The instant book that wasn't

"9/11 8:48" -- the first book published about the terrorist attacks -- was print-on-demand. So why wasn't it available everywhere, immediately?

By Elizabeth Manus

Oct. 22, 2001 | Nineteen days after the World Trade Center calamity, a small company specializing in print-on-demand publishing achieved a big victory down in Charleston, S.C. BookSurge LLC became the first publisher out of the gate with a quality book about the disaster. After five days of nonstop printing, the company had stockpiled 10,000 paperback copies of "09/11 8:48 AM: Documenting America's Greatest Tragedy," ready to go.

The book is a collection of writings culled from both the international journalism site BlueEar.com and the faculty and students of New York University's Department of Journalism -- among the contributors are Todd Gitlin, M.J. Rose and Robert Jay Lifton. On Oct. 1 copies began shipping to individuals and independent bookstores. By Oct. 12, the book had received coverage in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today and the morning talk show Today New York.

Time for a toast, right? Wrong. Because for a publisher like BookSurge, first out of the gate does not mean first into the stores. Indeed, three weeks after the fact, "09/11" could not be found at the most high-profile booksellers in trade retail land: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.

Chalk it up to business-as-usual clashing with business-as-unusual. For starters, BookSurge published "09/11" to boost the image of print-on-demand publishing and raise $1 million for the American Red Cross at the same time. As such, it set strict terms for booksellers and distributors as to what percentage of sales should go to charity. But some of the primary sellers and distributors, namely Amazon and Ingram Book Group, the nation's largest wholesaler and Amazon's main pipeline to trade publishers, also had their own hoops to jump through -- hoops that are much easier for giant publishers like Random House and HarperCollins to maneuver around, but that can be challenging for small publishers, and especially small print-on-demand outfits.

The chokepoint created by Amazon and Ingram raises, for some experts, questions that take on a First Amendment tint. The issue is not so much active censorship as "what's buyable, practical, and probable," as NYU Journalism chair Jay Rosen and author of the book's foreword put it. "Amazon is the lifeline to a larger audience. It's possible you can sell a million copies of the book from BookSurge.com, but it's not probable."

BookSurge chief executive Bob Holt is looking ahead to that day nonetheless. "Ingram will be disintermediated, maybe 10 years from now, maybe 20," he said. "The model where you put a bunch of books in a warehouse and distribute them, that's a dying horse. It's still very valuable for bestsellers -- but what percentage of titles are bestsellers? Less than 1 percent of titles each year."

Next page: Is Ingram the Microsoft of publishing?