Nile Books Tells Publishers ‘We’re Only Game in Town’

Junction City, April 6, 2008--Geoffrey Nile, owner and operator of Nile Books (NB) on Virginia Avenue, has served notice on American publishers that he will no longer sell their books in his store if they persist in doing their own printing.

In a sizzling NB Spam-o-Gram, Nile warned publishers that any book not being printed via his BookPurge subsidiary by All Fools Day would “have its ass remaindered out of the store.”

When Penguin, Doubleday, and Riverhead refused to sign, People of the Book, The Appeal and A Thousand Splendid Suns were the first books "carefully" packed into a Waste Management truck and shipped out of town.

“Getting rid of People of the Book was so wonderfully symbolic,” said Nile, “I’m actually thankful that Penguin Group didn’t sign on with BookPurge. The point I’m trying to make here is that Americans are no longer people of the book. We don’t have time for such old fashioned luxuries any more.”

The BookPurge System, which Nile claims will make him “bloody rich” with a reasonable amount of “collateral damage" due to bad PR and antitrust investigations, replaces regular books with shoddy, more expensive imitations.

Ultimately, Nile hopes to get rid of paper books, replacing them with his patented Spindle System in which proprietary “BookRadio” implants that are totally incompatible with other book reader systems will beam fiction and nonfiction directly into people’s brains.

“People can switch from regular ‘reading’ to speed reading just by wiggling their ears,” Nile told an angry mob outside his store.

BookPurge President, Elmer Mewtylate told reporters that the company also produces books that fold and books that roll.

“Folded books, produced on heavily leaded Chinese-made print-on-demand machines, will turn out books that look more or less like the books once sold at NB,” said Mewtylate. “However, to keep profits high, we may be forced to skimp a little on quality control issues.”

With a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his step, Nile led a bevy of industry gurus, librarians, English teachers, and book reviewers into one NB’s pristine restrooms and flung open the doors to the stalls.

“Here, my friends, are books that roll,” he said, explaining that books and toilet paper are a marriage made in heaven since 98.6% of all Americans do most of their reading in the bathroom anyway. “Read, dump, recycle,” he added.

Librarian Lulu I. Universe welcomed the change, noting that it would reduce the confusing number of players, programs and principles that naturally occur in a world of diversity and competition.

Book reviewers P. America of the Times and Buck Locher of the Star-Gazer said Monopoly is only fun when it’s a game with “itty bitty” little houses and hotels, free parking and people rolling the dice.

“In real life,” said Locher,  “Nile isn’t going to have any free parking or a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“When my dear old book-reading mother named me ‘Geoffrey’ instead of ‘Jeffrey,’ whined Nile, "she made life a lot harder for me, people called me a sissy and ‘Death on the Nile’ and bet money that I’d grow up and own a book store rather than a gun shop or a Harley-Davidson dealership. Well look who’s laughing now.”

Industry experts predict that authors who complain about being screwed will “simply do out of print” while the country’s remaining readers will “simply put up with BookPurge” as just another example of today’s generally lower standards across the board from Marvin Gardens to Park Place to Mediterranean Avenue.

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Copyright (c) 2008 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Comments

[Margaret Garside]

Ooooh, you're wicked. Book Purge? I love it.

Down with Amazon!!!

[Malcolm Campbell]

Thanks, Margaret!