For your weekend perusal, here is another installment of Friday Links

➻ Calvin Ried’s coverage of the BISG’s MIP (The Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay Conference) 2013: A New World of Big Data, Complexity and Collaboration for Publishers Weekly yesterday was a treasure of interesting insights:

BISG executive director Len Vlahos gave an overview of “The Digital Consumer” using data from its “Consumer Attitudes Towards E-book Reading Survey,” in particular looking at the behavior of “Power Buyers” or consumers who buy at least one e-book a week. They represent about 17% of all e-book buyers, they are likely to be a women aged 55-64, and are “grown not born,” he said, noting that they buy physical books and e-book interchangeably and have grown into being “power” e-book buyers over time. Vlahos also noted that while 80% of Power Buyers shop at Amazon, 40% shop at B&N and 30% buy or use libraries/OverDrive to find the e-books they buy. And while dedicated e-readers continue to dominate, their dominance is slipping (and the use of iPads for reading is growing) and Power Buyers generally own tablets and e-readers (though they prefer dedicated e-readers for reading).

That is just one bit of the fascinating data provided in the Ried’s coverage. But what does it all mean for those that write, publish, and sell books? What, if anything, does that data do to the way we move forward as an industry? If anything, it shows that we must continue to work together:

Ken Michaels, president of Hachette Book Group and chairman of BISG, closed the conference with a presentation on change and adaptation, noting that “the world is changing more rapidly than we realize.” In particular he noted that the former linear supply chain in publishing—the familiar publisher to distributer to retailer paradigm—has been replaced by a crazy and complex constellation of financial interests and sevices surrounding one central figure—the reader. He also used this new paradigm to promote industry collaboration, like BookStats.

“We see complexity as an opportunity,” Michaels said, “not because we can figure it out in isolation, but because we can participate togther in organizations like AAP, BISG, IDPF and others, without which we couldn’t educate ourselves about the best practices in this new world.”

And speaking of collaboration, this time internal, the BBC went inside HarperCollins in London to see how their covers come to life in a cool little video, Cover to Cover: How are book jackets designed?

➻ Taking a look inside another literary institution, Julie V. Iovine of the Wall Street Journal writes that The Library’s Future Is Not an Open Book. It’s a great overview of a paradigm shift taking place in libraries throughout the country and shows that libraries continue to be some of the most dynamic, forward thinking institutions in the country. The piece deserves a full read, but this excerpt should begin to give you the gist of the article:

Branch libraries have long served as community hubs offering book clubs and after-school story times. But central libraries, dedicated to the care and maintenance of weighty collections within ornately crafted and lofty spaces, are having to recast themselves. Thanks to the shift of emphasis to online resources over hard copies, the prevalence of mobile technologies and changing approaches to studying and learning, libraries have a different social purpose. “I used to be greeted by a sea of faces with questions like how to spell ‘Albuquerque,’” said Amy E. Ryan, a career librarian since the 1970s and now president of the Boston Public Library. “That’s all over. It’s now about providing an experience.”

That experience still includes books, but more importantly for our true education and the health of our civic life, it includes the serendipity of discovery, of the unexpected, of the other and the unfamiliar—something I think is less prevalent as algorithms dictate who and what we see and read in our lives online.

I also believe that if the world were a perfect place, libraries would become the central, not-for-profit wireless providers in their communities. There are a number of models that could be explored, and the for-profit businesses we have providing this public service now are 1: dead last in most customer satisfaction polls, and 2: lagging behind much of the developed world in providing hi-speed service and capacity. The best ideas they seem to be able to come up with is to charge their most loyal customers more and to tier their services, which explains the public’s low esteem of them.

➻ As always, while the Amazon continues to be depleted, Amazon the company just keeps growing. In the news this week, Joanna Stern wrote about Amazon Introducing Amazon Coins—Virtual Currency for Buying Apps and Games, Greg Bensinger reports that Amazon Is Developing Smartphone With 3-D Screen, the Guardian‘s Ian Griffiths and Simon Bowers have Fresh questions for Amazon over pittance it pays in tax, and Dave Jamieson tells us about Amazon Warehouse Workers Suing Over Security Checkpoint Waits, all while Amazon employees strike in Germany. From Melville House’s Kelly Burdick on that last point:

An Amazon spokesperson said the strikes will not affect shipments in Germany.

