To recap: The Biltons surrounded themselves with “several large piles of books” as they sat on the floor “for a couple of hours” at a Barnes & Noble store. They “lobbed” the books back and forth and photographed pages with their iPhones, then “left the store without buying a thing.”

Only later did Bilton wonder, gosh: “Did we do anything wrong?” He sought out legal experts: “Did we indeed go too far?”

I have never heard of such self-absorbed rudeness or flat-out idiocy in a bookstore and was further incensed when the article revealed that Nick Bilton is the lead technology writer for the Times and author of a book about the future of iPhones, for heaven’s sake. But enough about me.

Defacto Shoplifters

“Yes, you and your wife went too far,” writes Denny Hatch of the website Target Marketing, “And your tacky little iPhones’ theft of copyright wasn’t the half of it.”

Hatch says Bilton was guilty of “de facto shoplifting — taking merchandise off the shelf, using it and then discarding it.”

In the world of direct marketing, this is “the equivalent of the catalog bandit — the woman that orders three party dresses from a catalog, chooses one to wear to the party and then returns all three the next day for a full refund.”

A Treacherous Course

The Biltons not only got away with ruining the merchandise, writes Richard Curtis at [e-reads], a reprinter of out-of-print books.

“By the mere act of clicking their iPhone a dozen times, Nick Bilton and his wife steered a treacherous course between fair use and piracy, between the Copyright Act of 1976 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Curtis observes.

Bilton tried to excuse himself by saying that “many people have a cavalier attitude toward using cameras to obtain copyrighted material.”

Curtis huffs, “Cavalier indeed. Our archives are packed with the exploits of ‘cavaliers.’ Up to now the Times has tiptoed around the issue of piracy in the book business …. But the time is approaching when the subject will take center stage, for it is by far the greatest threat to the future of authorship and the success of the e-book industry.”

Infringement Recipe

Perhaps it’s not Bilton’s actions but his article that should be held up to scrutiny, writes Bill Rosenblatt at Copyright and Technology. By describing how easy it is to photograph book pages in a store, Bilton has published an “infringement recipe” that could “induce” readers to do the same. Given the newspaper’s exposure and influence, “would [publishers] have a case against the New York Times?”

Swiping More Than the Bar Code

Of course, readers already have the “recipe” for photographic infringement, and more. As independent-publishing expert Dan Poynter puts it, customers regularly “visit a store, see a book they want, pull out their iPhone, check the price at Amazon and make a one-click order.”

To do this fast (before the staff sees ‘em! bad, bad customers!), iPhone users simply photograph the book and let technology take it from there. As Poynter explains:

“Now Amazon makes the process faster and easier with an iPhone App. With Price Check for iPhone, buyers can photograph the bar code of a book (or any other product), say the product name, or type it in. Amazon will find the product and offer it for sale—often for much less. Point, scan, check, click, done. And Amazon delivers.”

Blatantly Criminal

“If only the problem were just cell phone pilferers,” writes Suzanne White, author of bestselling astrology books. “People today can scan my entire books and put them up for sale all over the Internet — Kindle, Nook, Crook, et al, and nobody stops them. Others try. I try. But we don’t always succeed.”

White says that “Amazon now asks authors placing their books on Kindle to check a box attesting that they own the rights.” But elsewhere, piracy flourishes. One magazine group in France copied an astrology book by White and “pleaded innocence” when she sued. This group “tried to prove I was complicit because I had written horoscopes for one of their magazines. They had very powerful big guns.” She settled for 5000 francs.

In another case, “back in the beginning of Facebook, I found an
app called Chinese Horoscopes that used my text,” White recalls. “It was doing such good business that after much haggling, I eventually went into business with the guy! He had taken the texts quite innocently from a site that claims to ’share copyrights.’ I wrote a stinging how-dare-you letter to the owner who wrote back saying that because the company was offshore, I could do nothing.”

The commercial appeal of nonfiction books makes them vulnerable. “Astrology and Tarot and I Ching or diet or cookbooks and many other subject areas are commercial and easily exploited,” White says. But novels are copied illegally, too, especially in foreign countries.

“Does Stephen King know when his books are pirated in Czech or Hungarian, Chinese or Urdu? I doubt it,” White says. “Neither he nor his publishers can read those languages. Let’s face it. This is the Internet. There is money to be made in pirating any and everywhere. Publishers can’t police it any better than authors can.”

Most egregious for White was a matchmaking site in New York that “used my New Astrology™ book, pasted my photo on the front page …. then wrote to congratulate me! I could not get him to take it down. Instead, he hired someone to rewrite it all, paraphrased my whole book and changed the name of his site, and eventually tried to sell it to me for a million dollars (no lack of chutzpah there). Eventually he went bankrupt.”

(Granted it’s not saying much, but) I’ve never heard of such blatant stealing! It’s so criminal, and yet, as White says, going to court is not an option. “The folks who scan my books and pirate them are not rich people. I would be suing in the dark.”

Watching the Bookstore Go Up in Flames

Here’s another scam that floored me. In his article, “The Price of Now: Why I Hate Bookstores,” Kyle Bylin at Hypebot.com says he read the first chapter of Bilton’s book at a bookstore and was so taken with it that “I didn’t want to wait,” so he bought it right there, knowing “I could buy it cheaper on Amazon.”

He did consider another shortcut: “I’ve heard of people buying books from Barnes & Noble and returning them once their Amazon shipment arrives. I opted not to do that.”

My hero! We’re back to women and their pretty dresses! This scheme involves buying and returning the physical book after using the bookstore as your bag man. And won’t that book feel nice and new to the next customer.

Here’s what went through Bylin’s mind as he bought the book for a higher price in the bookstore than he would have paid at home, ordering it on Amazon: “In my head, I came up with the excuse — that while I’d be content with watching the store go up in flames for their high prices — I did like walking around, browsing, and the experience of holding books before I bought them elsewhere.”

So here’s a reader who understands the perilous situation of bookstores, all right. He’s just so jaded by the Internet that he sees the retail price as “a donation for feeling sorry about reading for free.” This was a real jaw-dropper for me. A … a…. donation? You mean, like a … a …. charity? Because you feel sorry for the bookstore?

Exactly, says Bylin. It’s the bookstore’s fault for overcharging the poor customer: “The instant gratification of getting what I want now, in my hands, something that I can carry home and read: Shouldn’t that be the bonus and not the cost?”

Yes, let’s all remember: The world is here to bring everyone like you instant gratification because today nobody owns anything, really. Copyright law is so “uncharted,” as Curtis says, that tools are everywhere to help you monetize, maximize, and Appize everything you want.

Being Almost That Stupid

And everybody’s in on this scam. even authors like Bilton, muses Poynter. “So,” he writes, “was Bilton’s ‘confession’ a publicity stunt to bring attention to his book?”

That would be hard to figure, since Bilton’s article makes him look so stupid. But maybe fame is fame: If you just get your name out there — even exploit the newspaper that (I guess) employs you — readers will race to buy your book.

But could that have been Bilton’s idea all along? I must say, when I listen to Bilton interviewed on the Internet, he seems far more knowledgeable than the kind of jackass who clogs up the aisles of a bookstore while photographing pages of new books and dumbly wondering, “Did we do anything wrong?”

