Booksellers, so used to always being the underdog, sometimes resort
to whining, and it’s not pretty—whenever I write a
too-fond description of one reading series, say, I’ll get a letter from
another bookseller complaining that I’m unfairly ignoring them.
Everybody’s allowed their prima donna moments, of
course—especially in a thankless job like bookselling—but
occasionally, complaints of unfairness obscure more important issues.
That’s happened in the last week, as bookseller disgust over one minor
controversy has stolen attention from a disturbing decision by
another publisher.
Independent publisher Chelsea Green is publishing Robert Kuttner’s
newest book, Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the
Power of a Transformative Presidency, exclusively through
Amazon.com‘s print-on-demand
service for two weeks. On his blog, Kuttner claims that the
exclusivity is because Chelsea Green “decided to get Obama’s
Challenge out as fast as possible, in time for the Democratic
National Convention,” and he’s also promising that his publisher is
“rushing out its regular print edition, which will be in bookstores
after Labor Day.”
Barnes & Noble seems to have gone batshitcrazy at the
news of this deal, announcing that it won’t ever stock Obama’s
Challenge on its shelves, and that its customers will have to
special-order the book. An “outraged” independent bookseller from
Vermont commented on the Publisher’s Weekly story by calling the
exclusive deal “a money-grubbing sellout” and “a slap in the face to
independents,” concluding by saying that “An trust [sic] has
been violated and it won’t be forgotten.” Other independents joined in,
vowing not to carry the book at all.
The sad thing about all this anger is that the book will have, at
best, two months of play before it disappears into irrelevance forever.
Meanwhile, Random House is making a decision with many worrisome
ramifications for the publishing industry and nobody seems to
care.
Random House imprint Ballantine Books paid $100,000 for the rights
to The Jewel of Medina and a hypothetical sequel by Spokane
author Sherry Jones. Medina is a novel written from the point of
view of Muhammad’s wife Aishah, and the book had all the signs of
becoming a best seller with the book-club crowd. When Ballantine sent
an advance copy of the book to Middle Eastern Studies professor Denise
Spellberg in the hopes of a blurb, Spellberg contacted Muslim message
boards and alerted them that the book “made fun of Muslims and their
history.” Soon, angry Muslims were calling for a boycott and
demanding that Random House disassociate from the book.
In late May, presumably out of fear of retribution, Random House
announced it would not publish The Jewel of Medina. This is
unprecedented in publishing, which has a proud history of not
backing down on controversial titles like The Satanic
Verses. Barnes & Noble and other booksellers should be
threatening to refuse to carry Random House titles to protest the
publisher’s cowardice. Instead, they’re too busy huffing over the loss
of sales caused by two weeks of exclusivity for a book that nobody will
remember in four months.