3d. Commission agents have purchased complete editions of popular-selling books from the publishers, and re-sold them at a slight advance:
(a) To dry-goods stores, where they have been put on "bargain counters" and sold at less than cost, to attract customers to their stores.
(b) To publishers of local newspapers, who give the books away as premiums or sell them at cost prices, to increase the local circulation of their papers.
(c) To mail-order agencies, who advertise the books at less than they are usually sold for by dealers.
4th. Many publishers have been advertising and mailing their books directly to retail customers at reduced prices, or at the same price they recommended local dealers to ask for them, and they have prepaid the postage, thus competing directly with their distributing agents, the booksellers, in their own field.
5th. Finally, some local librarians, who a few years ago were appealing to local booksellers for a discount, having been granted the discount, have recently been supplying books "at cost prices" to other patrons of the local booksellers. Thus our friends, the librarians, having inverted the good old practice of returning good for evil, having helped to rob the local bookseller of his livelihood, now propose to abolish his office.
To carry the proposition to its conclusions, suppose we abolish the bookseller. Can the librarian take his place and send the orders in to the publishers? If so, if this is all there is to the bookselling business, why should the publisher pay a commission to the librarian for doing what the people could as readily do for themselves? But a general business cannot be carried on in this way. Publishers have tried it for years, yet only comparatively few people are willing to order books that they have not had an opportunity to examine, and of this class librarians are the most conservative. They, too, want to know what they are buying before they place their orders. Hence, this postulate: If the librarian is to succeed the bookseller, he must become a merchant; he must order stocks of books and take the speculative chance of selling them. But the librarian has had no experience or training in merchandising. Can he afford to hazard his own capital in an untried field; can he induce his friends to supply him with capital to invest in a business of which he confessedly has no knowledge? It would manifestly be a perversion of the funds of the institution in charge of the librarian, to invest them in a gainful occupation.
From what I have said, it must be apparent that booksellers, as well as librarians, have a province of their own, and perform a service that cannot be delegated to another. And hence it is desirable that we live and dwell together in peace and amity.
But in these days of combinations, reorganizations and revolutions in the conduct of business, the publishers have looked farther, in their quest for more economical purveying agents. For the past ten years they have been trying to induce the dry-goods merchants to carry books. But, after all this time, not more than half a dozen department stores carry fairly representative stocks of books. They confine themselves, for the most part, to new copyrighted fiction, and of this they handle only that which is widely advertised.
Of late, department stores and dry-goods stores have met severe competition in clothing stores, that make no pretext of carrying a book stock. They simply buy an edition of a popular-selling book and advertise it for less money than it actually cost. They do this simply as an advertising dodge, to attract customers to their stores. Then, too, the mail-order agencies have cut the price of the most popular books so low that it is no longer profitable to handle them. The result of this has been that many of the most promising new novels have been killed before they were fairly put on the market; for as soon as they ceased to be profitable no one could afford to re-order them.
The effect of this recent drift of the trade has been to stimulate the frothy side of literature to an extreme degree. The more serious literature is being neglected. The latest novel is the fad. Its average life is reduced to little more than one year, though the copyright lasts for twenty-eight years, and with a renewal it may be extended to forty-two years.
This shortening of the life of books has had a baneful effect: