books for your order (optional approval);
3. Your books have been despatched (invoice attached);
4. Your Marc file has been emailed.
Although system-generated, the emails don't come from an 'un-manned mailbox'. If you have any questions for us, you can hit the reply button, and we'll get back to you.
We are currently looking into Talis Gateway (and several other options) and aim to introduce EDI Orders and EDI Invoices in 4Q-2010, followed by the complete set in 2Q-2011.
MI Reports
We provide Management Information (MI) Reports of all stock ordered from Books Asia. We generate spend-to-date reports, and Pie Charts showing percentages of Language, Age Group, Binding and Year of Publication.
Here's an example showing the profile of books ordered by a library (Customer Id has been removed for data protection) between Jan 2008 and Aug 2009:
MI Report - Pie Chart - 01/2008 to 08/2009
Our MI Reports are issued to our customers on a quarterly basis, but they can also be emailed to you anytime upon request.
Quality Methods
We provide helpful, categorised invoices to simplify auditing when our boxes arrive. And we package titles from each category (Adult Fiction, Adult Non-Fiction etc) into separate boxes.
Transliteration labels are provided free of charge, and are always affixed to the inside cover of the book. We also provide our Marc records free of charge, eliminating the need for librarians to re-key biblio data onto your LMS.
Our quality-checking process means that fault returns are virtually eliminated. Our fault returns are less than 1 book in 10,000, which is impressively low for Indic-sourced stock.
Continual Improvement Policy
We welcome feedback and constantly look to improve the supply chain, our in-house processes, and the technology we use.