This year marks ABA’s 125th year of helping indie bookstores thrive. As part of our 125th anniversary celebration, we’ll be sharing interviews with key figures in the industry and exploring how the organization has changed since its inception in 1900.
This week, Bookselling This Week met with ABA’s Advocacy team! Dave Grogan, Director of ABFE, Advocacy & Public Policy, and Philomena Polefrone, Associate Director of ABFE, shared the Advocacy team’s origin story, their past accomplishments, and their current efforts.
Bookselling This Week: In my other 125th anniversary interviews, people often stop to gush about the advocacy team and your work, so I’m really glad we’ll get to hear from y’all.
Let's start with a really quick introduction. Why don’t you tell me a little about what you do and how long you’ve been with ABA?
Dave Grogan: I’m Dave, and I am the Director of ABFE, Advocacy and Public Policy. I've been here since February of 2002.
We didn't have an advocacy division when I started. It was created in 2010. I was the co-founder, along with Dan Cullen. I’m very proud of that.
Philomena Polefrone: I’m Philomena Polefrone, and I am the Associate Director of ABFE. I’ve been here for a little over two years. Before that I was at Columbia, teaching basically the greatest hits of political philosophy. I also have my PhD in literature.
BTW: Dave, was there a particular incident that spurred the creation of the advocacy department?
DG: I joined ABA in 2002 as a reporter for Bookselling This Week. During that time, Amazon was not collecting sales tax on purchases.
They had a physical presence in the states, which we call nexus. They had online affiliates that were acting as sales agents — they would promote Amazon, and if somebody clicked on their link and went to Amazon and bought a product, they would earn a commission. And it escalated from there. Finally, New York State decided that they were going to do something about it and pass a law so that if you have online affiliates in the state (or any similar physical presence) you would have to collect and remit sales tax to the state.
That was in 2008. We started going up to Albany to lobby, and we were told by leadership there that we didn't have a chance. But when David Paterson took over for Spitzer, he put it in the budget. It passed, and we celebrated!
Two years later, there was a reorganization of ABA, and they decided that we needed an advocacy division. They asked if I would like to start it with Dan. I really enjoyed the work. I liked advocating for bookstores, so I was all in.
BTW: Philomena, in just two years (almost three now), you’ve made a name for yourself. You're doing lots of events, you're giving lots of talks, and really managing to make everything so accessible and easy to connect with.
I’d love to hear more about how you’re pulling from your past experiences as a teacher and applying it to this work.
PP: Thank you for that. Anyone who's been a teacher knows how to do this very particular thing, which is to learn something the night before and then teach it the next morning.
Also — if they are particularly reactive to students falling asleep — they know how to make really boring things interesting.
If I can get a class of 22 19-year-olds to pay attention to Kant at nine in the morning, then free expression legislation actually seems pretty easy to make exciting.
That’s something I've been doing for over a decade, and that's the same skill set that is used in advocacy and organizing.
ABFE, more than anything, is an educational organization. One of our fundamental missions is raising awareness about book bans and the role that booksellers can play in fighting against book censorship.
DG: And that applies to advocacy in general. A lot of education is involved in advocacy.
With the sales tax issue, we had to help educate some booksellers on what was happening and why it was so important — how it was impacting not only them, but also how it further impacted communities losing that revenue.
PP: A lot of the time, you're educating legislators about bills, small businesses, and all the things that booksellers have to worry about every day. Lawmakers can be motivated by that when they hear about it, but they don't necessarily know from the beginning.
And in some cases, you're trying to use education in those meetings to counter disinformation. Dave, this is one of the things that you're doing all the time while working on reducing credit card swipe fees.
DG: Since a lot of legislators are not involved with small businesses, they are unaware that small businesses only make one to two percent net profit if they're successful.
That's always surprising to the lawmakers who are not small business owners. They have no idea that the margins are that slim for retailers.
Those are the kinds of things that we have to make sure they understand, that this is a very slim margin, highly competitive industry, and that needs to be considered with everything they do.
BTW: So we mentioned a couple of some of the projects y'all have done in the past. What are some of the projects that you've worked on while you've been here that you're particularly proud of? Or that you feel were most beneficial to our members?
DG: Sales tax was the most visible victory. Especially since we were told we had no chance against Amazon, and then we ended up victorious.
Booksellers had so much to do with that victory. The New York State booksellers really went all out for that, and really drove that issue to the point where it couldn't be ignored. Then other states picked it up. And because of that, Amazon collects sales tax today — at least some sales tax.
That was incredibly impactful.
A lot of what we do in advocacy is long term. So persistence is the key to a lot of our work. But there's always little victories along the way.
Ten years ago, nobody wanted to talk about antitrust, and now it's pretty popular to talk about. We've really moved the conversation into the mainstream. And again, that's because of booksellers’ persistence.
Those little victories keep us going.
PP: I'm proud of so much that we've done in terms of free expression advocacy, including things that started before I got here, like helping shepherd the case against HB 900 in Texas and the case against Act 372 in Arkansas. Learning about the litigation process through that, and getting to join amicus briefs with our allies has been extremely educational. In this job, you learn a lot by doing, and it's been such a pleasure.
I'm proud, of course, of The ABA Right to Read Handbook, which began as the “ABA Right to Read Toolkit.”
The toolkit came from talking to booksellers and ABA leadership about the resources booksellers most urgently needed. In my first month here, I began interviewing people and learning from as many booksellers as I could, and turning that into how-to guides and resources.
A year later, that turned into The ABA Right to Read Handbook, which is a consumer-facing book providing that same information, as well as history and interviews with booksellers. To see it appear in so many independent bookstores is more moving than I can articulate.
