The Jonathan Franzen/Oprah Book Club embargo story, broken here and followed up with proof here on MobyLives, brings the logistics of embargoing to the fore. On the Washington Post book blog, Craig Fehrman posts an inside look at the practice in regard to political books – occasioned by the fact that Jimmy Carter’s new book, White House Diary, got loose on Google Books Wednesday in advance of it’s release Monday.

Its inadvertent preview caused the publisher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) some consternation and provided a peek into the tricky world of stage-managing book releases.

Publishers tend to be very protective of their political titles. While reviewers normally get an advanced readers edition weeks or even months before a book’s release date, political books are different. Publishers often mail review copies on the same day the book comes out; if they’re feeling really generous, they mail the book (along with a non-disclosure agreement) a week before publication.

That’s what Farrar, Straus and Giroux did with White House Diary, and this process seems reasonable since, for political books, the details are often the payoff. A political book’s revelations and its newsy spin will power the early publicity, and publishers work very hard to make sure this coincides with the book actually being in stores.

Then there’s the other side of the coin – the reporters who want to get the scoop on any juicy tidbits a political book might contain:

Reporters, of course, work just as hard to dig this information up. Laura Bush‘s memoir, Spoken from the Heart, came out on May 4 of this year, but the New York Times ran a story summarizing the book’s greatest hits on April 27. The Times‘ full review went live the next day, and other outlets (including the Post) tracked down early copies of their own.

The Times, which said only that it obtained Spoken from the Heart “at a bookstore,” attracted some industry outrage for breaking the Laura Bush embargo. But this sort of thing has been going on for a while now — and has been kneecapping the Times as much as anyone else

And then there’s the other other side of the coin, when newspapers or magazines pay top dollar for exclusive first serialization rights. For example:

…the Times had orchestrated the syndication of Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman’s The Ends of Power. When the Post obtained a bootleg copy and ran a summary 12 days before the book’s released, it cost the Times almost $500,000 in syndication revenue.

This is where broken embargoes have done most of their damage. Bookstores sign affidavits promising not to sell their inventory before the release date, but the media have never reached a similar consensus.

That’s one reason we’ve seen a decline in major syndication deals for political books. In fact, it’s one reason Carter’s White House Diary isn’t getting syndicated.

Though as Fehrman points out, Carter did get kind of a de facto syndication thanks to Google Books. Though the slip did not seem to be Google’s fault exactly. Publishers have different arrangements with Google such that selections of their books are viewable, usually a week or so before pub date. And so went White House Diary. FSG, it seems, broke their own embargo by accident.