Since you're in VA, you might be able to get Bookworm Plantation, based in Fairfax. (Bookworm Plantation --5609 Sandy Lewis Drive, Fairfax, VA 22032 --(703) 764-3101) It's the only alternative around of which I am aware; a number of Fairfax Cty schools have switched over to them. The librarian thinks the selection/quality is much better with BP than Scholastic. The biggest downside is that you have to do all the ordering, setup/pull down and inventorying of everything--it is definitely much more labor intensive than Scholastic.
Two of my kids are in two different schools, and they both had book fairs last week--one Scholastic, one BP. I didn't see a significant difference in terms of the ratio of hardback/paperback. But, I did note that the BP fair had a much larger selection of the (very expensive) picture books. The holiday selection from BP was much better in terms of diversity--there was a good selection of books on Ramadan, Hanukuh, Kwaanza, Christmas; Scholastic did not have all those holidays represented; it was almost all Christmas. Both had activity/art kits available, but Scholastic's selection was much larger. Both had pencils, etc., but at the BP fair, they were only displayed for a limited time. Scholastic had posters; BP did not. Both had books based on TV shows (SpongeBob comes to mind immediately), but the BP selection was much more limited in terms of the number of shows--Scholastic had SpongeBob stuff, Rugrats, Clifford, Hello Kitty, Mary Kate & Ashley, and numerous others. Scholastic's parent section was mostly stuff on cooking/crafts; BP had books on things like girls being bullies. Doing reorders with BP was not a problem; with Scholastic, the librarian doesn't even bother with reorders because she says more often than not, they can't fill them anyway. That's kind of my brain dump on the differences I noticed....
If you do a Google search on Bookworm Plantation, you'll turn up some VA schools that use them--might want to call them directly to see what they have to say.