Self-run Social Library Places

To be charitable, maybe Nick Bilton and his wife didn’t actively set out to steal. Maybe they simply represent masses of people who have changed their minds about brick-and-mortar stores in the last decade.

Certainly they, and perhaps millions like them, don’t think of bookstores as places to go to buy books. To them, in the 21st century, bookstores are just vehicles for “showcasing books for Amazon,” as Poynter puts it.

If that’s true, surviving bookstores may now be seen as “self-run social library places,” muses Suzanne White, because they offer book clubs, author events, classes, cooking demonstrations, storytelling hours, sidelines and even books lining shelf after shelf.

At these bookstores, observes White, “bookish and other types can meet and greet each other, have coffee and a sandwich and get to know authors, take courses and hear writers talk about their work.”

Wait a minute: That sounds familiar in a way that’s, you know, alarming.

A successful bookstore, White adds, is more like a “bricks-and-mortar social network,” and there it is, the retail/electronic world in reverse: No longer does Amazon need to mimic the retail experience with its “Look inside!” feature and browsing facsimile. Instead, bookstores should now try to be Facebook inside the retail environment, a place where you can import all your “friends” right there in the aisles.

Isn’t that what the Biltons were doing? They could just email those iPhone photos to their contractor, so they didn’t bother about that pesky problem of buying a book or actually reading it.

This is why Bilton’s “infringement recipe” is so seductive! Customers who “hate bookstores” like Bylin at Hypebot don’t want to wait, and you shouldn’t either! You can “like” bookstore displays, Tweet shelf talkers, video author events and order, order, order books from every other resource but the store itself.

The Entitlement of Internet Pricing

Thank heaven many readers agree with Ben Patterson, a reader who left this comment at Hypebot: Along with “paying rent, providing a community gathering spot [and] bringing cultural events into a neighborhood,” brick-and-mortar bookstores are also “responsible for collecting sales tax — all things Amazon does not do.”

And to bookstore hater Bylin himself, Patterson wrote: “I suppose, if you’d rather have a Cash4Gold or PaydayAdvance on every street corner, that is an alternative, but it feels a lot like Internet pricing entitlement is negatively impacting neighborhoods and service.”

My new hero! That is so true: The sense of entitlement people get from pricing things on the Internet has turned consumers into tyrants! That’s why Bilton and his wife felt so righteous camping out in the aisles; and why Bylin has the audacity to pity rather than respect bookstores.

Patterson understands this odd reasoning: Keep the playing field even by charging Amazon sales tax, he says, and people will stop believing that Amazon is somehow ahead of the game by eluding the law.

That’s the real meaning of internet entitlement, I guess. Once you have your smart phone, anything on display in some dumb brick-and-mortar store is all yours for the taking.

According to Bilton’s article, the couple sat down “cross-legged on the floor” and surrounded themselves with “several large piles of books,” which they “lobbed back and forth” (!) for “a couple of hours” (!!) while researching “ideas for a new home that we are planning to buy.”

Isn’t that nice. Whenever you need a library, just go to a bookstore, Bilton suggests. There you can turn new books into used books for all the customers to follow.

Then Bilton and his wife “snapped a dozen pictures of book pages with our iPhones” and “went home without buying a thing.” Very tidy. Bilton does mention that they “placed the books back on the shelf” like the Good Samaritans they see themselves to be.

A Disturbing Idea

But later that night, Bilton was struck by a disturbing idea: “I asked my wife: Did we do anything wrong? And, I wondered, had we broken any laws by photographing those pages?”

So conscientious! After all, those pages were protected by copyright, a very big word for a very important concept. You’d think an explanation of copyright would be the point to an article with the headline: “Can Your Camera Phone Turn You Into a Pirate?”

But no. The authorities Bilton consults compare the use of cell phones that photograph book pages today with the use of Xerox machines that duplicated book pages during the ’70s, and the use of Napster programs that shared music files during the ’90s.

According to these experts, technology has advanced so quickly that copyright laws can’t keep up, so nobody really knows the exact definition of piracy when it comes to cell phone cameras. But Bilton’s journalistic drive demands a deeper truth: Will he get caught?

“Need I worry yet that a phalanx of lawyers will soon grab me between the Home Decor and New Age aisles at Barnes & Noble?”

Well, if I were the two thugs running this chain, I would have thrown the Biltons off the escalator, but you know, bookstore clerks are nice. They allowed this couple to clog the aisles and rummage through new books on the floor because it might have sounded rude to ask them to put their !@#$%^&*! cell phones away.

That leaves readers to ponder a thought by Julia A. Ahrens, associate director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School: “By the time this becomes an issue,” she tells Bilton, “we might not even have bookstores anymore.”

That’s comforting, isn’t it, Nick? One day the same might be said of libraries.

Bookstore Rudeness

I know that bookstores have long been invaded by ill-mannered customers who blithely sit down in the aisles, break the spines of new titles, “lob” books around or — these I could throttle — buy a book on Amazon and bring it into a bookstore to have autographed at an author event.

But Bilton’s article raises new questions about the effect of cell phones on social manners in general. Maybe we’ve all grown accustomed to cell phone users driving erratically or talking loudly on the street or in elevators and restaurants because for some reason, they think their conversation takes precedence over everyone else’s experience.

What I can’t figure out are bookstore customers who blatantly use cell phones to compare prices with Amazon’s while they walk around the New Release table, or worse, take cell phone photos of books they might want to read so they can buy them on Amazon later.

I won’t go into Kindle owners who actually bring … well, you get the point.

This is not just rude behavior; it’s profane. A bookstore offers browsing opportunities and instant camaraderie with staff and authors that we never find on the Internet. There’s something sacred about a place where censorship is fought routinely, unknown authors are welcomed and introduced and young adults who’ve inexplicitly stopped reading are lured back to books they’ll treasure forever. For a customer to interrupt this kind of sacred exchange because they’re so entirely self-involved seems tragic.

Thanking Our Lucky Stars

The Biltons don’t appear to be stupid or cheap — I bet if you asked them, they’d want to contribute to the betterment of bookstores. Then, too, Nick Bilton is the lead technology writer for the New York Times and author of I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works (Crown; 304 pages; $25), a book published last fall about the impact of iPads and smart phones. That makes Bilton an expert. Yet he doesn’t know the meaning of copyright? When he and the missus took advantage of the bookstore staff’s good graces, he had to ask, “Did we do anything wrong?”

So come on, Nicky, get off the phone. Think how you’d feel if somebody photographed your book and blithely departed “without buying a thing.” The future you write about can and should provide Americans with every kind of reading option, most especially the bookstore option.

Not one parent at the show could open Tiger, Tiger to even begin page one because it’s so menacing, so terrifying and so creepy …. or so it seemed by the look of it.  The fact that the author, Margaux Fragoso, lived to tell the story would seem astonishing enough;  that she writes in a beautiful, gripping narrative voice with the most astounding insights opens our ears (and, incredibly, our hearts) to otherwise unspeakable matters.

I can say that once you do open the book and you do begin reading, it’s impossible to put down. And boy, is it needed. Fragoso refuses to be either victim or avenger. What she learned about herself and human nature keeps us appalled and instructed every step of the way. From the start, her choices in life are so unexpected and in a way so thrilling that … well, again, you hafta see for yourself. The wait may be excruciating, because Tiger, Tiger is going to simmer (and not on the back burner) at Farrar, Straus & Giroux until its March publication.

