Remember last Wednesday, when I told you about an anonymous tip on a national bestseller that allegedly isn’t getting any additional printings? Well, another tip from another source came in Sunday afternoon about the same title, saying “all national distributors suddenly list ‘no copies on hand’ and the publisher is ‘out of stock indefinitely,'” which seems pretty darn unusual for what’s supposed to be one of the hottest nonfiction books in the nation. That leads my latest informant to speculate that the publisher might have caved to legal pressures from the book’s subject or organizations affiliated with the subject.
photo by Geir Halvorsen, use licensed through Creative Commons
My understanding of the situation, however, based on what other sources have told me, is that despite the book’s high ranking on the bestseller lists, there’s still a lot of copies sitting on display tables across America, and the publisher anticipates “a large amount of unsold returns coming back from the major chains,” so why would they want to add to that overstock? Considering that the book in question had an announced first printing just shy of half a million copies, that theory sounds plausible enough. If I get any confirmation from the publisher, I’ll let you know.
(And there’s no clues to what the book is in the photo, honest! It’s just a bookshop.)