Three quick points re: Eileen Hutton's whining about booksellers' "snobbery" toward audiobooks (Soapbox, Oct. 24).
First point: Bookstore customers are readers. Ms. Hutton is welcome to try to convert them to listeners. Until then, I need to take care of what my customers want today.
Second point: Our customers come to our stores (and forgo the Internet) because we provide exceptional service. That service is based upon our knowledge of books. In fact, our only real competitive advantage over the likes of Amazon and Wal-Mart is our book expertise. And although Ms. Hutton would have us become flea markets selling absolutely anything related to a book, we can't compete effectively outside our area of expertise—like most businesses. So a customer asking for Wicked will not be offered tickets to a Broadway show, and a customer asking for something similar to One Flew overthe Cuckoo's Nest will not be offered the DVD version of A Few Good Men.
Third point: Compared to reading a book, listening to an audiobook really sucks.
Dave Silberstein, Olde Village Book Cellar, Lafayette, N.J.
More on Koen
Re: the continuing fallout from Koen's bankruptcy (Foreword, Oct. 17). As a small publisher, I am extremely concerned about the latest twist in the Koen saga. Baker & Taylor has in essence bought the books in inventory at Koen at remainder prices and now is seeking to return those books for full credit to publishers.
There is something terribly wrong with the industry when the second largest wholesaler goes into the business of flipping books instead of actually selling them. I don't know if it is legal; however, it is certainly unethical to return books to publishers for full credit when those books were not bought from those publishers; additionally, B&T is requesting a bigger credit than they paid for the books.
In the case of my company, Camino Books, those books had not even been paid for in the first place. This means that if Camino were to grant permission to return them, not only will we have to write off the original nonpayment by Koen, but the credit will also reduce the royalties of our authors.
I believe that B&T's actions are detrimental not only to publishers and authors but also to the integrity of the industry. Thus I have told B&T that I will not accept any returns that they acquired at Koen's fire sale.
Edward Jutkowitz, Publisher, Camino Books, Philadelphia, Pa.
Not to Bury...
The PW review of my book The Dictator's Dictation [Sept. 5], turns on the following assertion: "Boyers comes not to praise international literature but to bury it. His appraisals are resolutely negative." Here are some quotations from the book.
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p. 145: "Of all contemporary writers, J.M. Coetzee has had the most striking and sustaining things to tell us about evil and the struggle to achieve moral dignity."
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p. 194: "[Ingeborg] Bachmann's greatest work is Malina.... The brilliance of Malina has much to do with... its existing at once as meditation, parable, dream-vision, fairy tale and prophecy."
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p. 39: "[Natalia] Ginzburg was a great writer in part because she never allowed herself or any of her characters to get away with an investment in false horizons."
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p. 89: "This memoir [by Norman Manea] is a genuinely great book."
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p. 114: "Sweet Days of Discipline [by Fleur Jaeggy] is a rich and affecting book."
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p. 105: "With his wise, light touch, Peter Schneider appears to have solved the problem that has long plagued German writers."
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p. 199: "[W.G.] Sebald can be a thrilling writer. We admire in him the delicate shifting from memory to hallucination, from dense physical immediacy to difficult, obstructed speculation."
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p. 130: "That [Nadine] Gordimer can sustain a bristling and deeply feeling interrogation of what seems to be reality... is cause for further study—and for celebration."
The quotations above are taken from eight of my book's 16 chapters. Other chapters—on Anita Desai and Mario Vargas Llosa—are also "resolutely" positive. Can such a book be said to "bury" literature?
Robert Boyers
Tisch professor of Arts and Letters, Skidmore College, Editor, Salmagundi
Director, New York State, Summer Writers Institute
Truth in Fashion
I really enjoyed Rachel Safko's Soapbox (Oct. 10). But as someone who has been in the publishing trenches for nearly 30 years, I have to reassure you that Rona Jaffe was never really describing anything remotely accurate about publishing in New York. Fact is, publishing people have always tended to be aggressively unfashionable. For a while there was even a rumor of an overheard conversation among three 20-something women in a Norton elevator: they were apparently getting quite competitive about whose A-line skirt dated back the farthest—sixth grade, fifth? And then, because we eat so many business lunches and read so much, we all eventually get fat.
Molly Friedrich, Agent, Aaron Priest Agency, New York City
