Clubbing

There's been some turmoil over the last few days involving the Science Fiction Book Club, of which I've been a member for over a year now (and of which I'd been a member sporadically three or four previous times during the 1990s). Basically, the SFBC's parent company, BookSpan, has been purchased by the corporate behemoth Bertelsmann, which owns BMG/Columbia House. Bertelsmann is therefore set to combine the book clubs it's just bought with its other direct marketing entities, while also closing some of the smaller book clubs. Most notable here is their book club for conservatives, I suppose; I'd never even realized the other clubs slated for closure, such as one devoted to equestrian-related books, even existed.

The general thought now is that SFBC isn't going to close, but that it will be altered substantially from the way it currently operates. Part of that was the early retirement of longtime (over thirty years) SFBC editor Ellen Asher and assistant editor Andrew Wheeler. Obviously any time a business changes hands from one owning corporate entity to another, there will be job losses as redundancies are eliminated and as infrastructures from the smaller company are brought in line with those of the larger; however, the elimination of the two people who have probably done the most to give the SFBC its unique approach to SF publishing is troubling, especially since it's highly unlikely that Bertelsman has a well-qualified SF book editor already on staff.

Over at his blog, writer/editor Jonathan Strahan has been posting quite a bit about all this, and in this post he solicited comments from readers about their experiences with the SFBC. Here is the comment I left:

I’ve been a member at three or four different times since the early 1990s, and I am a current member now. In fact, my current membership represents the longest instance of membership for me. For the last year or so, it’s seemed as if every time I even consider the tiny possibility of canceling, the very next flier to come in the mail had three or four things in it that I wanted.

As I’ve seen mentioned in just about every blog comments thread on the SFBC topic since the turmoil became evident, the main value is in wonderful omnibus editions, and that’s where I’ve taken great advantage of the SFBC. It’s been invaluable over the last two years for my filling in of certain gaps in my collection, and at considerably less expense than if I were to track down the titles on their own, especially of things that just aren’t in print anymore or, if they are, are in expensive trade PB editions. Through SFBC I’ve been able to get nice editions of the Lensmen series by Doc Smith, the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack Vance’s Demon Princes series, and so on.

Sure, these are "book club" editions of the books, so the paper isn’t quite as good quality and the bindings aren’t as good either, but that doesn’t bother me, as I’m a reader first and a collector second, and I treat my books well anyway, so even the book club editions tend to do just fine on my shelves.

I’ve used SFBC more as a route to hard-to-find fiction than to get the new stuff (although I’ve bought some new stuff from them as well — books by John Scalzi, Charles Stross, and others). While I plan to stay a member for the time being, I am less than optimistic that SFBC will remain a good resource for the type of book-buying I’ve done from them. The fact that all the current turmoil springs from the eternal bugaboo of making the damned stockholders happy does not, it seems to me, bode well for a person like me who is happily digging into the earlier and, in some cases, largely forgotten byways of the genre.

I’m sure we’ll reach a point someday in the future when the concerns of stockholders aren’t given paramount attention on an a priori basis. I just hope I’m still around when we get there.

As I say, I do not currently plan to abandon my membership, mainly out of curiosity for what the new (but not likely improved) SFBC will be. I'm not optimistic about the direction they will take, though; I've never once encountered an instance where something got better after the people who were doing out of love were pushed out in favor of people who do it because it's just a whole new pile of beans to count.

Here's another SFBC member's take on the whole thing.