books were “pure commodities; a copy of a book in one store was identical to the same book carried in another, so buyers always knew what they were getting.”1 This is different than something like clothing, which has all sorts of vagaries when it comes to details like size, cut, shape, and color. Books also had an advantage over something like CDs because, at that time, there were only two major book distributors that every bookseller in the country worked with, Ingram and Baker & Taylor. This compared favorably to the several major and hundreds of minor record labels in the world.