Finally, there’s my legislative advocacy, which people see in bits and pieces, because you mostly only hear from me if I'm working in your state. I learned how to talk to legislators from Dave, working on the credit card swipe fee issue, and then brought that to the free expression space.
The example that stands out for me is helping Texas booksellers mobilize against HB 1375 last year. That was a bill that would have let anyone sue a bookseller, publisher, or author who contributed to a “harmful” book. That could have been ruinous for Texas booksellers. I was able to help them stay informed and mobilize, and they waited for over 12 hours in the committee room to testify against the bill, ultimately defeating it.
I'm so proud of my work there, yes, but primarily of them. We're lucky to have booksellers as advocates.
DG: They're so politically involved. When I talk to other coalitions, that’s one thing I've always heard about booksellers.
It doesn't take much to spur a bookseller to action. And it does help with our work that they're on top of issues.
BTW: I want to make sure I give you a little time to talk about any current projects that you’re working on and why it's important.
DG: Right now, we are advocating on behalf of swipe fee reform in states and at the federal level with the Credit Card Competition Act.
The Credit Card Competition Act legislation would require that credit cards issued by the largest US banks be able to be processed over at least two unaffiliated card payment networks, and that merchants be allowed to choose which to use. One network could be Visa or Mastercard, but the other would have to be an unaffiliated competitor, such as another credit card network or one of a dozen indie payment networks like STAR, NYCE, or SHAZAM.
US card processing fees are among the highest in the world — they average more than two percent of the transaction amount for Visa and Mastercard credit cards, according to Nilson. That’s seven times the maximum European rate despite higher volume and lower technology costs in the United States.
And in many states, retailers are paying processing fees on both the fee AND the sales tax — which is ridiculous because retailers don’t keep the sales tax as it is sent to the state. Illinois passed a law to exclude sales tax and gratuities from the processing fees but the banks took them to court.
To me, this is a no-brainer, there is no reason that retailers should be paying that percentage since they don’t keep that money.
PP: I've really spent the year helping booksellers prepare for the kinds of harassment, attacks, and intimidation that people use to try to censor books in bookstores, so booksellers can be more resilient if and when it happens to them.
Because book bans do happen, in a certain way, in bookstores: if someone is trying to remove a book from a bookstore, they’ll steal it, vandalize it, hide it, or try to intimidate the owners and staff into removing it from their collection. We've seen everything from in-person harassment and threatening emails to bomb threats.
Increasingly, this has become part of my job: helping booksellers defend their free expression by giving them the resources they need to protect themselves. As of this year, I started providing preparedness education to bookstores covering policies and procedures so they are not caught off guard.
That started with an education session at Winter Institute 2025, and I just finished taking that presentation to each of the summer/fall regional trade shows. (Except CALIBA, where Allison Hill, our CEO, gave the presentation.) In that presentation, I've just tried to break it down into some basic best practices that bookstores can follow. I'm currently turning that into a mini toolkit that should be released early next year.
Legislatively, I'm working on multiple fronts to be proactive in states that can pass freedom to read bills preventing people from banning books before it becomes a crisis. I've been working with coalitions in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Colorado, and so many other places to help pass these bills where we can — all driven by booksellers who are contacting their representatives. I’m also working in places like Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and more to keep booksellers informed about bills that would increase the number of book bans drastically — unless we do something.
BTW: What are some of your hopes for the future of bookselling? What do you hope it will look like? What do you hope will have changed in the next 125 years?
DG: That's a very good question. I'm picturing just a vibrant main street, people shopping at bookstores and independent bookstores are owning the market because we broke up Amazon and competition is fair again.
I’m thinking about A&P. I grew up at a time when independent groceries just like exploded and they were everywhere. They went from being one kind in town to suddenly all these different kinds. I think that this was the result of FDR’s justice department breaking up A&P coupled with the end of the war. And A&P was very similar to Amazon. I mean, if you read about how antitrust people used to describe A&P, you'd swear they were talking about Amazon.
In my head, I can picture the same thing happening right now with Amazon and bookselling. It's like they're this weight that needs to be lifted so that bookstores can be bookstores, and do what they do and succeed.
PP: There is a metaphor there for the connection between small business advocacy and free expression advocacy. The independent bookstores, their superpower is that they can make the store whatever they want, they can stock whatever they want.
And when you think about the market as a whole, that creates incredible diversity in stock and books and displays and experiences in bookstores. When we homogenize it, what we have instead is something that looks really sterile.
For me, I don't know about 125 years. Let's go 12.5 years.
We're going to get through this moment of bananas neo-McCarthyism, book censorship, and harassment of people. We're going to get through it. And on the other side of it, I really believe that there will be stronger protections for booksellers, librarians, educators, students, and parents whose freedom to read and raise their children as they want is currently being eroded.
It was only after one of the last really bad moments of book censorship, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, that all of these structures like Banned Books Week and various freedom to read organizations actually emerged.
We still have all of those structures. And right now, we're in the middle of a shift in many of those institutions to become stronger, to become more tactically savvy, and to look at how the First Amendment is used in bookstores and libraries and schools. They’re saying, “Okay, how can we make this as strong as possible so that this kind of attack can never find purchase again?”
In 12.5 years, I think we'll at least be well on our way to that. And bookstores are going to be really, really central to that goal.
Bookstores are currently building their capacity to be centers that activate their communities and keep their communities informed about issues like the freedom to read, like the banks skimming off the top of transactions, and so much more. What we're doing right now is building this network of independent bookstores into a political force that I know can have a clear voice and stand up for the issues that impact them.