Diamond announced two weeks ago that they would require barcodes on every product they distribute. Since I’m not sorta in charge of an independent comic book publishing company (Th3rd World Studios) I was really upset to hear this.

Right away I contacted our diamond rep who basically shrugged and said “uhhh I dunno what’s going on.” Our rep then attended big meeting where everything was explained and he got back to us again and said “Well I know now that this takes affect starting with books shipping in January and other than that they are preparing paperwork to inform the publishers on how this will work.”

So its been two weeks and Diamond still hasn’t really told us what is going on. This is a huge deal and drastically affects small publishers like ourselves. You’d think diamond would have their shit together and bother letting the people who are really affected by this know what is going on.

I don’t get why they decided to tell news sites before they contacted the publishers. To find out that we are going to have to spend a couple thousand bucks a year for upc and isbn junk from Newsarama and Pulbishers Weekly is horse crap. It was rude and disrespectful of Diamond to announce it to us in this way. But I guess that’s just how Diamond does things.

What’s even more frustrating is that even though we’ve gone through like three brand managers (what they call our diamond reps) I feel there are some Diamond employees who actually care about the publishers they are working with, but the corporate structure of diamond just lacks a serious level of communication so that even when someone is on your side they have no power or no real know-how of what’s going on.

A friend of mine, Lisa of Neptune Comics, pointed out in her blog that Diamond probably decided to make a mandatory use of barcodes because it served their needs:

I believe that part of this barcode thing is that Diamond is making their own comic book retail inventory management and Point of Sale software that they want to sell to store owners and they’ve realized how difficult inventory management is without barcodes. That could be part of why they are requiring it - it didn’t mean much to them until they had their own software to support and want to make sure it works. There were a couple of other “changes” they announced that I was also fairly sure came out of the problems they found while testing their software.

And if Lisa is right, I can totally see where Diamond is coming from. They don’t care about the little guys or who they affect. They own the market, have no competition and are just trying to make things easier on themselves. So from a business perspective I really can’t be mad at Diamond for making barcodes mandatory.

However, what I think is seriously screwed up is their lack of communication with publishers. Again its been how many weeks since this was announced and Diamond still hasn’t told us anything? All they’ve said is “uhh we are preparing something and will fill you in later.” It’s just rude and if they had handled the situation better and more diplomatically there would be tons of indy-publishers who would be less angry at them.