James Patterson Is Unhappy

So the book business is all aflutter about a recent advertisement by ex-ad man James Patterson, in which he demanded that someone (unspecified) do something (unspecified) about the horrible problems in publishing (unspecified). The ad is histrionic, hectoring, and utterly vague.

(If this is emblematic of the keen sensibility and razor prose that Patterson commands, I feel better for never having read one of his books.)

I don't seem to be the only one confused about his aims; Patterson spoke to Slate yesterday to insist that he has no plans and can't really articulate exactly what the problem with "books, bookstores and libraries" is, but he definitely wants someone to do something to maintain the industry that pays him millions of dollars a year.

On the very unlikely chance Patterson sees this, let me make some suggestions:

• If the problem is that libraries are underfunded, then the solution is to find stronger and more stable streams of funding. Libraries in the US are traditionally maintained and funded on the local level, but a federal program or private foundation could certainly step in to add broad financial support to the entire sector. Such a foundation could be set up relatively quickly by an individual or group of individuals with high personal wealth, and would enjoy broad support in the publishing industry and among the general public.
• If the problem is that bookstores are closing, then the solution is to get more people to buy books in bookstores -- this is a capitalist economy, so demand rules. If that doesn't happen, the next most plausible option would be some kind of non-profit status or preferential tax treatment for physical locations for selling printed matter, to help make those businesses more viable. But, as Yogi Berra said, if nobody wants to come, you can't stop them. And Patterson seems to have missed that large swaths of middle-class retail -- from JCPenney to Best Buy to Staples -- are also in trouble; this is likely a big-box retail problem rather than a book problem.
• If the problem is that big publishers -- primarily among them, the major competitors to Patterson's longtime publishing company -- are merging to better negotiate terms with ever-larger partners and retailers (e.g., Amazon and Apple), then someone first needs to articulate exactly how that is damaging and to whom. There are a lot of medium and small publishing companies; there has not been a notable flood of bankruptcies in that sector recently. If Hachette becomes somewhat less powerful in an industry dominated by Random Penguin on the one hand and Amazon on the other, that may be less than pleasant to Patterson, but it's difficult to see why the rest of us should care.

In short, Patterson needs to first define the problem. There can be no solution if we don't know what we're trying to fix. "Things are changing" is not a problem; it's a description of the world.

What Is the Deal With LeaderShift?

It's some kind of business parable that suddenly sold lots of copies last week -- and the Amazon comments on the one low-ranking review imply that there's an astroturf campaign in place to give it lots of good reviews quickly. (Not that that's anything new or notable.)

There's a weird stew of "take our country back" and multi-level marketing here, and the book itself clearly has some political slant, but it's hiding that slant behind code words. (Or perhaps the word I mean is dog-whistles.)

One author, Orrin Woodward, is head of a current major multi-level marketing scheme called LIFE, and seems to have been a bigwig in another one called MonaVie. His co-author, Oliver DeMille, has a long Wikipedia page that doesn't say much, and which claims his politics are "independent" while listing a bunch of Republican codewords.

Best of all, the book is a "parable" -- which is what business books call themselves when they're fictional. (Business readers are serious, serious folks, with no time to waste on stories, so you need to pretend that you're Aesop if you want to sell fiction to them.)

Anyone seen this book in real life yet? It looks like something very, very special.

Things I Haven't Commented on Yet

I had a very nice comment yesterday, asking my thoughts about the Night Shade firesale. (The best link round-up to date I've seen is from Publishers Weekly's blog.)

That reminded me that I also haven't said anything about the slate of Hugo Nominees -- I gather there is the usual ranting and rending of garments about them, though I've mostly just marked those posts to read later so far.

There's several other award things that I haven't weighed in on, either.

I may get to all of this stuff soon, but I have to admit, I've been really busy lately -- work and life and everything else, with a long Saturday trip into NYC with my sons last weekend that stole what would have been blogging time. (And, of course, when I have free time right now, what I really want to do is play some more Lego City Undercover.)

