I’m a Bad Brain. I was out of town dismantling the last of the Barn and without internet connection for five days, and am therefore delinquent. Steve will no doubt administer a sound drubbing the next time we’re in the same area code. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I spent some time in airports this week–in San Francisco, Atlanta, Cincinnati and Boston, and of course the third thing I look for in airports, right after coffee and the restrooms, are bookstores. Not that my work has ever made it into an airport bookstore, where what they stock is generally high-profile stuff with a pre-sell (if you liked the last five James Patterson thrillers you’ll love the current James Patterson thriller, etc.). I just like bookstores. And sometimes friends’ books are there, too. In Cincinnati, as I walked past the CNBC News Store managed by The Paradies Shops, I saw a display advertising the Read and Return program.

The way the program works is: you buy a book at a Paradies airport shop in Atlanta (for example), and–theoretically, anyway–read it and swap it back at a Paradies shop in Sacramento–perhaps, if you’re a fast reader, on the same business trip (you’ve got six months from purchase, and the book must be returned with its original receipt). At which point you get 50% of the purchase price back. Woo hoo, right? Well, for the purchaser of the books, perhaps.

What isn’t clear is what this means to me, the author (or, perhaps, to James Patterson, the author). And what happens to the book? How do the publishers feel about this? Paradies’ sales may be up 20%, but does that mean they’re re-selling the returned books? If they’re not, are they treating the returned books as returns to the publishers? Or just tossing them? Are they considered to be loss-leaders, to bring in business on the theory that most people will buy more but won’t remember to return the books or will lose the receipts? If they sell the same book more than once, does the author get multiple royalties on the sale? And what does this do to the author’s sales record, if you “sell” the same book three times, but don’t actually sell three copies of the book?

As a reader, the program sounds kinda cool to me. As a writer, obviously, I have a lot of questions. The program isn’t new–it’s been going for three or four years. I’d be very curious to know what its collateral effects have been.