That said, the action is significant—it’s the first meaningful labor action against Amazon anywhere in the world and an ironic mark against Amazon, a high-tech company suffering from the “distinctly old world malaise of industrial action,” as the FT puts it.the action is significant — it’s the first meaningful labor action against Amazon anywhere in the world and an ironic mark against Amazon, a high-tech company suffering from the “distinctly old world malaise of industrial action,” as the FT puts it.

I would suggest that, if Amazon doesn’t want to deal with the “old world malaise of industrial action,” they should probably not rely on old world industrial labor conditions.

➻ Over at Salon, Ted Heller says Goodnight, sweet print, asking “Are words on paper gone forever?” At the same time Fast Company‘s Addy Dugdale tells us that Qantas Urges Passengers To Ditch Their Kindles For A Paperback Book

A collaboration between Hachette and Droga5 is attempting to get Qantas’s passengers to turn their tablets and e-readers off, and turn instead to paperbacks.

Stories For Every Journey is a collection of bespoke books aimed at the airline’s frequent flyers. Each of the 10 volumes has been written to allow travelers to devour it, front to back, within the flight time–longer flights allow the passenger to devour a meal, throw back a few glasses of wine, and settle down for some sleep, with enough time left to finish the book.

In the Christian Science Monitor, Donna Bryson explores A ‘novel’ idea for spreading literature in Africa: The cellphone. And taking a look at a fascinating new book from Simon & Schuster, Claire Kelley wrote yesterday that Jaron Lanier offers to save the book business, but even his own publisher doesn’t listen:

In her review of his new book Who Owns the Future?, Janet Maslin adds another descriptor, calling Lanier a “mega-wizard in futurist circles. ” But she could have also called him a “book publishing strategist.” In the final chapter of his book, Lanier lays out his thoughts on the future of books and offers a money-making scheme to save the book business:

It amazes me that traditional book publishers don’t understand the emotional value of paper… To survive, the book business has to define a product for the upper horn, for the rich… there should be hyper limited editions of books like this one, hand copied by monks onto handmade paper, using organic fair-trade inks, and sold only in VIP rooms at parties where almost no one can get in. Listen up, publisher, you are with these very words publishing the advice that could win you a fortune, but you are choosing to ignore a way to get through these tough times.

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Who Owns the Future? was apparently unwilling to take the leap. Seemingly resigned to the inability of publishers to heed his warnings, Lanier offers possible outcomes once the book industry has been completely overhauled by Silicon Valley.

Man… with the physical book disappearing, maybe it’s a good thing so many of us practice Tsundoku.

➻All of these links make my head hurt after a while, which brings me back to the ideas of Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity.

➻ You may too old for summer camp, but if you’d like to take two weeks away from home this summer to build new relationships and “a new online thing,” check out the Summer 2013 Seth Godin Internship.

➻ Do you realize that we’re floating in space?

➻ Scientific American had a post I missed last month about The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens. And it seems that despite the recent surge in e-book sales, our brains still prefer the physicality of the page.

In the U.S., e-books currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of all trade book sales.

Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people’s attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

“There is physicality in reading,” says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, “maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms, but know when to use the new.”

And if you’re worries about getting your book wet in the bathtub, here is an 8-year-old’s invention for keeping books dry in the bath.

➻ Of course, Nicholas Carr would concur the reading on digital devices does not encourage the same level of comprehension, and The Shallows: cartoon edition can show you why in 3 minutes and 45 seconds.

Of course, I’m sure Carr would still prefer you read the actual book.

➻ But we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the internet as the cause of all our ills and think an internet-free existence is the solution to our problems. As Paul Miller shows in a review of his year spent offline, I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet, it isn’t what the internet is doing to us, but what we are doing on the internet and what we are doing ourselves that makes all the difference:

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are. [...]

When I return to the internet, I might not use it well. I might waste time, or get distracted, or click on all the wrong links. I won’t have as much time to read or introspect or write the great American sci-fi novel.

But at least I’ll be connected.

And there is certainly something to be said for that.