But, just in case I don't have time for a longer, more thoughtful post later, some quick takes on La Affaire de Nightshade:

• I don't know Jeremy Lassen and Jason Williams well, but I do know them, from my SFBC days, and they're deeply passionate and devoted to what they do. What I've seen written about their very generous royalty rates matches what I know of them -- and, I suspect, they also paid advances somewhat higher than warranted even by their royalty rates. Those points have been often forgotten in the kerfuffle, but I'll be blunt: Night Shade probably went under because they were too generous to authors. (Or, to be more nuanced, because they've spent 10+ years trying to punch above their weight, and you get awfully battered doing that.)
• I also know Tony Lyons from those same days -- my other hat in my last five years of bookclub duty was for Outdoorsman's Edge, which sold books on huntin' and fishin', and Tony ran Lyons Press before he founded Skyhorse. He can be a tough negotiator, but he's a great publisher with a strong sense of markets and an eye for a good business -- he's built that company very strongly through a recession, which is no small feat. (And I'm amazed at the implication that he did it entirely through dead-tree books.)
• Actual bankruptcies, that go through courts, are horrible for authors. Really. It's been a while since we had one in the field, so you folks might have forgotten, but contract provisions mean nothing in a bankruptcy, and your contracts could be sold for pennies with no money coming to you for years, if ever. Avoiding that is a huge deal.

I do have to dig in more, though -- I've only seen the broad outlines so far. It's possible that authors are being utterly shafted, but that's always the standard narrative of any publishing story, so I tend to doubt it.

Stuff My Employer Has Sold, And What Happened To It

There are no value judgements stated or implied here; I'm mostly trying to keep track of this myself, so I can refer back to this post in several years when I've forgotten how it all happened. I presume all of these deals made great business sense to all parties at the time, and that everyone is happy with the outcome.

So: just over a year ago, in early March of 2012, Wiley announced that it intended to sell off a number of consumer publishing assets.

Google was the first buyer to surface, buying the travel business from Wiley, including Frommer's and the Unofficial Guides, in August.

The second major divestment was in November, when Wiley sold its culinary program (along with the CliffsNotes reference guides and a reference program centered on the Webster's New World dictionary) to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

A couple of weeks ago, news leaked that Google had decided to eliminate all Frommer's books as of mid-February. The Unofficial Guides, though, would continue in both physical and e-books.

Yesterday, Arthur Frommer -- who founded the Frommer's brand back in 1957 -- announced that he's bought back the brand from Google. (Though, presumably, not all of the publishing assets and content, which implies he paid less than the $25 million Google reportedly did.)

Also yesterday, Turner Publishing bought a third chunk of Wiley's consumer publishing, including the Baseball Prospectus as well as pets, crafts, and general consumer books.

And, today, Publishers Weekly reported that HarperCollins Canada had bought a bunch of titles from Wiley Canada, including titles on hockey and cooking.

And who says that publishing is boring?

Update, May 31:

What appears to be the last piece of the stuff that Wiley wanted to sell -- a nautical program headquartered in the UK -- has been sold, as of today, to Fernhurst Books. (That company is apparently headed by the guy who build the program and sold it to Wiley in the first place, which sounds like a good thing for the audience and authors.) Details of this sale were not announced, but really curious folks can probably winkle it out of Wiley's next 10-Q.

And so it looks like Wiley did manage to sell of the things it wanted to sell, to what look like good homes on all sides. (I'm being positive, and assuming HMH is now solid and stable and has successfully gotten through its own recent turmoil.)

Carving Out a New Nook in the Market

When Barnes & Noble hints that they're going to slow-track their Nook e-reader business and "focus more on licensing their content to other device makers" -- as reported by The New York Times on Sunday -- what on earth are they talking about?

B&N is a retailer; they don't own the content they sell. They don't even own the relationship with the content providers -- that's all on the publishers. So how can they possibly find a successful business strategy out of trying to shove themselves into the middle of a marketplace that has been aggressively shedding middlemen for several years?

Are they trying to imply that they think Nook technology is so special and unique -- unlike a thousand other e-readers, most of which failed -- that they can live on licensing it to some other company that wants to beat its head against Amazon's predatory discounts for a few years?

Seriously, is there any strategy that could conceivably work behind that quote, or is it just bland waffling to hide the true cluelessness beneath?

Najafi Sells Bookspan to Pride Tree

Publishers Weekly reported yesterday that the Najafi Companies, the mysterious holding company that bought the book- and music-club assets known by a bewildering array of names (Yes Solutions, Direct Brands, Doubleday Entertainment, Direct Group North America, Bertelsmann Direct, Bookspan, "the entity") from Bertelsmann back in 2008, has sold those assets to what seems to be an even more mysterious entity called Pride Tree Holdings.