(BTW, thank you, Autumn, at From The TBR Pile, a blog for readers that’s turned up a good handful of other books named Tiger, Tiger [or Tyger, Tyger in goblin speak] that you can find here. And extra thanks of course to poet William Blake who started it all.)

*About the Trade Show

NCIBA stands for Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, and this group, like a dozen other bookseller organizations across the country, sets up a mini-convention every Fall so that bookstore buyers can be sure they’ve got their inventory ready before crazed gift-givers stampede the store.

This year, Publishers Weekly reports, attendance was down at these regional trade shows all over the country as independent bookstores continue to close. And yet despite eBook readers like the Kindle and iPad stealing storekeepers’ sales by offering so much text space you could fit over a thousand books on a single unit, a new light is dawning. First, customers who love the experience of holding and reading a physical book are buying them in stacks (gosh, it turns out that actual books make better gifts than empty space on a reading device). Second, Google is late but still may launch its own eBook inventory in December, and went it does, Google Editions will be offered exclusively through independent bookstores.

This could be a huge boost  and maybe a saving one for indies. Of course Amazon loyalists will resist it, but because the treasure trove of Google Editions is said to be even more massive than Amazon’s and could be faster and more easy to negotiate through indie websites, Google Editions could wipe out the unfair competitive advantage that book vendors from Amazon to chain stores have been using to drive indies out of business.

Equally important, again, is the fact that so many readers are finding that they miss the tactile environment of “real” books and don’t enjoy the impersonal robot look of eBook readers after all. Finally bloggers and Tweeters are discussing what we’re not told about the Kindle experience — the dull screen, sanitized text, lack of page numbers and phony Victorian drawings of authors (Poe, Dickinson, Joyce) who end up looking more funereal than literary. Remember, if you’re a supporter of independent bookstores, November and December are the make-or-break months, plus it’s so much fun to buy personal gifts for everyone on our lists, including kids, in a single bookstore.

DRIB (Don’t Read if Busy)

I hope when Tiger, Tiger is released that Farrar’s publicity department will raise an issue that’s hit the headlines this week and caused a Facebook/Twitter boycott of Amazon regarding a title called The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child Lover’s Code of Conduct by Philip R. Greaves.

Here’s a book that provides a real service to child molesters by showing how to get around those pesky laws protecting minors and how to stand proud about not using condoms with children, how to make the whole experience kindly and fun for everyone,  and much much more.

If you ever needed proof that nobody’s home at Amazon, here it is: The company routinely bars pornography and other sexually explicit or offensive titles, yet Amazon, caught sleeping at the switch when this pro-pedophile book got listed on Kindle –  tried to hide behind First Amendment issues as messages of outrage came pouring.

Anderson Cooper of CNN does a good job covering the issue and finding out just how icky and dangerous The Pedophile’s Guide can be by interviewing everyone’s favorite therapist, Dr. Phil McGraw, who makes enormous sense about the difference between free speech and exploitation. Cooper also explores with New Yorker legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin why “no court in the country” would ever force Amazon to remove the book, and why that’s a good thing (it’s up to you, Amazon, not the courts) in this important video.

This week enough people protested to shame Amazon into removing the book, thank heaven, but the point to make here is that Fragoso’s insight about pedophiles’ sense of entitlement in Tiger, Tiger is mirrored in The Pedophile’s Guide and useful for society to know.

Welcome Back, Laura H

Not so scary but equally mesmerizing is another hot-as-a-firecracker work of nonfiction, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (Random), which, as lush and addictive as her first blockbuster, Seabiscuit, comes out right on time for the holidays.

And what a book it is. Unbroken takes off like a shot as we watch a manic boy, born to be a juvenile delinquent in the 1920s, named Louis Zamperini running away from cops and storekeepers so fast that instead of going to prison, he’s discovered by track-and-field coaches and wins his way into competing as the youngest distance runner at the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

(Two quickies from the thousands of absorbing details Hillenbrand unearths: 1) German fans were so entranced with American sprinter Jesse Owens that as soon as stepped off the train in Berlin, scissors-wielding crowds surged forward  “and began snipping off bits of his clothing” with such fervor that a near-naked “Owens leapt back onto the train.” 2) When not racing, the incorrigible Louis Z. went around Berlin stealing “souvenirs,” including a Nazi flag that was seductively hanging in front of Hitler’s very Reich Chancellery. Two guards caught him, but he talked his way out and was even given the flag to take home.)

Although terrified of airplanes, Louis Z becomes a turret gunner on the WWII bomber Green Hornet but is shot down in the Pacific with two other airmen, and they all slowly starve on a disintegrating raft until Japanese planes spot them in the middle of a million miles of ocean and begin strafing just as Louis dives under the raft where — ta da! — sharks have been waiting for just this moment. And that’s just the end of the Prologue.

Other writers might better describe how it feels to be a speck in an indifferent and watery wasteland, but that giant existential loneliness really hits home, thanks to Hillenbrand’s incredible research and edge-of-your-seat storytelling. Sure to be another dense and luscious bestseller and a great gift for non-sailors, just as her last book Seabiscuit was beloved by non-horselovers.

The recent death of Berkeley, Calif., bookseller and activist Pat Cody reminds me what a privilege it is to work with books at any time.

Pat and her husband Fred opened Cody’s Books in 1956, long before the emergence of computers or chain stores, and right in the middle of a conservative backlash called McCarthyism that ravaged free speech almost as badly as the Patriot Act has in our last decade.

The Codys are remembered as champions of civil rights, but throughout even the most turbulent decades, when gas masks hung by the cash register and protesters squared off against police outside the store, their core belief was the value and the right and the privacy of reading.

To Fred and Pat, it didn’t matter who walked into the store — a homeless self-publisher (hardly an oxymoron) or a professor of physics from UC Berkeley: Matching the right book with the right customer was the highest act of political engagement they knew. Their first and last job as booksellers, they felt, was to contribute to the experience of quiet solitude that can only happen during the act of reading. When the reader’s mind meets the author’s mind, they believed, the world will change. Thank heaven that Andy Ross, who bought Cody’s Books in 1977, believed the same thing.

Pat was not the emotional one  — she never got as teary as Fred when it came to expressing political or literary passion. I remember Fred’s voice cracking when he talked about the day Aldous Huxley came into Cody’s Books (then a “hole in the wall” the size of a living room). “He was like me,” Fred said of the nearly blind writer walking slowly around the store examining everything, even the signs on the shelves. “If he saw something in print, he had to read it.”

By the time Cody’s moved to Telegraph Ave., where Fred allowed antiwar protestors to meet on the triangle of empty space in front of the store (so they wouldn’t “unlawfully congregate” in public streets), the mood of passionate engagement inside was the same as the mood outside.  Stories are legion about Cody’s Books in various stages of fervor and chaos, with employees running around answering questions and books waiting in unopened cartons and political meetings stopping store traffic, when suddenly Fred would march calmly and joyously out of a back room, throw his arm around the shoulder of a clerk and say, “Look at this great book that just came in!” and insist the clerk turn to Page One and start reading.

