REEL POLITIK

Contrary Commentary

by James Reel

Samizdat, Scientology & Blue Sky

SAMIZDAT WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. The big bookstores, both online and in meatspace, already promise to deliver us millions of in-print titles, and recently they've also been linking with rare-book dealers to track down first editions and out-of-print items for us. Now they're getting ready to print new copies of deleted volumes for one customer at a time.

Surely it won't be long until they co-opt the underground press, too. Imagine creeping into the Kosovo branch of Borders or Barnes and Noble and asking for the latest newsletter of the Committee for Albanian Unity. Instead of slipping you a crumpled, mimeographed sheet, which you would be expected to pass along to some other interested party, the clerk will sell you a crisp new copy fresh from the laser printer. Then, if the newborn peace fails to thrive, a NATO bomb will gut the building, and Serb irregulars will thoughtfully disembowel the survivors.

All right, perhaps distributing underground material will be too risky for corporate booksellers. But hardly anything else is, aside from running afoul of certain powerful special-interest groups (about which more anon). Should we worry that the superstores, whose bulk orders and stocking policies already allow them indirect authority over who gets published in what quantity, are muscling in on the used and out-of-print biz? After all, this should improve availability and delivery -- a good thing in a market economy. But book buyers aren't just consumers; they are readers, or collectors, or both. And that complicates what initially looks like a great advance in bookselling.

On June 1, 1999, Borders Group Inc. announced that it had acquired a 19.9 percent stake in an Atlanta company called Sprout Inc. This does not presage the introduction of literary Chia Pets. Sprout Inc. is apparently less interested in watercress than in watermarks: It is licensing publishers' out-of-print titles. Thirteen hundred books have been secured at this writing, and "thousands more" are promised. Sprout will make these available to Borders in electronic format.

So you walk into Borders, ask for some out-of-print title, and within 15 minutes you'll have your very own copy, downloaded and printed out from the database and bound on the spot, just for you. According to a typically vague Associated Press report, this should cost about the same as a "new book," although it's unclear whether that's a new paperback (which is what these will be, essentially) or hardcover.

Don't get too excited yet. The technology is still being developed. And even though small independent retailers are said to be considering the service, it's hard to anticipate who will wind up with access to what. Will Sprout be the sole source of e-versions of out-of-print books, sharing them with any store that cares to affiliate? Or will competitors start to germinate, with Sprout licensing material from, say, Random House, and another company licensing from HarperCollins? If so, will we have to traipse from site to site hunting for the one retailer with exclusive rights to the book we want? Meanwhile, who is looking out for the rights of authors or their estates?

And, by the way, why will we be paying full price for something analogous to a cheap Dover reprint?

Collectors, naturally, won't care about any of this. They will still patronize their favorite independent dealers, ever in search of that elusive signed first edition.

Everyone else may have readier access to obscure titles, but at what cost? Notice that now, even as the Internet and personal computers are poised to change the ways we can acquire and read texts, publishers and retailers are finding a way to deliver out-of-print titles to us as books, not as electronic files. From the retailer's point of view, books are more of a nuisance to control as inventory, but they are more desirable than e-texts because as physical objects they can be sold to an established clientele through traditional channels. It's still hard to talk people into paying for downloads on the Internet or subscribing to e-zines (as Slate learned the hard way). It's still simple to talk them into buying a few bound pages of printed matter.

I do hope that in a few years every bookstore, large and small, will be able to print out for its customers tens of thousands of out-of-print books. But I hesitate to specify that they all work from the same list of titles. Here's why.

Not long ago, messages distributed by the Red Rock Eater News Service list complained that Amazon.com had tried to blip a certain in-print title out of existence. Chris Leithiser reported that A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed by Jon Atack, had completely disappeared from the online catalog at Amazon, even the company's "out-of-print" service, even though it was still available new through Barnes & Noble and other online sources.

"This was particularly intriguing," wrote Leithiser, "because the (Scientology) cult has a long history of threatening litigation over this particular book, considered one of the best sources for information about $cientology."

Leithiser wrote a letter of complaint to Amazon, as did at least one other interested reader. They were politely informed that the company had removed the book from its catalog because of unspecified "legal issues."

It seems that Atack's highly critical look at Scientology had run afoul of English libel law. I don't know the details, but apparently because references to one minor individual were determined to be injurious, Atack was enjoined from distributing his book in the U.K. According to Red Rock Eater News Service participant D.M. Holmes, that doesn't mean that Atack's publisher, or bookstores and libraries, are forbidden to carry the item. Whether this is true or not, the Scientologists undertook their familiar campaign of legal intimidation to get English libraries and bookstores to destroy their copies of A Piece of Blue Sky.

Meanwhile, a Scientologist with a Web site (always a dangerous thing) tried to discredit Atack not by addressing the author's specific charges, but by assembling several pages of ad hominem attacks. A typical sentence from the site: "In addition to being a drug dealer, a con-man, a bad husband and a worthless father, Atack has also engaged in the distribution of stolen property." (When this column first appeared, you could still find the whole nasty dossier on line; it has since disappeared.)

"It appears," wrote Leithiser, "that A Piece of Blue Sky has been declared an unbook." This created a flurry of anti-Amazon posts, but in the company's defense I must point out that the book has been "disappeared" only from Amazon's site in the U.K., where the libel laws are both strange and stringent. You can easily order it through Amazon's American site, where its sales rank the last time I looked was an impressive 1,217.

So thank goodness for America's fundamentalist adherence to the First Amendment, which makes it extremely difficult to place a national ban on a book like Atack's. Even so, Amazon or any other bookseller would be perfectly within its rights not to carry the book. I doubt that any bookseller, even the aggressive online version of Barnes & Noble, truly lists every title in print. Yet we consumers tend to assume that these companies have access to every title that hasn't yet been pulped, and if they don't list it, it doesn't exist.

Consider, then, what power these retailers wield, simply by omitting a title from their systems. Who needs to burn books when all you need is a selective wipe of a very few databases?

Now, we shouldn't be too alarmed. "Censorship" is not what happens when a publisher withdraws a moribund title, nor is it the case when a retailer neglects to stock an item. We can always track down the volume at some library or used-book mart. Censorship cannot occur when readers are able to seek books from a diversity of sources.

That's why I worry, just a little, about concentrating the generation and distribution of all kinds of printed matter, new and old, hefty and flimsy, mass-market and vanity, in the loading docks of half a dozen huge companies.

We might all be better off if Megabook Inc. sent each of its employees home with a leaky mimeo machine and orders to find ten unpublished authors, run off one hundred copies of their latest work, and pass them on to their friends and neighbors. Now there's an innovative application of traditional techniques.

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

Reel Politik 21: Who's Looking At Who, Kid?

Reel Politik 22: Maps As Fiction

Reel Politik 23: How To Begin A Novel



James Reel's most recent 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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