Good luck to my old compatriots still working at the clubs, though this certainly doesn't look like a good sign from the outside. PW notes that the operation has been "steadily downsized in recent years," but all of the major clubs seem to still be running and Direct Brands is claiming 8 million members, which ain't chicken feed. Najafi is privately held, so no revenue or sales figures (or details on the Pride Tree deal) are or will be forthcoming.

From what I've heard, the downsizing has been the usual corporate type: get rid of half of the people and insist on running the same level of business. And we all know how well that usually works.

What BookScan Measures, and What It Doesn't

I found myself typing a long comment on this post over at The Beat blog -- about Colleen Doran's discovery that BookScan has been horrible at measuring the sales of her books -- so I've ported it over here as well. I think it will make sense out of that context.

Sure, it's true that mainstream newspaper reporters and other ill-informed people state that BookScan covers 75% of the book market as if that means all kinds of books everywhere -- but why should we listen to ill-informed people?

BookScan only covers the US, for starters -- many books will have a substantial life outside of that territory. And it always has been very clear about which accounts report to it and which don't -- it covers most of the largest retailers of books (Wal-Mart is joining as of the beginning of 2013), but does not include the mass of small bookstores, nor does it cover all of the other outlets that sell books sometimes, or sell a few specific niche books. And, as others have said, it doesn't do a good job of covering sales to libraries, either.

So there are publishing areas where BookScan is less useful: craft books, some travel categories, anything that gets picked up in large numbers by non-traditional retailers (like those books in Starbucks), and, yes, graphic novels. What it does cover well, not surprisingly, are the core areas of major publishing: fiction and narrative non-fiction, the kind of books that dominate sales and keep most of the big publishing companies afloat. For the vast majority of those titles, the BookScan rule of thumb (add about 25% to account for libraries and indies) works well, and it's thus the only way publishing people can accurately gauge how books from other publishers are doing. (Nobody in publishing uses BookScan to check out their own books' real sales; we all have internal systems for that.)

The smart publishing people who work in the areas that are less well covered by BookScan know that (and complain about it, of course, since it makes their jobs harder), and they make allowances for those other markets. In the case of the DM, relatively accurate numbers are available separately from Diamond, so anyone looking to sign up a comics project with any hope of hitting a comics-shop audience would have to be an idiot not to check the numbers in that channel. I'm not claiming that those idiots don't exist, of course.

I think what Colleen Doran has really unearthed is that there are stupid, badly informed people -- some of them (at least momentarily) in positions of power at publishing houses. (And many of them writing for major newspapers like the Globe & Mail.) Those people don't understand what BookScan really measures, and use it wrongly. That's not the fault of the tool; it's the fault of the idiot using the tool.

Since she came out of the DM world -- and most of her projects are focused at that world -- it's only to be expected that her books would sell primarily in that world. Since BookScan does not, and has never claimed to, include sales figures in the DM, her numbers are vastly more inaccurate than in the genres that BookScan was made for. That doesn't mean that anyone is lying or misrepresenting things; it means that BookScan is a very bad tool for calculating the sales of products that mostly sell within the DM. And we all should have known that already, since that's not what it measures.

This all seems analogous to looking at a thermometer in your living room and complaining that it doesn't tell you how cold it is outside.

The Imp of the Perverse

Yesterday, along with the other mail, I got a copy of A Memory of Light, which, as you know Bob, is the thrilling conclusion to a very long-running epic fantasy series. It presumably contains many shocking and surprising events that are eagerly awaited by hundreds of thousands of fans.

And so it came with a little notice, asking -- well, perhaps demanding is more correct -- that any coverage or reviews hold off until the official publication date in early January.

So of course I was immediately seized with the desire to thumb through the last chapter or two, type up what seemed to be the juiciest and most amazing bits, and post immediately. That was a silly, weird desire, particularly since I've never read any of the other books, but it was definitely there.

I didn't do it, obviously -- I do have more tact and couth than that. But I'm sure someone, somewhere on the vast Internet, has already done so. And perhaps that's the lesson of the Internet: anything you can think of, someone has already done.