Some said the store remained open because of and in spite of Pat and Fred’s politics. In the early 1950s, they had gone to Mexico rather than succumb to FBI demands that they publically name Communist friends. According to their son Anthony, while in Mexico “they attended social gatherings at the home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and met luminaries like Pablo Neruda, who declared that Pat’s “lemon meringue pie was the best he ever had.” Fred gave up a career as a professor rather than sign the dreaded “Loyalty Oaths” (stating they weren’t members of the Communist Party) that in California would split academia down the middle. (This controversy lasted right into the 1970s, when San Jose State University hired Fred and Pat’s good friend, the author Jessica Mitford, as a distinguished professor, then fired her for refusing to be fingerprinted or to sign a Loyalty Oath.)

It’s tempting to say that Pat Cody was the last of the Old Lefties, those great former communists whose idealism never quite agreed with the harsh realities of the Communist Party. So they left the American CP, one by one, channeling their hopes for a just society into the civil rights movement that would also become a literary force, at least for the Codys, beginning with the Beat Movement of the 1950s.

One of the most affectionately revealing stories about Fred’s passion for free speech took place at that very time, when San Francisco police arrested City Lights publisher and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti for “willfully and lewdly printing, publishing and selling obscene writings,” namely Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and Other Poems.

As “a gesture of refutation and dissent,” Fred feverishly stacked copies of Howl floor-to-ceiling in every window of Cody’s Books and waited with arms folded and smoke coming out of his ears for the Berkeley police to come get him. As poet Joyce Jenkins later wrote in Poetry Flash, “Berkeley’s tradition of intellectual freedom held fast, and no arrests were made” — much to Fred’s disappointment.

Pat Cody’s role in all this was less flamboyant yet often more trenchant, more enduring, even more iron-willed than Fred’s.  With a master’s degree in economics from Columbia University, Pat wrote articles for the business division of The Economist magazine, and this important trickle of cash helped pay the mortgage on the Codys’ now famous Fulton Street house, where they were raising four kids.

And it was Pat the tough-minded bookkeeper who kept Cody’s alive by somehow juggling an increasing payroll, mounting bills from impatient publishers and an expensive inventory that kept spreading with every gorgeous art book, German import, and self-published book that even Fred couldn’t sell.

You can read about all this in Pat’s own memoir, Cody’s Books: The Life and Times of a Berkeley Bookstore, 1956 to 1977, but I think the way I will always remember and feel inspired by Pat is her work as the visionary organizer who built a national movement called DES Action from her kitchen table.

Like millions of pregnant women from the 1940s to the 1960s, Pat had been prescribed a drug to prevent miscarriage called diethylstilbestrol or DES, which, she learned to her horror in 1974, was causing cancer and infertility in millions, including, possibly, her own daughter.

The first chapter of Pat’s second book, DES Voices: From Anger to Action begins as Pat the DES mother fights tears while breaking the news to her 18-year-old DES daughter, Martha. It’s such a heartbreaker that readers are amazed how quickly Pat then matter-of-factly sits down with other DES mothers to create a model of grassroots activism.

Not only do they discover that doctors are unaware of the drug’s effect and how to diagnose it, they realize that DES Action is the only group committed to tracking down and alerting the millions of DES mothers, daughters and sons (and, tragically, a similarly affected third generation). And then DES Action must convince medical researchers, policymakers, foundations and legislators (Pat and her daughter Nora, who becomes DES Action’s executive director, testify before a number of Congressional groups) that inattention to DES is simply the first crucial domino. Push it over and you see a long, long line of others that collectively should be called Neglect of Women’s Health in General.

But perhaps the greatest irony in DES Voices is Pat’s warning to present generations: Synthetic estrogens, the most damaging component of DES, did not disappear when DES was taken off the market, Pat explains. They have turned up in Hormone Replacement Therapy for menopausal women today and in plastic bottles and plastic food containers that may be causing the same kind of endocrine disruption that Rachel Carson first wrote about in her classic book, Silent Spring.

I don’t know how they did it, but somehow DES Action quietly got the news about plastic bottles channeled through enough sources that today, stainless steel and other reusable bottles are becoming the universally acknowledge safe choice. Well, I take that back. I think they did it because Pat Cody was behind this movement from the start.

All this came to mind when Pat died, but there is one more stunning realization I’d like to remember, thanks to that dear gracious woman who brought dignity and grace to just about everything she thought or wrote or spoke about.

At a time when many people approaching 90 (Pat was 87) are overwhelmed by, you know, kids today trying to read while multi-tasking on iPhones or checking in on Twitter or playing with iPads and Kindles, Pat was thrilled by all of it.

She published DES Voices through lulu.com and cheered when Google announced itself as the “eBook ally for independent bookstores.”

She was intrigued by the idea of eBook readers (“think of the trees they’ll save”) and loved the enormous changes occurring in libraries thanks to the computer revolution. Few real witnesses were left, after all, who could observe, as she did, that “people need libraries now even more than they did in the Great Depression.”

And yet even when I heard Pat’s characteristic optimism flow forth about the digital revolution, an uneasy feeling would descend that made me feel like just another whippersnapper messing around on the Internet playground with new and trendy gadgets promising to “enhance” (who are we kidding?)  the experience of reading.

Perhaps Pat’s most enduring legacy, along with her voracious love of books  and a talent for super-organization and good-natured survival skills that still distinguish the independent bookseller, is the belief that she brought to the simple act — the subversive, the heartfelt, the intellectual, the freeing, the spiritual and the profound act — of reading a book.

I keep thinking about that delicious homophobic snafu that stuck it to Amazon last month and demonstrated the growing power of Twitter, however deliberately flash-in-the-pan it was.

The incident roared to life a month ago and died so fast that it didn’t seem important, but for me, something oddly familiar about it kept pinging away at the old postmenopausal memory. Finally I remembered an event 10 years ago in which Amazon behaved in an even more bizarre and homophobic manner that still has relevance today.

The Latest Episode 

Last month Amazon abruptly removed gay/lesbian-themed titles from its powerful sale ranking system. In a weekend, thousands of books were ineligible for certain title searches, best seller lists and other critical functions.

An author sent a query to Amazon’s customer-service department asking why the books were being removed. Ashley D of Amazon.com Member Services replied that “we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists.” 

Well, “adult” is hardly the category to dump an entire classification of books, since the term signifies “pornographic” (think: “adult’ bookstores).  But it is the correct term to use if Amazon officially believes that everything homosexual is offensive and needs to be removed from, you know, normal people’s eyes. 

(A thoughtful explanation of why a sales ranking on Amazon is so important, along with a list of explicitly sexual hetero books that were not censored and non-explicitly sexual gay books that were, can be found here.)

The First Irony

According to Lisa Derrick in the Huffington Post, after the purge, if you searched for books under the category of “homosexuality,” the first title to pop up was the anti-gay self-help book, “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.” This title (which teaches “gender esteem,” tee hee, what a concept) continued to have a sales ranking, while a long-established book for children about lesbians raising kids, “Heather Has Two Mommies,” was pulled from the ranking and search functions. This made Amazon look twice as bigoted (or dumb) as before.

(Go here for a lengthy list of LGBT books whose sales rankings were similarly removed.)

Enter Twitter

And just as suddenly an outpouring of outrage against perceived homophobia at Amazon flooded into Twitter so immediately and furiously (and delightfully) that Amazon felt pressed to make an official statement. Oh, it wasn’t just gay books that were affected, the company said – the problem “impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories.”  Amazon blamed the whole thing on a “glitch in our systems” and an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error.” 

Now wait, the Tweeters asked: Would a “glitch” understand the difference between a book that says homosexuality is good (“Heather Has Two Mommies”) and a book that says homosexuality is awful (“A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality”)? 

No, answereth the Tweeters, growing even more  appalled in new discussions with such wonderfully Twitter hashtags (discussion subjects) as “#glitchmyass,” “#apologyfail” and “#amazonfail.” 

The Boycott Virus

The gist of most responses was that Amazon got caught censoring gay books and betrayed customers by trying to lie its way out of the problem. More outrage erupted all over the Internet in which so many writers swore they would never use Amazon again that a “boycott virus” spread like, well, a disease.

Egad, not a boycott! responded Amazon as it scrambled to reposition all the books in question in a very short period of time. And that, the company thought, was the end of it.

Some discussions now say the Tweets overreacted because they’re all young, they want to rebel, they’ve confused gay marriage with gay anything and are looking for a parent figure to pull down. 

Or, as one thoughtful response suggested: This sort of confusion happens in large corporations all the time: A department at Amazon decided to defang sexually explicit books so they wouldn’t offend the general readership, but “the directive mutated from ‘let’s discreetly unrank the really raunchy stuff’ to ‘we’d better be careful to put an “adult” tag on anything that could imaginably offend anyone.’ “ 

That would mean it was a glitch in the system, but of the human kind, and nobody’s responsible because Amazon covered it up.

The Other Episode

For the last month, though, I’ve kept thinking about another occasion that occurred in 1999 when  Amazon legally, officially (and delightfully) embarrassed itself by deciding to “out” the co-owners of the Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis. 

You can read the deposition transcripts from one of my old columns here. 

In this case the co-owners of Amazon Bookstore, an independent feminist bookseller founded in 1970 (i.e., decades before Amazon.com came along), asserted that  their brick-and-mortar store had been losing money in the ’80s and ’90s because the online book retailer in Seattle had taken the Amazon name. Indeed, vendors, customers, reporters and online readers so often confused Amazon.com with Amazon Bookstore that the co-owners in Minneapolis spent as much time resolving mistakes as they did running their store.

Attempts  to find a peaceful solution through talks with Amazon.com were rebuffed, so the co-owners sued, citing trademark infringement.

The Second Irony

You’d think depositions in a case like this would focus on what happens when a new company takes on an existing company’s name, yes? Questions might be: Who was damaged and who should  be responsible when the established bookstore name gets confused with the new online name?

But no. Noting that Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis identified itself as a feminist bookstore, lawyers for Amazon.com began asking the co-owners questions like this: 

Q: Have  you had any interest in promoting lesbian ideals in the community?

Q: I’ll ask you this, are you gay?

Q: In the email it states, all the owners at this time of Amazon Bookstore Cooperative and historically have been lesbians … Is that an accurate statement, to your knowledge?

Q: Are any of the employees at the Bookstore gay… ?

Q: Are any of the women at the bookstore married to a woman?

You can imagine the farcical tone of this scene. The lawyer for Amazon Bookstore was objecting vociferously but getting nowhere. The shocked co-owners  found themselves having to remind Amazon.com’s lawyer that “it’s not legal (for a woman) to be married to a woman.” (Remember this was 1999 when gay marriage wasn’t even a gleam in Gavin Newsom’s eye.) And the Amazon.com lawyer kept saying, well, if the women at Amazon Bookstore can’t marry,  “do they have [women] partners?” 

As to what sexual orientation had to do with trademark infringement, the Amazon.com lawyer said as far as he was concerned, being gay was as unimportant as the color of a person’s hair, but “obviously from the perspective of my client (italics mine),  we think [sexual orientation is] important to the case, the defense’s case, and that is one of the grounds for relevance.”

And why would it be relevant? I admit I had a little fun in my column imagining these attorneys planning their strategy before the trial. At some point the lightbulb went off and somebody said, “Wait a minute – these women are dykes! If we base our defense on proving they’re a bunch of lezbos,  we’ll walk away with the trial!”

But the irony was, the co-owners were too nice: Their lawyer half-humorously suggested that if Amazon.com could get away with harassing the Amazon Bookstore co-owners about whether they were lesbians, the co-owners should be allowed to ask Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos if he were gay. 

That would have been terrifically good copy for the media, but also a cheap shot, so Amazon Bookstore never sank to the level of Amazon.com. The co-owners did try to explain that Amazon.com sold many more gay books than Amazon Bookstore did and that Amazon Bookstore sold many more general books than gay books, but neither point made much impression. 

Eventually the co-owners settled for what I hoped was a thoroughly obscene amount of money (never disclosed), and bless ‘em, that bookstore has continued on its feminist way (see 2007 interview here). 

How Amazon Works

Why go through all this again? Well, first, to understand how Amazon.com worked 10 years ago. If the company thought it was playing hardball by disclosing the sexual identity  of the staff of Amazon Bookstore, we need to know.

We should know that the gay-themed questions were being asked not just by some attorney fishing for bait he could use later but “from the perspective of my client,” which is to say the people who own and operate Amazon.com. 

Is There a Pattern?

So our question today might be: Could those homophobic people still be calling the shots at Amazon after 10 years? Could they be setting policy? Are they  capable of screwing up the sales rankings for gay and lesbian books and using the term “adult,” i.e. porno, as a reason?

I think these two very bizarre episodes suggest a pattern inside Amazon of people acting negatively toward anything gay or lesbian (don’t even ask about transsexual or bi). 

And I wish that Bezos, who has made a career out of being jus’ folks in his “customer-centric” way, would have given an interview or answered the phone or come forward in some way to sort out the matter in person.

I may end up posing quite a number of Things I’d Love to See in the publishing industry, but a recent email from an editor in New York points out what a tangled knot mainstream publishing has become — too tangled, it seems, to make any substantive changes. 

The editor’s message responds to a recent column about publishers ending the tradition of publishing a book in hardcover first, then waiting a year for the trade paperback (if any). I proposed that publishers start with the cheaper but still beautiful trade paperback edition first. Especially for books by unknown or midlist authors, the already wasteful practice of publishing hardcovers seems senseless.

And now that money is short, readers are far more likely to take a chance on trade paperbacks; book reviewers who used to require hardcovers (honestly! I haven’t heard that one in 20 years) have been overtaken by bloggers who LOVE paperbacks; and since even publishers dismiss hardcovers as “promotional copies for the trade paperback,” my thought is: Just reverse the process.

Here’s what the editor from mainstream house has to say about that: “If you want to push the idea of trade paper originals, perhaps you could examine how authors expectations’ for an advance would have to adjust, and perhaps how publishers might also try more dynamic royalty approaches rather than the industry standard royalty, which is 7.5% for tradepaper.”

Well, okay! I thought. A few adjustments on either side (author/publisher), and off we go. 

But no. It’s not that agents and authors I talked to don’t love the idea – they do. Rather the old suspicions that have been built into an adversarial relationship for centuries come crawling to the fore.

