All tomorrow's partisans: the culture war after the 2004 election.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Columns - Book publishing

FIVE DAYS BEFORE the election, it was almost impossible to conceive of a world in which John Kerry and George Bush were no longer running for president. A week seemed like forever, a month like eternity.

But these days there's a growing demand for ever-timelier responses to political events, and some products--especially documentary films, DVDS, and books--have extraordinarily long lead times: six months or more. So booksellers and publishers were looking not just five days ahead; they'd been plotting out post-election scenarios for months. What did they expect?

Well, first, that on November 3 many Americans will begin trundling down to the used bookstore to offload some of the millions of anti-Bush tomes that have flooded the market since the summer of 2003.

"Oh, absolutely," says Gerry Donaghy, backlist inventory supervisor of the famous Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon, a new and used bookstore so big they hand you a map at the front door. "I'm waiting to see what the used-book buyers' 'no buy' list is going to look like after Tuesday. Eventually what's going to happen is that someone's going to have their shelf filled with Michael Moore and Richard Clarke, and they're going to be like, 'Oh man, I'm just so sick of looking at this.'"

What as-yet-unwritten dries will take their place?

"It's either going to be What the Democrats Did Right to Win the Election or What the Republicans Did Wrong to Steal the Election," Donaghy says." I suspect that there are probably some savvy writers right now who are waiting to hear back from their editors for a green light on their projects on Wednesday, for which book they're going to do."

There's some truth to that. The PublicAffairs publishing house, for example, was waiting on November 2 to find out whether its Election 2004 book, written by a team of four Newsweek reporters embedded in the two major-party campaigns, will be subtitled How Kerry Won and What You, Can Expect in the Future or How Bush Won and What You can Expect in the Future. Two separate covers were displayed in winter catalogs for prospective buyers, leading to a brief brouhaha when the New York papers caught wind of the bet hedging in late October an d right-wing weblogs followed up with heavy-breathing speculation that the Kerry version proved "liberal bias."

Gene Taft, director of publicity for PublicAffairs, says that "almost certainly we'll do something to reflect the election it's inevitable," but that even if the...