The Great Amazon Squeeze, Once Again

This week, Jeff Bezos admitted what numerous teardown analyses have shown: that Amazon sells its Kindle devices at "cost" to drive content sales. There's no indication of how optimistic Amazon is when it determines its "cost," so the general suspicion in publishing that they actually sell devices at a slight loss is still entirely plausible.

And those with memories that stretch back more than a couple of years remember that the famous $9.99 Kindle price point was also, in the vast majority of cases, selling at a loss. Since the end of the great antitrust suit means that Amazon is free to once again discount major-publisher books below its own cost, is there anyone who doesn't believe that Amazon will do so again?


(The comparison in that Forbes article is with videogames, where Sony, Microsoft, etc, do take a small loss on each $300-$500 console...but then make that up by making hefty profits on each piece of $60 software for that console, plus the gravy of direct-to-consumer DLC. I don't need to point out the differences between that and the book market, do I?)


So, to review: Amazon sells hardware at what is at best a breakeven price to sell more content, and then sells content at a loss to maintain lock-in with their customers. It must be nice to have a pile of money so large that you can burn it off idly like that.

But, if I owned Amazon stock, I know I'd be screaming right now.

Trillions! Trillions! Trillions!

Most of the projects I work on for my day job never get mentioned here, because they're deeply technical and only of interest to accountants, CIOs, and similarly specialized business folks. But, once in a while, I do have something that's more exciting that that, and this is one of those times.

Yesterday was the official publication date for Trillions, a great book on what pervasive computing will mean for business and society, from three very smart and very savvy technologists/designers/thinkers, Peter Lucas, Joe Ballay, and Mickey McManus. They're all part of MAYA Design, a Pittsburgh firm that does amazing work on interface design and other things I don't even have the terminology to describe. (When I visited them last year to talk about marketing for Trillions, they showed off an amazing system called Visage that they created for DARPA to manage and control manifold real-time dataflows for a battlefield.)

So Trillions is genuinely visionary, and comes from three guys who really know and live this stuff. It's an exciting book to be (a tiny) part of.

I'd like to get more copies of Trillions out there, particularly in the hands of SF folks and influential Internet people. (And who else would be reading this blog?) In the past, I've sent out queries to people I knew on books of less direct interest to the field, but I think I've already outstayed that welcome. So, this time, I won't spam anyone; I'm just looking for inbound interest. I'll be happy to send a copy of Trillions to you if you'll read it and possibly blog/talk/write about it -- I'm not looking for guarantees, just interest. I might be able to swing e-books in some format as well, though it's still much easier to ship blocks of dead tree.

Check out the website, which has a bunch of fascinating videos about what MAYA has done and the topic of the book, and shoot me an e-mail if you're interested in a copy of Trillions.

C'mon! It's the only book at Wiley I've worked on that has a quote from a SF writer! (And probably the only one that ever will!)

"Trillions is bold, unabashed, ingenious, and absolutely fizzing with insights about the new-modern process of blending design, high-tech, and commerce. Always entertaining and mostly right on topic."

 - David Brin

Stating the Obvious

This story is a week old, but I neglected to mention it when it hit: Amazon declares that Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy is the highest-selling series ever for them in the US.

This does not mean that Collins's books have sold more copies overall than, for example, J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series, which was the prior record-holder. And it doesn't mean any of the things implied in Sara Nelson's self-lauding statement at the link.

What it means -- and what everyone who works in publishing already knows, but doesn't usually like to say in public -- is that Amazon is capturing an ever-larger share of the book business, which means that they sell a larger percent of books now than they did ten years ago -- so of course the big sellers now are bigger for Amazon than the big sellers were ten years ago. (Look for a similar statement about those "Fifty Shades of Grey" books in another year, especially if a movie does get made.)

This is good if you think that a single retailer should dominate the entire retail landscape for a particular kind of product. If you don't think that's such a good thing, your mileage may vary.

But what the statement really is saying is "we own the book market now, suckers." So you might as well learn to love Big Brother.

A Little Levity for a Friday

These may not actually be the absolute 10 Worst Book Covers in the History of Literature, but they're definitely on the shortlist.

My favorite is right here:

Double Penetrator! Try to tell me that was inadvertent! Just try!

