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One small voice in the proud tradition of FreeBlogging*Friday, August 20, 2004posted by gbarto at 7:38 AM:This post appeared on the old turkeyblog site last night, as gbarto.com was down a few hours so the hosts could do a software upgrade (wish they'd told me, grrr, but everything's up again).Barnes and Noble bias? I was in a local Barnes and Noble this evening where I learned some interesting things about how the Bay Area B & N ordering works. If you visit the current events section, you'll find Dowd's Bushworld, Molly Ivins galore and more. But you won't find Unfit for Command. They ordered 15 copies, which are gone, and they're not sure when the next batch is coming in. But, not to worry. They have around a dozen copies of Bushworld, Imperial Hubris and other anti-Bush titles. To be fair, they have around 8 of Hewitt's book and the same number of Dave Bossie's Faces of John Kerry. And they have displays all over the place with at least 30 copies of My Life. I talked to a bookseller who says he hasn't seen one of them move in days - massive over-ordering: once the book had been discussed on television, nobody seemed to need it anymore. I asked why there were so many copies of Clinton and so few for Unfit for Command. The bookseller said that both the liberal ordering and the liberal displays (the Current Events highlights rack could have been put together by Terry McAuliffe) reflected, in management's view, the audience in the Bay Area. Which explains everything except why My Life's rotting on the shelf and Unfit is on order. Methinks the management's ordering "strategy" reflects the thinking that "nobody I know is voting for Bush," even if the sales tell another story. Which raises the question: do the more liberal types who go into bookselling (at the local level, anyway) represent another form of media bias? Even if not in ordering, it's certainly evident in the displays around here which assume, among other things, that that Molly Ivins is just a hoot, though in my regular visits to bookshops I rarely hear her latest being discussed and rarely find a copy of her work moved to a different part of the store - interested non-buyers often deposit a book in the wrong place - or with the spine cracked. * * *
French Elections, 1st round
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