“To get pleasure out of Christmas shopping, begin early and make your selections gradually. It is quite time to begin now. There are no gifts so satisfactory and lasting as well-chosen books, and none so flattering to the taste and intelligence of the recipient.”
Reading these words, you might be forgiven for thinking they've come from the folks at IndieBound, who just this week launched a new ad campaign to get out the book vote this holiday season. Likewise, they might have been uttered by Carol Fitzgerald, whose Bookreporter.com (full disclosure: I was once her employee at an earlier incarnation of the site) is offering up special programs to inspire potential book-givers to buy. Or from Random House, whose new CEO, Markus Dohle, came up with the idea for the Web-based Books = Gifts advertising campaign. They might even have come from the prominent bookseller I mentioned last week, who insisted that if customers gave him a list of 20 people, plus mini-bios, he could guarantee the perfect gift/giftee match.
But no. These words come from an ad that appeared in the November 11 New York Times. November 11, 1908, that is—almost exactly 100 years ago.
Never mind that the ad, which we discovered on Consumerist.com, was being used as an example of Christmas creep, of how craven booksellers, even then, began their blatant consumerist push even before Thanksgiving. But this kind of hard sell, which might have appeared unseemly in 1908, seems less political than practical in anxious 2008: come January, we'll all be looking back on this holiday season as a watershed in the book business, a season that may well determine the fates of many BookLanders—and maybe of BookLand itself.
I don't think I exaggerate; just about everyone is worried. (The only book folk who say their business is okay are some foreign scouts and a few established, independent publicists—and they say it sheepishly, sotto voce and with anticipated survivor guilt.) Even S&S's Carolyn Reidy was cautious at best in one of her addresses to a religious publishing group—although in her official speech the next day, she sounded more characteristically upbeat. Still, when a much respected longtime publishing person like Reidy openly suggests we reexamine a longtime practice like the returns system—which originated in the Depression as a means to help booksellers but now doesn't seem to be helping anyone—well, even the optimists among us need to take notice.
Certainly, there are issues in the book business that none of us, individually or in small groups, can control. What will happen to Borders, for example, and then to the wholesalers who service that chain, is out of our immediate range. But getting back to basics—as the Random House, Bookreporter.com and IndieBound programs propose to do—we can control. Forget, for the moment, the debate over discounts, distribution and format: they will work themselves out one way or another, and probably long after the Christmas tree has been mulched. Better to focus on what we all got into this business for in the first place: finding a way to connect the writers with the books and, ultimately, with the readers.
Besides, it'll be much more festive for friends and family to have something other than shrinking 401(k) statements to read this season.
Agree? Disagree? Tell us at www.publishersweekly.com/saranelson