Incoming Books: BEA Edition

This past week was the big US-based book-industry trade show, Book Expo America -- as usual these days, held in the ever-dumpier Javitz Convention Center way over on the seedy fringe of Midtown Manhattan -- and I was required to attend and man the booth by my employer, a big publishing company.

I've been to BEA for most of the last decade -- I was too junior, and at a company entirely separated from the bookstore market, for the first decade of my career to get a BEA badge then -- but this year was the first time I was officially given booth duties. (In fact, in my prior few Wiley years, I was specifically warned not to spend much time in the booth, for fear of clogging it up and stopping the paying customers from getting what they need.)

If you know anything at all about BEA, you know that it has two essential activities: schmoozing [1] and grabbing free advance copies of upcoming books. I did a bit of the first, seeing old work pals, former contacts, still-current friends, and even a couple of authors. (I'll refrain from name dropping, because you don't care.) And I did my fair share of the latter, too, after a couple of years where the big houses seemed to be trying to switch over to digital download codes. (Or maybe I was just there at opening on Wednesday, for the first time ever -- BEA has always previously been a half-day visit for me, usually in the afternoon -- since that's when I got a lot of this stuff.)

Since this blog has lately devolved to primarily lists of books sitting in front of me, let me tell you about what I found, organized by increasing physical trim size of those books (since that makes a neater stack):

Drama is the new graphic novel by Raina Telgemeier, following up the Eisner-winning (on top of several other major accolades) Smile, which I reviewed here appreciatively some time ago. Drama does not appear to be a memoir, as Smile was -- the main character is named Callie, for one thing -- so I think this is the fictional story of one middle-schooler, her role in a school play, and her nascent love-life. It's coming from Scholastic in September -- by the way, Scholastic had a great giveaway setup, with tables on either side of one end of their bowling-alley booth where different things appeared regularly over the course of the show.

Sh*tty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us is a joke book, more or less, from Laurie Kilmartin, Karen Moline, Alicia Ybarbo, and Mary Ann Zoellner. All four of them are high-powered New-York-type writers and moms; just from flipping through it, it seems to be heavily about fancy drinks and mani/pedi/hair issues, which the moms I know -- none of whom I'd call "sh*tty," though I'd think they'd be the audience for a humorous parenting manual -- don't care all that much about. So this is for a particular, urban, terribly hip kind of self-conscious mom, who doesn't live up to her unrealistic expectations of perfection in motherhood (as she probably doesn't live up to her unrealistic expectations of perfection any other ways). But it looks funny, it was free, and it's called Sh*tty Mom, so I had to grab it. (It also is barely 60 pages long, so each of the four authors didn't have to do too much work before getting back to their spa weekends and skinny margaritas.) This one's from Abrams Image, also coming in September.

Jasper Fforde's first novel for non-adults is The Last Dragonslayer; it came out in the UK a couple of years back, and I've been vaguely looking for it since then. Harcourt is finally going to publish it here in September -- as the first of what I think is turning into a series, and now I finally have it. It's pure fantasy in a way his books for adults haven't been, set in one of those worlds where magic was once strong and is now ebbing -- though Big Magic may be around the corner.

I spent about five years working on a book club about hunting and fishing -- despite not being a hunter or fisherman at all, and, in fact, not being more than mildly fond of the Great Outdoors to begin with -- and that still burbles up in odd ways. For example, I got a copy of Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species, a book about hunting and then eating various invasive species in the US by Jackson Landers, whose prior works include the very apropos The Beginner's Guide to Hunting Deer for Food. It's from Storey Publishing -- which I dealt with, back in my Outdoorsman's Edge days -- and is yet another book coming in September.

Albert of Adelaide is a first novel -- from the middle-aged New Mexico immigration lawyer Howard Anderson -- being published by the epitome of the "do only a few books, but Do Them Big" publishing strategy, Hachette's Twelve imprint. So it's mildly surprising to see that it looks deeply odd: a fabulist, fantastic story about the title character, a talking platypus looking for the fabled "Old Australia." It's out in July.

Almost the only thing I waited on line to have signed -- aside for a couple of books for my younger son, Thing 2 -- was Ian McEwan's upcoming novel Sweet Tooth, a '70s-set espionage novel, and that was mostly because I couldn't see any easy way to just get the book and avoid the signature. (I really don't see the point of cattle-call signatures -- if a writer you know signs a book to you because she knows you, that's one thing, but standing on line with a hundred other people doesn't make the resulting signature anything but another mass-produced object.) Anyway, this is from Nan A. Talese Books, and is coming in mid-November.

I'd meant to read Kurt Andersen's novel Turn of the Century for the last decade-plus -- though I should have read it when it came out in 1999, which sadly is no longer possible -- so, instead, I snatched a galley of his new novel True Believers, which is coming from Random House in July. I'm afraid it's yet another novel about the 1960s from someone who was young then, but I'll try not to hold that against him.

Mark Helprin is back with another one of his far-spaced, gigantic novels -- this one is named In Sunlight and in Shadow, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish it in October. I don't believe I've managed to read a Helprin novel other than his magnificent, luminous, majestic Winter's Tale despite meaning to read several of them (notably A Soldier of the Great War, which I had a hardcover copy of for around a decade), but perhaps this time will be the charm. This novel doesn't appear to have any fantastic elements; it's the story of a young man just returned from WWII and the rich woman who falls in love with him.

Economix: How and Why Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work),  in Words and Pictures is a graphic novel explaining how the economy works, written by Michael Goodwin with art by Dan E. Burr. It looks to be very much in the tradition of Larry Gonick's nonfiction comics -- both in style and in political tone -- which is good for those of us who can't get enough pure Gonick from the source. This is a finished book, so I think it's already available -- and it's published by Abrams ComicArts.

Jonathan Tropper's last novel was the bestseller This Is Where I Leave You (which I actually read and reviewed here), so his name was familiar when I saw the big stack of his new book One Last Thing Before I Go. I believe this is another novel of suburban anomie featuring privileged white men who aren't quite as rich and successful as they'd like to be -- not that there's anything wrong with that -- and their dysfunctional families, including pregnant daughters and far-too-happy ex-wives. Dutton will publish it in August.

America, You Sexy Bitch came with a button -- reading "you sexy bitch," naturally -- which was a pretty bad reason to wait in line to get it signed by authors Michael Ian Black and Meghan McCain, but it's too late to go back on that now. MIB is a comedian and actor, and MMCC is a professional Republican (her father ran for President a couple of times, so it's in her blood), so of course their book is about riding an RV across the country to either find America or argue about it. I'm not sure which one the book ended up being; we'll all have to find out. It's from Da Capo, and it's probably already published, since it's a real hardcover and everything.

And last for me -- though it will get passed along to the boys -- is the fifth book in Kazu Kibuishi's Amulet graphic novel series, Prince of the Elves. (See my reviews of the earlier books.) It's another book from Scholastic -- if I'd managed to get a copy of the new "Captain Underpants" book, I would be proclaiming them the greatest publisher in the history of the universe -- and is coming, like so much else, in September.

I also grabbed a few things for the aforementioned Thing 2: a teaser with the first 150-ish pages of the new Artemis Fowl book, a signed copy of Brandon Mull's new Candy Shop War sequel, another YA fantasy from the same publisher because the author was signing right before Mull would, and probably another book or two I'm forgetting.

I did not manage to snag a copy of the new Lemony Snicket book, Who Could That Be at This Hour?, let alone get the super-cool package with a "briefcase" of important documents. This is partially because the line was immensely long, and partly because I actually did have booth duties, and couldn't just hang around all day nabbing stuff. Boo hoo. I can wait until the real book comes out, unless some publicist takes pity on me -- or notes my love for the "Series of Unfortunate Events" series -- and shoots me a copy of it. (I'm not holding my breath.)

Otherwise, BEA was unremarkable: some hours of standing in a booth, chatting with colleagues, helping out various passers-by, and waiting for the minutes to pass; some time wandering the floor, looking at things and making mental notes; and a pleasant hour or so at the Baen party down in the basement on Tuesday evening. It was a trade show, but a decent one.


[1] Usually disguised as "business discussions."

3 of Agency 5 Settle With DOJ

Publishers Weekly has the early line on the settlement -- as usual, subject to revision as more details are released.

And, yes, the DOJ has now essentially just handed Amazon a loaded gun and dared them to shoot it at every other book retailer. I'll admit that I was hoping the Obama DOJ would actually prosecute anti-trust cases, unlike their predecessors, but I never expected them to act deliberately to strengthen the strongest player in an already lopsided market. For shame.