George Tenet’s new book At the Center of the Storm, which blasts the Bush administration and in particular Cheney for pushing us into the war, supposedly goes on sale Monday April 30th. Yet somehow The New York Times managed to legally get their hands on one. “A copy of the book was purchased at retail price in advance of publication by a reporter for The New York Times.” Uhm, where did you purchase this book? My store has our initial order in the basement. We can’t put them on sale until Monday unless we want to face the wrath of HarperCollins. There are several problems with the NYT‘s buying this book ahead of time. One, some store is selling this ahead of time, which just isn’t fair to the rest of us. Imagine if we put our Harry Potter on sale a few days early? What would the other book stores do? Secondly, we’re going to get a ton of customers in the store this weekend wanting the book and we have to tell them that no, we can’t sell it to them yet. This kind of stunt just pisses me off. They do it all the time and get away with it.