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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
India’s Ban on Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses May End — Thanks to Missing Paperwork
For reasons that are perhaps obvious, the degree to which block-headed, dangerous, and small-minded people often cannot deliver fully on their block-headed, dangerous and small-minded initiatives because they are in fact block-headed, dangerous, and small-minded is a source of some small comfort as of late. Eventually, the chickens of being impulsive, sloppy, meandering messes come home to roost. Most of time, at least. It is the rest of the time that keeps you up at night.
At these Bookstores in Japan, Anyone Can Rent a Shelf to Sell Books
Ten years or so ago, when the fate of brick and mortar bookstores seemed very much in doubt, some ideas sort of like this one were tossed around. One I remember specifically, though can find no linkable evidence of, was a per-title carry cost to publishers–something on the order of like 10 cents per month per copy. It is the same sort of idea in this Japanese store, though bundled differently: having your books in a store is valuable.
The business proposition for renting out some/all of your shelves would be that the rental fees would make up for the lost sales: presumably the books people pay to show off will sell fewer copies, and thus result in less total sales profit, than books an owner or manager would select with the goal of maximizing sales. (I am assuming for the moment that the shelf-renters are getting the same price/cost split as the non-renting publishers would get).
The sweet spot might be to maximize say 80% of your shelf space with sales-minded titles and then 20% of space to rental inventory. In this case, you would be cannibalizing only the bottom 20% of sales performers on a per copy basis. And as we know from the distribution of sales, these are selling many, many fewer copies than the bestsellers. Could be interesting. Of course, the renters would have to see some benefit over time; my base case is that eventually the novelty will wear off and it will not make sense for them. Would love to be wrong.
Jamie Oliver Pulls ‘Offensive’ Children’s Book From Sale
Let’s for the moment, hold in abeyance (legit) skepticism about a white author writing a fantasy book that has an Indigenous Australian as the main character. Let us also acknowledge that the said white author is not an Australian, but English. We are not off to a great start, are we? We then get to add language errors, experiential obtuseness (to put it mildly), and what seems like a pretty reductionist representation of a diverse array of Aboriginal experiences.
But the icing on the crap-cake to me is this: Penguin Random House UK says they had a process for having books like these (I am guessing the “How Bad Did This White Person Get It Department” is not sufficiently staffed) vetted. And they just….didn’t do it. Due to an “editorial oversight.” Which, for reasons I cannot quite put my finger on, feels someone more egregious than not even realizing you should look at these things at all.