The Folio Society turns over new leaf with NetSuite

In 1947, in the midst of post-war austerity, The Folio Society was launched by Charles Ede to bring aesthetic pleasure to book lovers.

The war, in which Ede had served as an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment and then in the army’s intelligence corps, had seen paper rationing. Academics researching the journals and magazines of that time will confirm how inferior was the paper used. You have to treat those texts very gently now, as if they dated from pre-modern times.

The Folio Society was a membership-based book club until 2011. Previously a private company, it has been an employee-owned trust since 2021.

Its goal has always been to produce illustrated hardback editions of already published books, on high-quality paper and usually bound in buckram. Slip cases are normally used to protect the books.

Mark Mainstone, technology and business services director at The Folio Society, says that, with the advent of the internet and electronic publishing more widely, “there was a fear that publishing was going to be going in the wrong direction”.

“But we’re seeing it completely going the other way,” he adds. “People want to have that special book, or special versions of their favourite books, done beautifully in a way that we can do.”

Mainstone, who also worked for 14 years in a range of roles, from sales and marketing to IT, at Direct Wines, was brought in originally as a consultant to The Folio Society four years ago, joining formally in 2021.

His career has included stints in India for Direct Wines and as an IT director at Unipart, managing outsourced IT delivery and software teams.

“I gained a lot of experience [in India], running and working in outsourced environments, offshore environments, and just the whole experience that you get with any business, but setting up in a country such as India – which is very vibrant in all sorts of ways – comes with its challenges,” he says.

At The Folio Society, Mainstone encountered IT systems that looked antiquated, adding: “Their systems were very old, green screen and not talking to each other. Everything was manual. They brought me in to source a new system that would integrate and reduce complexities, improve efficiencies and understand what was going on in the business, in terms of the analytics, the KPIs [key performance indicators] and so on.

“We went through a whole selection process. Based on the business needs and the size of the business, we found NetSuite was the best thing to go for. And we did a lot of workshops to make sure the business saw how easy it would be to implement if they kept to the way NetSuite operates.”

As a result, The Folio Society ended up with less than 5% of bespoke configuration, he says, which “was a revolution for the business – it reduced so much complexity into simple processes”.

That system is for handling all the financial processes of The Folio Society’s business, but a new system is being regarded for the production of the books themselves too. “I can’t say what that will be just now, but it will integrate with NetSuite,” adds Mainstone.

Book production is a complex process, and Mainstone says there can up to 20 different suppliers: “It’s like an orchestra, essentially. Each book is months and years in the making.”

The Folio Society is well known for publishing “classics”, but it also publishes Ian Fleming’s Bond books and George R R Martin’s Game of Thrones sequence, while Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and his other stories are a staple.