Getting Booked

Been following the David Vise case? He's the Washington Post reporter with a best-selling book on the charts, The Bureau and the Mole, about FBI spy Robert Philip Hanssen. The case has drawn interest because Vise has been his own best customer: He purchased a total of 20,000 copies of his own book from barnesandnoble.com, and later returned 17,500 of those copies.

The New York Times' business page seems to suspect that Vise has been manipulating the best-seller charts -- Vise denies this -- and has run several accounts of his actions. The Times' editorial page, on the other hand, weighed in Tuesday on Vise's side, dismissing the case against him. But there's another way to read the case: Vise is being publicly chastised by colleagues in the elite press not because he did anything wrong, but for behavior they regard as unseemly.

The Times' business line on Vise is that his purchases "immediately aroused suspicions among journalists and publishing executives that he was engaged in a literary pump-and-dump scheme to inflate the sales of his book reported to national best-seller lists."

Vise's version is that he intended to buy 5,000 copies to sell as autographed collectibles through ebay.com, amazon.com, and his own Web page. As barnesandnoble.com's price dropped, Vise returned copies to take advantage of the bigger discounts; a series of such transactions over a month pushed his total purchases and returns to their stratospheric levels.

Vise also says he bought his copies after the book made the best-seller lists. But Vise's ace against the Times' business page is the Times' own best-seller chart. That's configured to ignore bulk sales, and on Sunday The Bureau and the Mole was sitting in the Number 4 slot. As the Times editorialized Tuesday, "Mr. Vise seems to have been guilty mainly of planning to outsell the booksellers himself by offering autographed copies of his book online." Vise apologized last Friday for any "mistakes I have made that have contributed to any confusion in the book industry."

Knowing all this, Times business writers Felicity Barringer and David D. Kirkpatrick nevertheless ran a long story Monday that seemed to have no purpose other than to humiliate Vise. "Mr. Vise's earnestness, self-confidence and salesmanship evoke a mixture of Candide and Lee A. Iacocca," they wrote. The Times quoted a Post colleague who told them that Vise "comes across as an operator." They noted that Vise immodestly "covered the wall" of his Post cubicle "with his articles." Radio host Don Imus, who featured Vise as a guest, described him as "crazed, he was hollering and going on about what I could do to put his book on the list get it up to No. 1." (Vise said he "thought Imus was a forum where one could act wacky and have fun…") They noted that even Vise's publisher was "startled by his author's zeal for selling his creation."

The Times, in short, thinks that Vise lacks class. The story's crowning touch was to blame the rise of such an unseemly type on barnesandnoble.com. "Decades ago," wrote the Times, "the industry was dominated by small, carriage-trade book stores, which made recommendations that their customers followed, and many authors disdained self-promotion as undignified."

Got that? There's more. "But the growth of large chains, discount warehouses and online stores has made standing out from the crowd more difficult and more essential." Success, moans the Times, now "reflects the authors' ability to sell themselves and their work."

And that's what the Times thinks is the book trade's real problem: too many choices, not enough gentlemen.