Store owner joins suit to fight book-rating law
New state legislation that takes effect Sept. 1 requires sellers to label titles
When Valerie Koehler bought Blue Willow Bookshop, she wanted to offer an expansive selection of children’s books.
“We made it our mission to have a robust children’s section, so we’re half kids, half adults,” Koehler said. “Not a very common business model for most bookstores, but it works for us.”
Her children were in grade school when she started running the roughly 1,200-squarefoot bookstore in 1996. Over the years, she realized that to be profitable, she would have to sell to more than in-store customers. She worked with area school districts — now numbering 21 — to sell books to them, help organize author visits and provide book giveaways to students.
But a Texas law set to take effect Sept. 1 could jeopardize her ability to serve school districts, Koehler said. It will require school library booksellers to identify books, including those written for teens, that are “sexually explicit” or “sexually relevant,” and those books rated “sexually explicit” would be banned from schools. The law also requires booksellers to identify such books sold to school districts in the past.
Blue Willow Bookshop joined Austin’s BookPeople, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in a lawsuit Tuesday to challenge the law. The lawsuit argues booksellers will suffer financial damage if they lose schoolrelated business. Koehler estimates that a fifth of Blue Willow’s business is with schools.
The state measure was sponsored by Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, and born out of conservative fears in recent years of sexual content in public schools.
Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, who shepherded the measure through that chamber, said the bill will mostly affect large vendors, as just 50 companies sell most books bought by the state’s public schools, and three large com
panies are responsible for most titles in campus libraries.
Independent booksellers say the law will require them to allocate employees, money and time to reading and rating every one of their books potentially sold to school districts. Booksellers also say they may not have records showing the contents of every book sold over several decades.
“It’s just overwhelming,” Koehler said. “It is untenable. It’s not something a small business, even a large business, could do.”
Koehler said it is costprohibitive given the staff and resources it would take to review that amount of books. Koehler noted they would have to get a legal opinion on book ratings too, adding to the cost. Blue Willow has approximately 14 employees, two of whom are full-time.
“We would have to rate them for their content. The ratings aren’t clear to us, what they’re supposed to be,” Koehler said. “And if we do not rate them correctly, we might be overruled by the Texas Education Agency.”
The result could be that local booksellers will lose the business they do with school districts, affecting their profitability and the range of books available to local students.
Ultimately, the law could push local booksellers out of the business of selling to schools altogether, said Joy Preble, children’s programming director for Brazos Bookstore in Upper Kirby. The nearly 50-year-old store with nine employees is not a party to the lawsuit but does business with three school districts.
“Of course we would lose business,” Preble said. “We would lose hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars of business.”