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WASHINGTON - June 26 - Ralph
Nader, Commercial Alert, and 27 authors and scholars sent a letter today to Borders
Group CEO Gregory P. Josefowicz, asking him to reconsider his "category management"
plan which will likely reduce the range of ideas in print and put small publishers
out of business. The letter follows.
Dear Mr. Josefowicz:
There is a difference between
books and pop-tarts. It should not be necessary to point this out to a man who
sells books, but apparently it is. According to press reports, you plan to embrace
the grocery industry's practice of "category management," so that publishers
-- not you the bookseller but publishers -- will manage the offerings on your
shelves.
We urge you to reconsider.
Borders is not Albertson's. Such pop-tart marketing likely will slash the range
of book titles and ideas available to the public. It will jeopardize smaller presses;
and worst of all, it will further strengthen the hand of publishing conglomerates
that have too much power already.
According to the May 20,
2002 Wall Street Journal, you have devised 250 categories for books, each to be
captained by a publishing firm. These firms will pay you a large annual fee --
in excess of $110,000 according to the Journal -- which will be hard for most
small and medium-sized publishers to muster. In return, the "captains"
will be able to decide which books you carry, how many are bought, and where they
are placed. Although you say you will keep final authority over book-buying, Borders
will be an agent of the publishers rather than of its customers.
Under your plans, smaller
publishers will be at a big disadvantage, since each publisher-captain will be
able to deploy your shelf space to its own advantage. In categories rich in small
press titles, the publisher-captain will be able to cut the number of titles in
the category, and fill the category with its own titles.
Denied shelf space in a
major outlet like Borders, smaller publishing houses will be hard pressed to survive.
The Kremlin would have found it difficult to invent a more subtle and effective
way of suppressing original viewpoints and ideas.
Books are not just another
consumer product. They form much of our society's repository of ideas; they are
the bloodstream for the life of the mind. You have a responsibility to serve as
well as to gain, for your books have the protection of the First Amendment. If
you were not ready to accept this responsibility, then we cannot imagine why you
would have entered the book business to begin with. There are many other things
to sell.
We wonder, how do you understand
your role in regards to your readers, and those of future generations? In your
view, how many titles are "too many titles" to lose? By what measure
will you decide whether your plans have cost the public too much in terms of access
to ideas? What steps will you take to ensure that diverse choices are lost because
of your "category management" plans?
The Borders Group is the
nation's second largest book retailer. It has more than 1,190 bookstores in all
50 states, which operate under both the Borders and Wadenbooks names. You are
in a unique position to maintain a high standard for book sellers throughout the
country.
Once large outlets replace
a sense of exploration by patrons with formulaic categories, the location takes
on a distaste, a sense of being manipulated and homogenized by absentee category
marketers instead of being served by a bookstore in a community.
Please leave "category
management" to the soap merchants. You have undertaken a higher calling,
one to which we hope that you are equal.
Sincerely,
Peter Barnes, co-founder,
Working Assets; author, Who Owns the Sky?
Greg Bates, Publisher, Common Courage Press
David Bollier, author, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of our Common
Wealth
James Boyle, Professor, Duke Law School; author, Shamans, Software and
Spleens
Liane Casten, author, Breast Cancer: Poisons, Profits and Prevention
Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jeff Cohen, co-author, Wizards of Media Oz and Adventures in Medialand
Richard B. Du Boff, Samuel and Etta Wexler Professor of Economics Emeritus,
Bryn Mawr College
Paul Duguid, co-author, The Social Life of Information
Laura Flanders, author, Real Majority, Media Minority: The Costs of Sidelining
Women in Reporting
Edward S. Herman, Professor, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Lewis Hyde, Thomas Professor of Creative Writing, Kenyon College
Sut Jhally, Founder and Executive Director, The Media Education Foundation
Naomi Klein, author, No Logo
David Korten, author, When Corporations Rule the World
Saul Landau, Senior Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies; author, Red Hot
Radio
Mike Males, author, Smoked: Why Joe Camel is Still Smiling
Bob McCannon, Executive Director, New Mexico Media Literacy Project
Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology, New York University
Ralph Nader
Jonathan Rowe, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly
Marcus Raskin, Co-founder, Institute for Policy Studies
Gary Ruskin, Executive Director, Commercial Alert
Marta Russell, author, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social
Contract
Andre Schiffrin, Director, The New Press
Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology, Boston College
Jonathan Tasini, President, National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981)
Robert Weissman, co-author, Corporate Predators; Co-director, Essential
Action
Mark Zepezauer, co-author, Take the Rich Off Welfare
<-----letter ends here------>
A copy of the letter is
available in .pdf format at http://www.commercialalert.org/PDFs/borders.pdf
Commercial Alert's mission
is to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it
from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community,
environmental integrity and democracy. For more information, see Commercial Alert's
website at http://www.commercialalert.org.
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