REEL POLITIK

Contrary Commentary

by James Reel

Who's Looking At Who, Kid?

CAPTAIN LOUIS RENAULT was the deliciously corrupt police chief in occupied Casablanca. He'd spend his evenings gambling at Rick's Cafe Americain, occasionally raiding the place under Gestapo pressure.

We thought we'd seen the last of Renault as he strolled into the fog with Rick Blaine at the end of Casablanca. But now, out of all the tintype joints in all the towns in all the world, he walks into The New York Times, where he polices the book trade.

Surely that was Renault posing as reporter Doreen Carvajal on the front page of the Feb. 8 Times. In an indignant article, Renault/Carvajal declared, in effect, "I'm shocked--shocked!--to find that co-op advertising is going on at Amazon.com!"

That is, the online bookseller has been taking money from publishers to give certain books prominent play. For $5,000, Amazon.com would agree to to award a new title a nice blurb in the "Destined for Greatness" section of its "Bestseller" page, before the book was published. Editorial praise for the title would also find its way into the "What We're Reading" feature and elsewhere, and an e-mail alert would go out to buyers of the author's earlier books.

Ten grand would get a title all that, plus big play on the home page, even more prominent placement on the "Bestseller" page, an author profile and further e-mail alerts.

Buried several inches into the Times story was a curt acknowledgment that Amazon's biggest online competitor, Barnesandnoble.com, would also soon take money from publishers in return for similar display of certain books.

Perhaps coincidentally, the Times website offers plentiful links to Barnesandnoble.com. Surely the Times is principled enough not to allow its commercial affiliation to influence the play of an article intended to shame Amazon.com. After all, my impulse to belittle that effort has nothing to do with TW3's own commercial links to Amazon. So let's give the Gray Lady the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, the Times and some readers reacted with the dismay of a child who's just learned the awful truth about Santa Claus, and with the anger of an overprotective father who's discovered that his supposedly virginal daughter has been practicing the wrong kind of pole-vaulting behind the bleachers.

But the only thing that's really shocking here is that people expected Amazon.com, as a righteous vendor of the honorable book, to shun the altar of Mammon.

Extorting money from manufacturers and distributors for favorable product display is the basis of modern American commerce and entertainment. Television networks charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for 30 seconds of commercial time during their most popular programs. Fast-food chains, cell phone manufacturers and soft-drink companies pay big bucks to Hollywood studios to get their products a fleeting placement in some movie. Even the brands of food you find in the supermarket are determined in part by which companies pay for the privilege of shelf space.

Publishers, of course, pump megabucks into terraspace bookstore chains to get their latest products stacked in an impressive pile near the front door. Amazon.com, as a bookseller -- don't overlook the .com in its name -- is merely doing the same thing. Except that in cyberspace there's no true front door -- you can enter a site anyplace without necessarily hitting the home page. So Amazon had to get creative with salable display space.

The controversial solution: Ask publishers to pay for a recommendation that customers had assumed to come from the hearts of Amazon.com's own staff. Readers and -- especially -- small publishers that couldn't afford the co-op payments felt betrayed. They'd trusted oh-so-pure Amazon to protect their interests, to guard the nobility of the printed word and stand aloof from the vulgar back-room alliances of American commerce. Yet here for all to see on the front page of the nation's newspaper of record was Amazon soiling the sheets with Scribner and Doubleday.

This is not the sort of beautiful relationship the Captain Renaults of the modern world care to indulge. So they blew the whistle and rounded up the usual suspects: monolithic corporate interests out to poison the souls of America's readers.

But why, despite so much contrary evidence, do we persist in our belief that books and the arts in general hold such power over us, and that booksellers, libraries and video renters therefore stand as guardians of our character?

Year after year, well-meaning adults raid school libraries, trying to protect their children from potentially damaging books containing racial epithets (Huckleberry Finn), cuss words (The Catcher in the Rye) or discussions of drug use and sexual awakening (just about the only novels most teens will voluntarily read).

If only words, pictures, plays and music really held such mastery over us. Great art could perfect us. Evil art could be blamed for our every defect.

Be realistic. A book cannot rape you. It may intrigue you, puzzle you, inspire you, offend you. But all this requires your receptivity. You can close yourself to a book at any time. It cannot leap off your lap and latch onto your psyche against your will.

Think about certain high school and college students we've all seen trudging through required English classes, those bored, exasperated malcontents whom literature cannot penetrate. They dislike reading, see nothing in a novel beyond mere plot, and suspect that their teachers and classmates invent "insights" into the text as they go along.

Such students are immune to literature. But even more receptive people are rarely transformed by aesthetic experience. If books are so ennobling and uplifting, why are so many readers, writers and critics total jerks?

We book lovers ought to stand proudly as humanity's finest moral and intellectual specimens. Yet we can be just as petty, self-absorbed, insecure, judgmental, uninformed and confused as people who can't tell tercets from tiddlywinks.

Usually a book merely gives us pleasure. At most, it may bring out the best in us -- that is, help us emphasize the good qualities we already possess. But a book rarely manages even this, so what credence can we give the argument that words and pictures may also corrupt us, and that the intrusion of paid promotional shenanigans betray the holy bookseller's congregation of devout, trusting customers?

Perhaps they may stir the muck already deep within us, but books and the sometimes dirty book trade lack the force to mutate us into practicing sociopaths. Aside from psychoactive drugs, only our families and peers, through continuous personal pressure, hold that power over us.

Books can't turn bad people angelic and good people satanic. They merely intensify what we already are.

Amazon.com is a business. We are customers. Each side is its own culture, with different needs, practices and expectations. "Let the buyer beware" doesn't mean that the seller is out to screw us, just that we have interests that sometimes differ and sometimes intersect, and that vigilance will protect us from misunderstandings and occasional abuse.

But now Amazon.com will tag its paid recommendations, protecting us from our own naivete. Captain Renault can look the other way again. As long as the book trade has restored its semblance of virtue, we can believe what we want about the nobility of literature, until the next time somebody fumbles too obviously under the table.

Reel's Archive

Reel Politik 1: On The Future Of Reading

Reel Politik 2: How Not To Read A Book

Reel Politik 3: Plagiarists Of Experience

Reel Politik 4: Logolingus: A Private Pleasure

Reel Politik 5: A Community of Dreamers

Reel Politik 6: The Sensuous Bibliophile

Reel Politik 7: A Divine Madness

Reel Politik 8: Show Me The Books!

Reel Politik 9: The Argument

Reel Politik 10: Literacy & Community

Reel Politik 11: Real Writers Need Real Editors

Reel Politik 12: How To Read For Yourself

Reel Politik 13: Lies, Damn Lies & The MFA Novel

Reel Politik 14: The Merchant-Ivory Connection (ML 100, Round 1)

Reel Politik 15: Who's Stuffing The Ballot Box? (ML 100, Round 2)

Reel Politik 16: Interactive Fiction: It Still Doesn't Compute

Reel Politik 17: Feel The Burn

Reel Politik 18: Whose Life Is This, Anyway?

Reel Politik 19: Buy My Book. Please!

Reel Politik 20: The Overstuffed Bookstore



James Reel's new book, Tucson: A CitySmart Guidebook, is published by John Muir Publications. Reel, a Tucson-based writer and editor, is a contributor to Fanfare and the author of The Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music.

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