Small Vendors Left Out of Schools’ Book Purchasing
Ramin Talaie for The New York Times
Connie Attanasio, president of Attanasio & Associates, a trade-book vendor in Queens.
By JO CRAVEN McGINTY
Published: April 18, 2010
Enlarge This ImageEven as recently as last year, the process by which books ended up in New York classrooms bore more resemblance to Avon than Amazon.
Kalim A. Bhatti for The New York Times
The warehouse of Ingram, the country’s largest trade-book wholesaler.
Scores of salespeople traversed the city, going from school to school, peddling so-called trade books: the novels, works of nonfiction, test guides and other publications that teachers use to supplement textbooks.
But the city has transformed the way it buys these books, abandoning the decades-old process in which numerous vendors competed in door-to-door or bazaar-like settings, to one in which nearly all such books — literally millions of volumes — are purchased via computer from two large discount wholesalers that have promised savings of at least 30 percent.
In its first year, city school officials say, the streamlined process is on target to save $18 million. But, much as large book retailers have pushed out independent sellers, some of the small local companies that used to deal directly with the schools say they may be forced out of business, at a cost, they contend, to students.
“You’ve got to sit and read through hundreds of books to make good selections,” said Connie Attanasio, a trade-book vendor who specializes in collections for English-language learners. “You can’t give a discount of over 30 percent and do the kind of work we did.”
The city uses a different process to buy textbooks, which the city’s Education Departmenttypically buys directly from publishers in large quantities.