Kuttner: Amazon, Barnes & Noble Battle Over My Obama Book

Robert Kuttner in The Huffington Post in re his book Obama's Challenge:

Margo [Baldwin, president of Kuttner's publisher, Chelsea Green Publishers] negotiated a highly creative deal with Amazon, to offer readers the benefits of its new print-on-demand service. You order it, they print, and you get it two days from the time of your order. An Amazon discount coupon will also be in the packets of DNC delegates, alternates, and media. In the meantime, Chelsea Green is rushing out its regular print edition, which will be in bookstores after Labor Day. Or maybe it won't.

When the Amazon agreement was announced, Amazon's retail competitors pushed back big time. Amazon is of course the 800 pound gorilla of bookselling. What was an independent publisher doing in bed with it?

Barnes and Noble canceled its initial order and has decided not to stock the book in any of its stores, making it available only on B&N.com and by special order. Only one independent bookseller did likewise. In an open letter to the bookseller community, Margo appealed for perspective, and argued that the Amazon launch strategy was designed to build interest in the book initially, creating the demand that would result in strong sales in all retail outlets. With an expanded pie, there would be more book sales for everyone. And the market would hardly be exhausted in two weeks.

He concludes:

All innovators take risks. For a small publishing house that depends on the goodwill of booksellers, this was a huge one. The book could have a shelf life of just eight weeks. If Obama loses, this book will be a historic curiosity, and we will have a bonfire of unsold books. If he wins, maybe it will make a difference.
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Hardly makes one feel too much enthusiasm for spending money at Barnes and Noble, though, does it?

Where Credit Isn't Due

In conjunction with my employer's big convention, aka assembly, of weekend last (I may or may not write about it in detail later: stay tuned) , it fell upon me as the Communications Department (yes, I am the department--editor, writer, art director, media manager, photographer, photo editor, publisher, and copyboy, all rolled into one) to send out gobs of what I still like to call press releases knowing full well that non-print media prefers to have them called media releases. Whatever. Since this year's assembly involved a big election, I sent lots of releases and got lots of ink and pixels in return.

It's interesting, and amusing, to track the permutations of these releases via Google and Google News. (Oddly, I get slightly different hits using the same search terms on Google and Google News. Go figure.) This led me to send e-mail to a couple-three far-flung correspondents regarding the propriety of my now claiming all of these various sources that used my release verbatim or nearly so as places where "my work" has "been published."

Unfortunately, one or two of the far-flungeds seemed to think I was serious, and replied seriously. This leaves me with the dilemma of how now to look like an idiot while at the same time not making them look like idiots. There are those who will tsk-tsk and say it's the because e-mail is an inferior communications medium, rife with the possibility of misunderstandings such as this. To which, after much thought, I reply: hooey! The written language has been around for a little while now, and with scant reliance on "emoticons" or "smileys" abbreviations or any other crap to indicate the placement of tongue-in-cheek.

Anyhow, I as usual digress. The point is that now my CV is crammed to bulging with all of these new places where "my work" has "appeared." No idea how I will keep up with it all.

It then occurred to me that I have been short-changing myself for years now, for I can in complete honesty say that "my writing" has appeared in Newsweek, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and Macworld...since at one point or another they have all printed letters from me! (Hey, I wrote the letters and they published them--how much clearer could I be?)

The I got to thinking about the likes of, an expression I found odious during my magazine-editing days: By the likes of do you mean these? Then why not say so? Well, here's why: you can fudge like made with the likes of...and with just a little ingenuity I can pad the old vitae even more by pointing out that I have written for the likes of Esquire--since there was certainly an interval back in the 1980s when the editor and art director of the magazine on which I worked seemed intent on making it look and read an awful lot like Esquire, Jr. ("No I never said I wrote for Esquire; I said I wrote for the likes of Esquire!"

It also occurs to me that I can claim to have "contributed" to several sources, including the Associated Press--sources that did not use my releases verbatim but which adapted them or otherwise built on them for their own reports. It's a shame I didn't think to send releases to Reuters. Oh, well, there's always next year. As it is, it's going to take me several days just to update my CV.

He said jokingly!!