Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: The Bookfather

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Mike Peterson Published: May 30, 2014 1 minute 4 comments

Dan Thompson strikes a nerve with today's Brevity.

I noted the other day that Barnes & Noble, for those of us outside the megalopolis where it is apparently staffed by people who know how a book operates, is not a bookstore so much as it is just another faceless Big Box, and it's the faceless Big Box that helped kill off small independent bookstores before Amazon came along.

So now Amazon and a publishing house have gotten into a large pissing match, and I've bought a dishpan.

First, the pissing match: Hachette Publishing is not a small player and you may know them better by the imprints Hyperion and Little, Brown. They say that Amazon is holding their books for ransom, that it is purposely cutting off pre-orders and delaying shipments in order to extort more favorable terms.

You can read the gory details here. It's fascinating, but I'm trying to dig myself out of a recent TLDNR trend.

But here's this much: That linked Washpo article quotes writer Scott Turow, past president of the Author's Guild, one of Hachette's authors and an expert on bloody, convoluted machinations:

“What kind of entity in a competitive market would willfully drive customers into the arms of its competitors unless it believes it doesn’t really have any competitors? Can you imagine Best Buy refusing to deliver for a period of weeks what’s available from its competitors? But Amazon behaves as though they’re the only game in town. And increasingly they are. It’s a head-scratcher why anyone with regulatory authority would tolerate it. If this is not an example of untoward power, I don’t know what is.”

I'm not surprised at this turn of events. I've heard stories from self-publishers of their being forced by Amazon to discount their books below cost. 

They have a good comic, they were able to compile a good collection. So they thought they didn't need a friend like Jeff Bezos. Now they come and say "Amazon, sell my books." But they don't ask with respect. They don't offer friendship. They don't even call him Bookfather.

Instead, they come to his website and ask that their book be sold — for money.

Well, that's why you'll see a widget in the right hand rail here titled "Independent Publishers."

Anybody who doesn't want to work with Amazon can list there for free. I get nothing except a little assuaging of guilt over the piece of the action I get when someone does buy a book from the Bookfather.

Now here's the deal with the dishpan:

My kitchen has an old, steel double sink, no disposal, no dishwasher. 

I don't remember whether I bought a new dishpan when I moved in four years ago or whether I brought the one from the place I rented before that, but it was getting scratched up and stained and nasty-looking, which I can live with, and cracked, which sort of defeats the purpose.

Now, in the olden days, O Best Beloved, you would simply go to the store and buy a dishpan. And if I were still living in western Maine, I'd have gone to Reny's and found just what I wanted.

Or, if I were living in the 1960s or 1980s, I'd have gone to Kresge's or Woolworth's or Grant's or any number of places, and there, somewhere alongside the wooden clothes pins and toilet plungers and mouse traps and rubber bath mats, I'd have found a dishpan.

But I don't live in Maine anymore and I also don't live in the past.

We've pretty much done away with those old dime stores that stocked a lot of odd little things you needed and a lot of even odder little things that you didn't.

Well, except over the river and down the road in Vermont where you can buy old timey stuff if you don't mind paying through your old timey nose for the nostalgia.

So I went to K-Mart, which used to be Kresge's back before it sold its soul to Wall Street. But we only have a midsize-city K-Mart, not one of the big ones, and it only had one dishpan which was oddly short and apparently is intended for people who only wash two or three dishes at a time.

And they didn't have dishpans at all at the Dollar Store.

So I went, for the first time in nearly a year, into our midsize-city sized Wal-Mart, which, by the way, is probably no more Satanic than K-Mart but which I stay out of for what I will admit are largely symbolic reasons.

They had larger dishpans than K-Mart, so I bought one, only to get home and discover that it fit the sink like a glove. A really, really tight glove. Which means that, if you pulled hard enough, you could haul it up and dump the dirty water out onto the counter but it was too tight a fit to dump it out into the sink.

Also, when you did that, the rim split. Finnegan beginnegan.

All of which is to say that I really did try to avoid buying a five dollar dishpan on Amazon, but there ya go.  If you want us to shop bricks-and-mortar, stock yer damn shelves. 

The Bookfather had exactly what I wanted, but, understandably, did not want to give me free shipping on a five dollar dishpan. However, as you see here (and some of the fine print is worth the embiggening click), they'll give you the free shipping if you purchase something else that raises your total to $25.

It happens that I'm about to start researching my next kids' history project, so I ordered a book on the women's suffrage movement, and a dishpan. (It's not "ironic" if the dishpan is going to be used by a guy, okay?)

So first I get the instant email confirmation of my on-line order, and then, the next day, I get another email saying that they are shipping the book first and will ship the dishpan later. For free.

I'm pretty sure that someone somewhere got screwed on this deal, but it wasn't me and the author of the book is dead, so I'm just gonna study my history and wash my dishes and y'all can sort it all out.

Now here's your moment of nostalgic zen: