The Uncomfortable Zone

Sometimes an issue arises that raises questions that aren't easily answered. Take, for instance, the recent announcement that O.J. Simpson had written a book entitled If I Did It, which was at least in part a "fictionalized" account of how he would have murdered his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman if he'd actually done it.

Right.

Now the company who owns the company who owns the publisher who owns the imprint under which it was to be published says that there will be no book, nor will there be a two-part televised interview with him touting said book. All of a sudden, everybody's taking a high road they couldn't have found with a AAA road map highlighted in yellow a week ago.

But it raises some interesting questions.

At the bookstore we discussed how we were going to handle this, and the decison that was made was easy: we would not order the book for stock, but if a customer requested it we would order it for them. We would only do this if they would pay for it up front, a practice we employ only occasionally, and usually only for obscure titles that we would be stuck with if they reneged on the deal. We were doing this to keep ourselves from ordering a book and then having people find it elsewhere the same day they called us. We did not it on our shelves, plain and simple.

Of course, if someone were willing to pay we aren't in the business of refusing business, so we'd have made our usual profit. Is that wrong?

Only if you consider that we have never refused to order a book for a customer based on its content. We've special-ordered The Anarchist's Cookbook, for instance, and for about two years back in the old Geraldo Rivera Satanist in Every Daycare Center phase, copies of The Satanic Bible. People were curious, and although we didn't want that in our regular stock either, we weren't going to refuse to sell it.

In order to make a point, my brother ordered a single copy of Madonna's Sex all those years ago, and before it was even in the store we'd gotten an order for it, and it was sold to that customer less than half an hour after UPS delivered it. We never had to stock it, but we made our point anyway. In fact, the local news media went nuts when they found out we had ordered it, and they asked for an interview. So, my brother grants the interview, and he did it splendidly. He lambasted the reporter for ten full minutes -- "We work our butts off to sell truly fine works of literary value because we believe in promoting thoughtful, important literature. We can't ever get you people here for a single second to talk about that, but just let some semi-talented narcissistic bleached blonde who calls herself "groundbreaking" come out with an overpriced piece of soft pornography and y'all are all over this banner moment in the history of world literature."

Well, they aired a little squib -- but all you saw was my brother talking in a rather heated fashion, and the reporter talked over the entire piece, so nobody ever heard what he said. They'd been promoting the story all day, and had to do something.

But I digress.

The OJ book was beyond reprehensible on every level you can think of. But the man has right to write it, and a publisher has a right to publish it, and they both have a right to expect to make money from it.

As did the Fox network, who planned to air the two-part special on their regular cable channel -- not the news channel.

But they were shocked to discover that they had few takers for advertising, and so in a performance worthy of Laurence Olivier, the head of that network said they were NOT going to air such swill.

Swill's in the eye and ear and pocketbook of the beholder, though, and the most interesting part of the debate lies in taking an unemotional view -- was it truly fair for the marketplace to put pressure on the publisher and the Fox network not to print/air this? And if it was, then can't the same be said for a dozen other hot-potato issue driven books/television shows?

Where's the line? And do we ever truly want to find out?