Chain heat.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

Are book superstores a threat to the reading public?

The next time you go into a book superstore run by Borders or Barnes & Noble - stop to smell more than the gourmet coffee wafting out of the signature espresso bar. Stop to soak up the larger environment: The typical Borders superstore, for instance, stocks about 150,000 different titles and 50,000 music selections (there are videos for sale, as well). The magazine rack boasts about 2,500 different publications. The prices are about as good as they get: 10 percent off the list price of most hardcover books; 30 percent off New York Times hardcover bestsellers and other special selections; classroom and volume discounts; remainder bins piled high with books priced low.

There is a special area where kids can run riot, manhandling stuffed animals and pawing through other merchandise, while parents shop at a more-relaxed pace. Most days, the chances are good that there will be live music, an author reading, or some other event. Every day, customers are not merely permitted but actively encouraged to browse, to lounge about in abundant, strategically placed chairs and couches.

Soak all this in. Take a long pull off your double cappuccino and a quick nibble of your chocolate biscotti. And then, in the midst of such a scene, despair - for it all merely proves that "American culture is in jeopardy....Under the effects of the chains' buying power and economic concentration, it will suffer from a lack of diversity and choice."

That's the official position of the American Booksellers Association, a trade association that represents about 3,500 booksellers nationwide, as articulated by its chief executive officer, Avin Mark Domnitz, in Publishers Weekly. In March, the ABA, joined by about two dozen California booksellers, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Borders and Barnes & Noble in the U.S. District Court for Northern California. The suit claims that the superstores are getting from publishers illegal "extra discounts," "special terms," and a "whole range of various [advertising] and 'promotional' terms not provided" to "independent" bookstores.

The ABA and the other plaintiffs are suing Borders and Barnes & Noble under the Robinson-Patman Act, a 1936 federal antitrust statute that forbids "price discrimination," and two similar California state statutes designed to prohibit "unearned" discounts to chain stores. If they prevail - and there is reason to believe that they will - they will gain a...