From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
The Problem in Aisle One
So what is the difference between books and Pop-Tarts?
What's the difference between a book and a Pop-Tart? Michael Spinozzi, the chief marketing officer of Borders Group Inc., the bookstore chain, flew to Portland, Ore., this week to tackle that very question.
Borders recently embraced a system called "category management," in which it divides its books into 250 categories and anoints one publisher to serve as "captain" of each. Being captain means you get to pay for--and share in--market research that will supposedly tell Borders, and publishers too, how to sell more books.
This has disturbed any number of people. Dissenters worry, for one thing, that these big category captains will use their position to edge aside the competition. Earlier this summer, Borders received a protest letter from Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, the publisher André Schiffrin and 25 like-minded intellectuals decrying the whole project.
"There is a difference between books and Pop-Tarts," the letter says, warning that "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."
The Pop-Tart reference is carefully chosen. Gregory Josefowicz, the new CEO of Borders, and Mr. Spinozzi, its marketing executive, are both from the Jewel Osco unit of Albertson's Inc. They have shaken the publishing world in part because they seem ready to employ retailing tactics they used in the grocery trade.
Borders is taking the criticism seriously, which is why Mr. Spinozzi huddled in Portland with Gary Ruskin, who drafted the protest letter and who runs Commercial Alert, which he and Mr. Nader founded to combat the commercialization of culture.
The critics of category management are probably right to be suspicious--I think it was Thoreau who warned against any venture that requires new jargon--but are Pop-Tarts really so different from books? Partisans on both sides of the question argue that each provides sustenance and must be conveniently and attractively packaged to move.
It's true that Pop-Tarts boxes offer a more accurate description of their ingredients than most book jackets. But the main difference may be that selling Pop-Tarts, unlike peddling books, is a pretty good business. Kellogg's says that it sells enough of the little toaster cakes in a year to circle the globe 6.8 times.
The book business is something else again. Profits are scant, sales are flat, and competition is murderous. No less important, publishers and retailers have to compete against an increasingly efficient network of sellers offering the same products, previously read, at a fraction of the cost. (Kellogg's doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about a secondary market for used Pop-Tarts on the Internet.)
As a novelist and capitalist, I find myself rooting on both sides of the debate. It seems obvious that somebody--anybody!--needs to make some sense of the book business, which publishes something like 122,000 titles annually and promotes almost none of them more than minimally. On the other hand, if fewer books were published, it's a safe bet that mine (always more popular with critics than shoppers) would be the first to go.
Besides, the category-management concept does come across as mildly sinister. The market-research part sounds innocent enough; Borders says, for instance, that such research into the habits of children's-book buyers is leading the chain to abandon its arrangement of books by age. Instead it will divide kids' books into "read to me," "read with me" and "read alone," since children of the same age often have widely varying reading skills.
The problem is with those category captains, who reportedly will have to pay fees as high as $100,000. Mr. Spinozzi says that goes entirely for training and research and that category captains will share the in-depth market research they've helped pay for but will not enjoy increased shelf space or any other advantage. "Borders makes all the decisions with regard to the titles we carry," he says, adding that the system is simply part of an effort to bring fact-based decision-making to bear on the seemingly intractable problem of getting book sales growing again. But critics worry that only large publishers can afford to cough up the fees and that the whole system will promote further consolidation. (My agent jokes that pretty soon submitting a manuscript will be easy because there will be only one place to send it.)
Still, a lot of the animus directed at the plan seems rooted in a dislike of chain bookstores--a dislike that highlights the paradoxical way that liberal intellectuals resist change. The reality is that these new chain stores deliver almost everything any book-lover could possibly want, including a diversity of viewpoints.
The average Borders shop, for example, carries 150,000 titles--so many that, as an author, I come away depressed at the prospect of adding my own pathetic spoor to the mountain of works already there. Thanks to the miracle of free enterprise, you can now live in the blandest, most bourgeois suburb and buy the works of Herbert Marcuse or Michel Foucault down at the local mall.
Michael Korda, editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and author of a cultural history of the best-seller list, puts it succinctly in a telephone interview: "With the exception of the Carnegie libraries, nothing has ever brought literary culture to the hinterlands like the invention of the mall-based superstore."
In short, this is a golden age for consumers of books. The economist Tyler Cowen has noted that in 1947 only 85,000 books were in print in the U.S., a figure that had grown to 1.3 million by 1996. More books are more widely available today than ever before in human history.
The idea that a book might be out of print, moreover, is itself history, since you can find almost anything on the Internet and print-on-demand technology is keeping even abstruse monographs in publishers' catalogs. Mr. Ruskin disputed this wide availability when I spoke to him, so I challenged him to name an obscure volume. He chose the unabridged "Democratic Promise: the Populist Moment in America" by Lawrence Goodwyn. I found it for him while we were on the phone.
Arguably, books are not as central to life as they once were, and this is a problem. But short of changing a culture obsessed with TV, movies and music, it's hard to imagine an alternative to better marketing. Perhaps Tony the Tiger is available for a tie-in.
Mr. Akst, a business columnist, is the author of "The Webster Chronicle," a novel.
