"It's May and we haven't seen a penny," city managing director Jeff Coelho said yesterday.

"Only one book has sold in the last 60 days," he said, and now the distributor wants to return its inventory.

Jeff Swartz, of the The Islander Group book distributors, sent Coelho an e-mail recently updating him on the poor sales and the large remaining inventory of the 5,000 initially printed.

"We have your account on hold because each month we just keep getting the books back from retailers," he wrote on April 29. "We also have too many in our warehouse and need to know where we can ship the extra copies. We need to ship about 3,500 copies back to your office."

Former managing director Ben Lee, a key Harris aide who wrote the book's preface, remains sold on the book's ultimate worth even if it doesn't make back even a tenth of the production cost.

Lee said the book was produced as a way to mark Honolulu's 100th anniversary, as a present for visiting dignitaries and officials as well as a historic record of the city's accomplishments of recent years.

"I think the book is a good book and it tells the story of Honolulu," Lee said. "It created a lot of civic pride. I'm proud of the city and the way it looks."

The 220-page book reads like a greatest hits of Honolulu city government with beautiful photos and descriptions of revitalized neighborhoods; bigger, prettier parks; and visions of a medley of municipal improvements with little mention of the struggles and debates that accompanied many of the projects.

Lee still says the money was well spent. He compares it with the more than $900,000 the City Council is spending to host the National Association of Counties conference in July. He said the books could be given to the county officials who attend that conference, as a relevant and attractive souvenir, better than a glossy picture book or canvas tote bag.

But it's unclear whether the current administration and a council that battled regularly with Harris will want to hand out a book written primarily by and about the former administration.

Earlier, Lee predicted the book would break even.

But Coelho said that was never going to happen.

"It was a good idea gone bad," Coelho said. "A bad business decision was made" when production costs exceeded potential sales revenue before the book even reached bookstores, he said.

Coelho shakes his head as he does the math. Because it cost $108,763 to produce 5,000 books, every book would have had to sell for $21.75 — more than the full retail price of $19.95 — just to break even. But after distribution costs and discounts figure in, each copy brings the city closer to $12.

Yesterday, he said the city could collect more than $9,500 if all the 1,109 books now in stores sell.

Swartz's e-mail said the book launched well but sales sank quickly. "The book got off to a great start and we had it in all of the right places but consumers just didn't seem to want to pick it up and buy it," he said. "Now, all of those stores are returning them to us.

Coelho said he hasn't been able to determine the total number of copies sold.

Council Budget Chairwoman Ann Kobayashi finds the situation "maddening." She noted that Harris planned and produced the project without council approval and then left the city stuck with the bill.

"What kind of legacy is he leaving?" Kobayashi asked.

Former Harris spokeswoman Carol Costa said the money came from within the Customer Services department that she supervised. She said it came from savings — money not spent on the annual report and other programs over two fiscal years.

Meanwhile, Coelho is trying to figure out a few more things:

• What to do with six desk-sized pallets of books, more than 3,700 copies that the city will need to pick up or begin to rack up storage fees.
• What happened to 87 copies — about $1,000 worth — that never made it to the distributor.
• Why $13,307 of the total bill — to pay for paper to produce the book — hasn't been paid and where he will find the money.

Costa and Lee said some books were given to visiting dignitaries. Costa doesn't understand why the paper bill wasn't paid earlier.

Lee said marketing will boost sales. "I think people will buy the book if they know about it," Lee said.

But Kobayashi is frustrated to hear that the books could become a storage issue. "I guess we'll have to give them away free so we won't have to store it," she said.