A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
by Richard Kostelanetz
Schirmer, 670 pp., $ ???
My editor told me that my latest book, the second edition of my Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, would cost $ 60 before Christmas and $ 90 after. Those prices seemed a bit high, even for a book that is 670 double-columned pages, but not outrageous.
So you can imagine my surprise to discover at the beginning of this year that the nouveau legendary Amazon.com -- with its reputation for deep price-cutting -- was offering the book for a whopping $ 289.25. What world were they in? Part of the popularity of Amazon.com's online format is the option it offers for customer responses, and one of the contributors to my dictionary submitted a letter saying the price was way too high. His comments appeared on the book's web page for a while, then mysteriously disappeared, only to reappear later. The Amazon.com format also offers an option labeled "I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book," so I wrote that readers could get the book far cheaper elsewhere. This advice, however, "Earth's Largest Bookstore" decided not to publish.
Meanwhile, Amazon.com's principal online competitor, Barnes & Noble, was offering the book for $ 60 throughout January. Sometime during February, however, the BarnesAndNoble.com price jumped to $ 90, and then to $ 95, escalations made without explanation. During February, Amazon.com, reconnecting to Mother Earth, lowered the price to $ 98 -- claiming, however, that this price represented a marvelous bargain, "reduced $ 191.50," which is not quite the same as admitting a previous inflation. Nonetheless, at the beginning of April, Amazon.com went back up to $ 289.25, adding that the book is "back ordered." Borders, not to be overcut, wants $ 312.50 on-line, while Books-A-Million asks $ 289.25 (though its "club members" can get the book for a mere $ 260.32), and Cody's in Berkeley also wants $ 289.25.
A friend with Internet time to kill tells me that a smaller website called VarsityBooks.com has the Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes for $ 90.25 reduced from the "suggested price" of $ 95; even establishing authority of a sort by offering a picture of the cover, which they must have obtained by having the book securely in hand. Another site, called BigWords.com, promises to deliver it for $ 55.80. (BestBookDeal.com offers a $ 10 discount for BigWords orders over $ 100, which means you can get six copies of the book for the price of one at Border's; hunt down enough deals like that, and you could start your own online bookstore.) A site called Fatbrain.com asks $ 60 for "450 pages; not yet published," while Blackwell's wants £ 40.95 for a book still described as "not yet printed." Time has apparently passed them by.
Perhaps the Internet is a less efficient retailing channel than most of us suppose. I don't believe that discrepancies in book pricing were previously so huge, but one advantage offered by the Internet is comparison shopping without leaving your desk. The proprietor of St. Marks Books, an independent store in New York's East Village, told me that none of his regular wholesalers has the book. He surmised that it must have a "short discount," meaning a retailer's discount insufficient to warrant wholesalers' stocking it. Perhaps, I replied; but if one Internet retailer can sell it for $ 55.80, it must be getting the book from somewhere for less.
Great discrepancies in prices prompt strange thoughts. One notion occurring to me is that either my publisher or my wholesaler is trying to price some Internet retailers out of business. (After all, more than one bookseller would be relieved if Amazon.com disappeared.) It's unlikely, of course, but consider that the major online bookstores don't actually have the book. None of them offers a photo, as they do with many of their books; they merely list the dictionary to bolster their claim that they have a far larger selection than any local retailer could manage. Were someone to place an order, Amazon.com would reply that it was "back ordered," which is a euphemism for "get it elsewhere." (Or perhaps, if a customer persisted, they'd purchase a copy from BigWords.com before shipping it out for $ 289.25.)
My editor tells me that none of his colleagues can account for the discrepancies. "Retailers," he adds, "can charge whatever they want." Nonetheless, I wonder if other new books are priced so capriciously. While an author can be amused by the variety of retail prices, all apparently concocted without consulting the wholesale cost, I'm pained by the thought that there might actually be a reader out there who will decide against purchasing my poor, orphaned dictionary, not because anyone forbade it but just because of bad salesmanship. Why, it's checkout-counter censorship.
Richard Kostelanetz has published many books of poetry, fiction, experimental prose, and criticism.