No time for bookstores

This seems to be the month for Obama book controversies. First it was Jerome Corsi's anti-Obama book (see below), and now it's a pro-Obama book.

American Prospect co-editor (and Boston Globe columnist) Robert Kuttner's new book, "Obama's Challenge," will be published by Vermont-based publisher Chelsea Green early next month. However, booksellers are in a fury because Chelsea Green is making the book available exclusively on Amazon.com for the first two weeks -- sorry, bookstores, you'll have to wait your turn, until Sept. 15, to be exact.

Independent booksellers are up in arms, and even Barnes & Noble cancelled some part of its 10,000-copy order for its stores. The Times reports today that B&N threatened yesterday to cancel the book altogether.

Chelsea is speeding the book onto the market in time to distribute "several thousand" advance copies, and 15,000 Amazon discount coupons, at the Democratic National Convention next week. The book will be available on Amazon.com through its print-on-demand service, called BookSurge.

On the Chelsea Green website, publisher Margo Baldwin writes that "this election is too important to wait around for traditional publishing lead times." Or traditional booksellers, it seems. What it sounds like is that Chelsea, for whatever reason, can't get a conventional printing done, and books delivered, in time for the convention, and so it's using POD -- in other words, order a book on Amazon and they'll print you a copy and rush it to you.

It makes marketing sense, except for the part of making booksellers so angry that they want to burn your house down. I wonder who at Chelsea forgot about that, or thought of it but decided it wouldn't matter.