“I’d be fine with it [the idea of publishing trade paperback editions first],” said one agent. “If the publisher offers a bigger advance because after all, the author is taking the risk so the publisher can save money; and if the publisher supports a real marketing campaign that explains to reviewers and booksellers and interviewers why choosing a trade paperback format does not mean the book is substandard (because everybody thinks hardcovers are top of the line), and if the publisher sends the author out on both real and virtual book tours to make it clear the trade paperback form is better when it’s the first off the press, then we’d consider it.” 

Yikes. Well, let’s go back to the publishing side. When I asked the editor to give me an example of “more dynamic royalty approaches” the response was, “I don’t really  have any answers.” And then came the usual criticism:

“The argument for the trade-paperback-only is an old one, and it always starts from the consumers’ point a view. Which isn’t a bad place to start! It doesn’t overcome the structural problems: reviewers favor hardcovers, and some review organs have ruled out paperbacks altogether. Bookstores also tend to favor hardcover display space over paperbacks (note which format comes first as you walk into the store). And the financial model that authors and agents and publishers are used to argues against it: the royalties generate more slowly; the costs are amortized more slowly.”

Well, the booksellers I talked to agree only this far: Everybody makes more money from hardcovers, when they sell. If the books just sit there because nobody knows about them or about the author, no matter how hard the bookstore’s staff gets behind them, sales are hardly going to be brisk. 

“Of course we display hardcovers at the front of the store!” a bookseller said impatiently. “They’re the newest books from the publisher. Then you go to the reprints.”

So here is my problem. Until publishers make an orchestrated and committed (and hyped) effort to change, and appeal to colleagues (not adversaries) in the book trade to change, too, nothing is going to happen. 

(I know the old argument: Joining together to create industry-wide change could be called collusion and we’d all be sued! Okay, so don’t join together. Somebody make a decision. It would take only one of the big houses to start the ball rolling before the other houses would follow. We know this because the model is so familiar:  Whenever some new thing, like say, books with “YOU” in the title, or dogs in the text or vampires on the cover, hits a nerve, then they all do it. That’s the way things work in publishing.)

I’m hardly the first to say that resistance to change is going to be the doom of mainstream publishing. But I admit it’s just beginning to sink in that Internet publishing has taken off so fast that New York publishers may have only five or six years before the empire really starts to crumble. 

Of course they’re all making concessions to new ways of publishing on the Internet, but in terms of setting out those “dynamic new approaches” that are needed right  now – come on, it’s the Obama era, for crying out loud – I worry that a new kind of paralysis is setting in.

I don’t want this response from Harold Augenbraum of the National Book Foundation – sponsor of the National Book Award ceremony I wrote about Monday – to get lost in the comments page so I’ve brought it up front here.

It’s a stirring defense of an evening I will always regard, I’m afraid, with “unrelentingly negative” thoughts, as he puts it, but there is information here we should all celebrate regarding the hard work the NBA has done (and that I didn’t mention in my column) to get these awards noticed outside New York. At the same time – well, my reply follows his letter below.

Dear Pat,

Your column is interesting, but missing many facts:

If you check YouTube, you will find all the 2007 National Book Awards acceptance speeches on line. If you check YouTube in the coming weeks, you will find all the 2008 acceptance speeches on line.

As for webstreaming, after careful consideration and research, we at the National Book Foundation have concluded that no one watches them. Instead, we will upload the National Book Awards speeches to the National Book Foundation web site and send notices to the National Book Foundation email list (currently about 10,000) to let subscribers know on a regular basis what is now up. You will note that the National Book Awards Finalist Announcement video, filmed in Chicago in October, is on the Foundation’s web site. You may also want to consult with your local independent bookstores and libraries. In October, after extensive phone calling to each and every independent bookstore in America listed with the American Booksellers Association and in response to selected polling of bookstore owners and booksellers, the National Book Foundation sent posters to 1,000 independent bookstores, along with 100 bookmarks each about the National Book Awards Finalists. We also sent 100 bookmarks each to 2,100 libraries–also after calling every one of them to find out the best person at each library to receive them. This month we will send an additional 300,000 bookmarks (the medium both librarians and booksellers requested: they do not have room for posters, according to them) focusing on the National Book Awards Young People’s Winner and Finalists. In January, the Foundation will send 300,000 bookmarks–again to libraries and independent booksellers–focused on the Foundation’s 5 Under 35 selections of younger fiction writers. As for sending the authors around the country to promote reading, unfortunately, after doing this for several years, we found that the numbers reached were too small to be meaningful for the costs incurred, so that other means, from very low-tech bookmarks to higher tech eNewsletters, webcasting (not webstreaming, which reaches very few people), and podcasts are more effective. You will also note that on the National Book Foundation’s web site are exclusive interviews with each of the Finalists, which can be downloaded and printed out and read at your leisure or to accompany bookstore or library displays, along with the posters and bookmarks. When we asked booksellers and librarians if they wanted DVDs, there was a resounding no: they don’t have DVD players in their stores in most cases, won’t install them just for the National Book Awards, and don’t have table space. If they did, wouldn’t they have running loops of the new-fangled author videos all the publishers are making?

You will also note that only 3 of the 20 judges this year live in New York City, and that last year 7 out of 20 Finalists lived in the three states on the west coast (see David Ulin’s column and blogs about the National Book Awards in the past two years in the LA Times), and that this year’s lifetime achievement Medal was given to Berkeley resident Maxine Hong Kingston, last year Sacramento native (but New York resident) Joan Didion, and the year before California resident Adrienne Rich. You may also want to note that five of this year’s Finalists were published by independent publishers, who attended the ceremony in force subsidized by the mainstream publishing houses. And Horace Engdahl did not say that the American publishing community was insular, he said American writing was insular: there is a big difference, and the defensiveness came not from a defense of the publishing community but from a defense of the variety of American writing.

Yes, we changed some things at the National Book Awards to try to make them more fun and “glitzy”. That resulted in more press than ever. Will it sell more books? I don’t know. But I do know that trying new things and evaluating them to see their good points and bad points and then either continuing or rejecting those changes depending on their effectiveness is not a bad thing.

You may also want to note that the money raised at the National Book Awards dinner, funded mainly by the large New York presses, has paid for all of the above, that writers are invited to the event free or at cost (if they can afford it), and that nonprofit presses also get a special rate, which is also subsidized by the mainstream houses. You might also like to know that moving the National Book Awards from the “modest hotel” you mention to a “posh” downtown location cost exactly the same as the hotel in midtown. And that Socialista is not exactly a “hotsy-totsy in-spot” and that the after-party was underwritten by two independent presses who do believe that a night of fun to celebrate the selections of some of the best writers in the United States is a good thing.

Last year’s National Book Awards Winner in Young People’s Literature, Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, has sold 250,000 copies, according to its publisher, not bad for a hardcover teen book. Could National Book Award Winners and Finalists sell more? Of course, which is why we’re trying new methods to see how to spread the word more widely. Some will work, some won’t. But to criticize the National Book Awards and the publishing community for one night of fun in which 13 wonderful authors get to dress up and celebrate their craft in front of the business people of their industry–not their sales, their craft–is something I consider one of the better parts of the business. If you want to criticize it, go ahead, but at least temper your comments with some of the good aspects of what goes on that evening and get all your information straight. How unrelentingly negative can you be.

Regards,

Harold Augenbraum
Executive Director
National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards

Holt replies:

Dear Harold,

I’m glad we agree that trying new ways to get word out about the National Book Awards, and making adjustments when the new ideas fail, is “a good thing.”

Let’s start with the difference in perception between the “modest” hotel and the “posh” hotel.

Here is the modest hotel, the New York Marriott Marquis, where the National Book Awards were held in 2007 (I’m assuming you used this ballroom):

And here is the posh hotel, Cipriani Wall Street, where the 2008 awards were held:

So it’s not the money you spent that makes the difference. It’s the decision to change the look of the NBAs from modest to posh so the event would be mentioned by the press as a glamorous shindig on the New York publishing scene. That was the goal, and apparently you’re still happy with its impact on the rest of the country. I needn’t remind you that many of the librarians and independent booksellerss you’ve been calling to get those NBA posters displayed are going broke in these perilous economic times and might feel, you know, unimpressed and maybe a little rankled by the choice of venue and the message it sends.

About those librarians and independent booksellers: I must say a wave of nostalgia* came over me when I thought of your dedicated NBA staff members making what must have been thousands of phone calls and sending thousands of packages to get NBA posters and bookmarks into libraries and bookstores all over the country. Just because I never saw the poster doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, and when it comes to the exhaustive effort it takes to get anything literary on anybody’s walls, kudos to the National Book Foundation.

Still, if last year’s poster is any indication, the problem is worse than I thought. Yes, the 2007 poster is on the National Book Foundation’s website and is downloadable for bookstores and libraries, all right, but frankly it’s so drab I wouldn’t put it up in my garage. It’s an all-type list of titles and authors (nary a photo) with floating illustrations of – well, hard to tell: either parts of tables or the letter M – that doesn’t garner much excitement.

The website does show us color photos of the book jackets (from 2005 on), but they’re not in the poster – in fact there aren’t any NBA posters that I could see until last year’s. So I think you have your work cut out for you, Harold. That dull, institutional look needs routing out, and I’m hoping that when the 2008 poster goes up, the NBA will think of the reader and liven it up a bit: Add a few lines describing each book, for example. Put the all-color jackets in the poster. Maybe provide thumbnail photos of the authors, or mini-photos from the awards showing authors and presenters doing something engaging and human. Why do a poster unless it catches and then holds the eye with things to discover? You could scatter small blocks of type with excerpts from the books, from author remarks or from book reviews. Otherwise, a list is a list is a list; it may be a poster, but the eye is just going to skip it.

Even the author interviews on the NBA website, which should be informative and fun to watch, are disappointingly provided in audio only (the screen goes black), so we miss much of the intimacy, the unexpected facial expressions, the spontaneity and tension that comes from a face-to-face conversation in front of a live audience. The audio is just a blah experience.

And yes, I did see the video announcing the 2008 NBA nominations on the NBF website but I didn’t mention because frankly it’s so unrelentingly off the mark and stuffy I can’t imagine anybody watching it for more than 30 seconds. For one thing the nominations were presented at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, which is famous for adapting literary works to the stage. That’s terrific, but we aren’t watching the video to hear the artistic director at Steppenwolf tell us about past productions. Save that for another video, which with time to explore the literary-stage relationship and the National Book Foundation as a bridge linking the two could be really sensational. Nor are we watching the video to wait while the artistic director introduces you, Harold, and wait again for you to spend more time talking about Steppenwolf, the NBF, Nelson Algren (a local reference but again do the Chicago angle in a different video), the upcoming NBA dinner, and then wait again for you to list the many books written by upcoming presenter Scott Turow, who finally, after five long minutes, reads the nominations. All this happens on a screen that is surrounded on the webpage (when I saw it) by the very list of nominations Turow is announcing, so the video feels irrelevant, lacking all the drama and weight that should come with this kind of announcement.

Simlarly the YouTube acceptance speeches (in 2007 - here’s Robert Haas) are preceded with interminable introductions by moderator Fran Leibowitz who I’m afraid stumbles through introductions she hasn’t rehearsed enough and tries to make on-the-spot jokes that are often pretty lame. Ditto some of the presenters who had trouble reading their own notes (others were polished and interesting). Finally after a suspenseful moment – when the winner is announced and we see members of the audience whooping it up – few authors offer the kind of memorable thoughts that would strike a nerve about books and reading with viewers at home. (Robert Haas’ mention of Emily Dickinson did, as did Sherman Alexie on growing up as a reader).

One presenter refers to the “wildly diverse (and) passionate” judges for this year’s NBA, and boy, does the viewer wish we could have some of that. Passion about books and reading should be the underlying message of awards, websites, posters and bookmarks, don’t you think? I mean it’s the job of all of us in publishing to somehow convey the essence of these books to readers, to uncover the authors’ excitement about writing and to relate our own exuberance in a way that infects readers’ consciousness big time.

So I wasn’t talking about covering the bases with not very interesting posters and videos. I was talking about breathing new life into a respected literary awards program that could and should inspire, making the originality and wonder of good writing so appealing that every challenge the comes in the reading of serious literature is worth the reader’s effort.

As to the comments of Horace Engdahl from the Nobel Prize, let’s get back to the exact quote: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” he said. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

It seems clear to me that “they don’t translate enough” means that U.S. publishers don’t publish enough translations. Surely he does not mean that individual authors should sit down and translate books from many different countries on their own. If Americans could only read more works in translation – and come on, U.S. publishers, you gotta put ‘em out in number – then writers wouldn’t be “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.”

So when Engdahl says “the U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” it’s the whole publishing community, obviously including writers, that he’s criticizing. American houses actively avoid publishing works in translation (as mainstream houses told the New York Times), so of course American writers are going to suffer. The question is, who is responsible.

But Horace, tell me this: When you look at the fact that little more than 2% of books published in the United States are works in translation, don’t you agree the output is “a national crisis,” as a National Endowment for the Arts director said? Don’t you think we should pay attention to the reasons our publishers are actively turning away from these books and the pressures (they also told the New York Times) that their corporate owners have brought upon them to publish more commercial, easy-to-read Amurrican books instead?

And remember, Harold, I have no beef about the judges or the selections of nominees and winners, or their locations. The humorous incident regarding a publisher at an NBA dinner who exclaimed how happy he was about so many winners from the West, meaning the West Side of Manhattan, was a comment on the way a deep bias (i.e., mainstream publishers in New York not considering life West of the Hudson) can seep into the vernacular of an insular community.

I have, it turns out, written before about the money. Back in 2003 I received an invitation to the NBAs and speculated before looking at the RSVP card how much an individual ticket would cost. I know you know a common gripe among publishers is that they’re kind of roped into buying tickets for a whole table or two or six at the NBAs, but this is one of the perks of bigness, yes? If you’ve got to be owned by a corporation, at least Dad can give you a night out once a year, and be sure to take that nice nominated author with you. But you know, Harold, for an individual person coming from, say, California, the ticket price might be – well, at the time I thought, shoot, $100? Then I read about your fine education-outreach programs at the NBA which must be costly for sure, so I thought maybe $200, and, considering your other programs, $300. Well, you can see where this is going. I got up to $500 per head before looking at the RSVP card and, surprise, surprise. Even then a single ticket cost for this one event cost a thousand bucks, not counting airfare and hotel (granted, not a problem if you live in NY and isn’t that telling?) plus meals and cabs and aspirin.

