For what it’s worth, I’ve gone and signed up on Indiebound, using the artfully cryptic name tobiascarroll. For more on just what that is, I’d recommend The Written Nerd on the subject.
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I’ve been meaning to post a lengthy response to this Jennifer Nix piece on print-on-demand and progressive publishing for a while now. As it’s been up for nearly a month, I think it’s doubtful that this response will ever happen, but I do think that one aspect of Nix’s argument — that, essentially, independent booksellers should be actively supporting the Obama campaign — is given something of a wrinkle by a quick glimpse of Indiebound’s bestsellers page. Specifically, the one for hardcover nonfiction, which (as of September 11, 2008) includes both Goodnight Bush and Obama Nation in its top ten– the presence of both suggesting that the politics of the people who shop in indie bookstores is less monolithic than one might think.
(That said, I think Nix’s piece sets off my inherent contrarianism more than anything, given that I am essentially a lefty who shops primarily in independent bookstores. So, yeah.)
No argument on the presence of Obama Nation, but Goodnight Bush is a parody of Goodnight Moon that’s so *not* pro-Republican. One of my favorite things at the store right now is watching people’s reactions when they discover it for the first time.
…and I suddenly realize that my argument above may have not read just how I intended it to read. I definitely get, from what I’ve read (and even from the cover text) that Goodnight Bush is intended as a satire of our current President. I ended up cutting a paragraph from the final version of the post wherein I would have gone into the fact that the two highest-ranking books on the charts both seemed to be titles that aimed for a pretty specific political audience — but then realized that the Indiebound charts probably meshed pretty well with most other bestseller charts in that respect. My apologies for the confusion…
The bestsellers list in question.