Elaine Petrocelli, the owner of Book Passage, a store with two outlets in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she worries that the blockbuster sales of some of the war books will lead publishers to line up a wave of similar titles that would dilute their appeal, something that happened in the past with knockoffs of "The Da Vinci Code" and other popular genre books.
She attracted attention with the first chapter, which appeared in Partisan Review in 1934, but never completed the manuscript and published it only in 1974, when her prestige led publishers to solicit her for anything she might give them.
Interest in circulation led publishers into market research.
The novel's lack of success led publishers to slash Melville's advances, so his earnings fell just as his family grew.
In the last few years, she said, soaring sales at online bookstores led publishers to optimistic expectations of the market, just as the expanding superstores and mass-merchandisers did in 1996.
This naturally leads publishers to scurry about hastily signing up more books on terrorism and germs and Islam, many of which won't be in bookstores for a year or more.
And this whole process maintains the simplicity that leads publishers to choose Netvibes in the first place.
They say (and they're not alone) that the web today is driven by page view economics and search engine optimization goals, which leads publishers to link to themselves too often.
It could be a function of unfamiliarity with YouTubers that leads publishers to fear the new and the strange, and in some cases it could be short-sighted greediness that makes a developer think he's owed money from having his game covered, but it feels like more than that.
But once Obama took the lead the publisher took the view that a new book wouldn't be commercially viable.