You can read about this in an archived column because even then I wondered about the insularity of the New York publishing community. So let me ask you, Harold: Have you ever considered holding the National Book Awards in, say, Seattle or Denver or Oxford, Miss.? These are great book towns as you know with plenty of terrific media including national bureaus and correspondents with NPR and AP and USA Today and even the venerable New York Times, plus book bloggers galore, and boy! Talk about the reception you’d receive, not only from the very independent booksellers and librarians you’ve been courting but also from writers who are, after all, the bread and butter sources for all of us.

Oh, but wait. It is the money that’s holding you back, isn’t that right? If the NBA dinner moved out of New York, a lot of mainstream publishers wouldn’t buy those tables, and as you mentioned in your letter, “the large New York presses” are so instrumental to much of National Book Foundation funding. Well, since that’s the case, if I were you, I wouldn’t go beyond the pale either. It just makes it all the more important captivate (not just reach) a national audience with the finest moments of the National Book Awards.

Finally, you mention that Adrienne Rich was a recipient of the prestigious NBA lifetime achievement award. But do you remember that she refused a personal invitation by your predecessor, Neil Baldwin, to contribute to an anthology the NBA wanted to compile as a fundraiser with Borders as its partner?

This took place in 2000, when chain bookstores were driving independent bookstores out of business in the most visible and predatory way. Rich was furious. She wrote to Baldwin about her fears of “a particularly intricate and disingenuous connection between Borders’ harassment of the independent bookselling community and its self-promotion via the National Book Foundation.

“To put it bluntly,” she added, “the National Book Foundation is presently providing credibility and respectability to a corporate enemy of independent bookselling.”

Well, you may think she got a little too hot under the collar, Harold, but of course, I agreed with her and put much of her letter in my column. A non-profit institution like the National Book Foundation simply can’t take sides in an issue like this: The chains-vs-independents controversy had been the subject of several huge lawsuits; it had torn up the membership of bookstore associations national and local; it had caused many authors to cut their book tours and it convinced readers who understood what was at stake to never set foot inside a chain bookstore again.

So I think Rich wasn’t asking too much of the National Book Foundation to listen to the reasons she would not contribute to any book, even if it helped the NBF, that would be promoted and distributed by Borders.

As Rich said, “I should not need to detail to you, of all people, the vital importance of both independent presses and independent bookstores to any genuine freedom of diversity of expression, in a country where media are being swallowed by media, and fewer and fewer ideas are made available by the resulting conglomerates.”

Apparently there were a couple of letters exchanged, and they go even deeper into the issue. But the lesson here, it seems to me, is that Rich is talking about the same blinders, Harold! She’s saying to Neil Baldwin, a representative of the mainstream publishing community in New York, you don’t get it. You aren’t seeing what’s happening to the rest of the country. One look West at the devastation that is reducing the number of independent bookstores by half would have told him, whether he agreed with taking sides or not: Don’t use Borders. It’s a slap in the face to the independent bookstores that sell a lot more copies of serious literary works – the kind the National Book Awards are built upon – than any of the chains.

Now Harold, tell me if I’m wrong about the outcome. The anthology was published by Random House’s Modern Library as “The Book That Changed My Life” in 2002, and I can’t find any indication that Borders survived as a partner or principal in the venture. If it didn’t – if your predecessor finally listened to Rich’s remarks that using Borders would be a blotch on the NBF name – I’d love to know.

Meanwhile, I sense that you are listening to the world, Harold, and I admit that it’s easy for people like me to sit out here 3000 miles away and criticize things I don’t like. So if you move the National Book Awards back to the New York Marriott Marquis next year, let me know. Who knows, if you let me in I might be able to afford the ticket.

With respect and gratitude,

Pat

*I mention nostalgia because I remembered the first time my advertising colleague Bill Chleboun and I found a way to publish a special Christmas Books insert – half editorial, half advertsing – at the San Francisco Chronicle. We printed it out-of-house to keep the costs down and used slick stock to make the color photos really pop, as they say. The best part was an early print run so we could get multiple batches to independent booksellers in plenty of time so they could use the insert as a sales tool on the front counter.

Like you, Harold, Bill was aware of booksellers’ busy schedules, especially during the holiday season, so he telephoned over a hundred booksellers in the Bay Area to see if they wanted the insert and how many they could use. The response was terrific, and everybody wanted it right away. So on the morning the special Xmas insert was delivered to the Chronicle, Bill and I, along with my editorial colleagues Alix Madrigal and Bob Thompson, were waiting at the loading dock. Most of the inserts would be mailed from the printer, but since this was our first venture, we decided to count out and tie up bundles ourselves, throw them into the back of Bill’s pickup truck and deliver them personally to the San Francisco stores that very morning.

I’ll tellya Harold, I remember looking up at the skyscrapers in the financial district as Bill sped us toward the first bookstore and saying to Alix and Bob, “this is going to be great.” I imagined the excitement of carrying in our first special Xmas insert and exclaiming “Here it is!” to the store’s welcoming staff. (Bill had faxed titles of the books featured in the insert so that booksellers could order enough inventory to fill what we were sure would be a serious demand.)

So the truck pulled up to the first store and out we jumped, each of us carrying a couple of bundles as we trooped through the front door (not the delivery entrance in the back). “Here it is!” I called out to the assistant manager, and the last thing I remember in my euphoria was seeing every head at the counter turn toward us, a look of surprise – or was it dismay – crossing the faces of sales people and customers alike. They all realized an interruption in holiday business had just begun – not exactly a happy surprise. “What is that?” the assistant manager said, and even as I started to explained, she began shaking her head. “I’ve never heard of your special Xmas insert, and you can’t put it here,” she said, gesturing to all the impulse items next to the cash register. “And you can’t put them there” (under the counter with the Xmas wrap and supplies).

Well, you know how these things go, Harold. The manager whom Bill had talked to was not in the store, there were no cell phones at the time, customers had begun lining up behind us, so what could we do. Before he knew it, Bill, still parked in the bus stop outside, saw Alix, Bob and I carrying the same bundles out of the store that we had just carried in. It didn’t take long to figure out we weren’t going on to the next store. “Wait here,” Bill said as he tossed us the keys, and thank heaven he found a buyer who had been told about the special Xmas insert and who came out to the sales floor to straighten things out with the staff. I must say when we trooped back in and found a clear spot near the register, it was gratifying to see customers pick up the special Xmas insert with curiousity and interest. Keep looking! I thought – it’s really an invaluable guide.

As you might have guessed, though, Harold, not every store owner/manager/buyer remembered talking to Bill, not every front counter had the space, and not every customer took to the special Xmas insert, so we had to do a lot more ’splaining to do. This is why the experience came back to me when I read about your staff making all those phone calls about the NBA poster and bookmarks. One of the things I admire about bookstores (and libraries) is that their priorities are never in doubt. The first thing they do is serve the customer, who has questions about books that must be answered immediately. Posters like yours and special Xmas inserts like ours are fine, but they may not be taken care of right away, and sometimes not for a while, even when the right person has ordered them. But it’s worth the effort on our part, wouldn’t you say? Believing in the National Book Awards and in the Chronicle’s book section as contributions to the nation’s reading habits must be, to use your words, a good thing.