➻ Getting back to books, Alexander Nazaryan has some thoughts in the New Republic about When Celebrities Take Over Publishing Companies …

Every age gets the publishing industry it deserves, whether it’s Babylonian scribes etching the Epic of Gilgamesh into stone tablets, medieval scribes toiling away at illuminated manuscripts or Maxwell Perkins laboring over the sentences of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Which is why, I suppose, today we have imprints from the comedienne Chelsea Handler, the rapper 50 Cent (Handler’s erstwhile beau, but I wouldn’t read too much into it), the chef Anthony Bourdain, and actors Viggo Mortensen and Johnny Depp, not to mention mystery writer Dennis Lehane and former Men’s Health editor David Zinczenko.

All these are small imprints, usually folded into publishing conglomerates and producing only a few books each year—and always announcing the celebrity affiliation with unabashed pride of the sort that must make the wise old men of the publishing world, the two or three still left, cringe. All were founded in recent years, as the publishing industry has searched ever more desperately for a solution to its chronic, worsening woes. They suggest, to me at least, that the business of discovering, editing, publishing, and promoting a book has become little more than that—a business, on par with hawking energy drinks or endorsing restaurant chains. Yes, publishing has always been about making money. The rise of the celebrity imprint indicates that it is now about little more than that.

I don’t know that I agree with that, or that there’s a huge difference between books written by celebrities and imprints presented by them (other than celebrity imprints show that said celebrities are interested in sharing voices other than their own which seems commendable), but if there is an undeniable truth in the article it is this:

The most depressing aspect of this whole celebrity imprint business: not what it says about publishing, but what it says about ourselves. In their own crass, slick ways, these imprints are indicative of the cult of personality that grips our culture, the facile worship of figures who somehow escape the critical examination we reserve for other aspects of our lives.

That said, I would want to read the “long-lost novel by Woody Guthrie, House of Earth, with an introduction by the historian Douglas Brinkley” whether it was published by Johnny Depp or not. And if these celebrities can get more people reading, then like Oprah Winfrey, I say more power to them. And from a marketing standpoint, I find it far more annoying (as Sally and I have been discussing for years) how publishers present books by women authors, which is why I love Coverflip: Maureen Johnson Calls For An End To Gendered Book Covers With An Amazing Challenge so much.

➻ And we’ll leave you with this…

➻ New York Public Library president Anthony W. Marx had an op-ed in The New York Times this week about E-Books and Democracy, and the evolution of how publishers are handling the sale of e-books to libraries. As Marx tells it, there really is no standard yet:

Many issues still need to be sorted out. Five of the Big Six [publishers] are making their entire e-book inventory available to us to choose from, while Macmillan is offering only a limited selection. HarperCollins allows us to lend each e-book we acquire only 26 times per title; Penguin and Simon & Schuster offer one-year licenses; and Random House sells licenses without time limits but charges much more per license. (In all cases, an e-book can be borrowed by only one patron at a time.) Prices charged to libraries vary widely according to the kind of license agreement, and we hope they will be reduced as demand increases.

What he makes clear in the end, though, is that we’re all in this together and that as e-book delivery becomes more standardized in libraries, it should create and support civic sense as much as dollars and cents.

We have every interest in seeing that publishers remain sustainable enterprises and that authors are paid fairly for their work. But those economic imperatives must be considered alongside the role of libraries in a democratic society. The challenge is to ensure that the information revolution provides more, not less, access for the public.

The last point is the key one, and one I fear is often lost when we’re discussing the changing business landscape of the publishing industry.

➻ The demise of the music industry has long been held up as a harbinger of what’s to come for publishing. But, as Evan Kindley brilliantly portrays in his review of three recent books—The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture by Timothy D. Taylor, MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne, and Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity by Chris Ruen—the rise of the MP3 file that ate into the industry’s profits was less an insurrection than an historic accident. What begins as a story of the changing nature of what it means to “sell out” and the Chiquita Banana Jingle quickly becomes an article on the commercial history of music and the compression of sound:

To begin with, Sterne shows that the MP3—that technological Trojan horse which has laid waste to the music industry—was the product of decades of corporate-funded research intended to increase profits. “Telephonic transmission drove research into hearing for much of the century,” Sterne writes; companies like AT&T were concerned to maximize their existing infrastructure, using the available bandwidth to carry as many calls as possible without going beyond the threshold of intelligibility. This led them to finance research in the fledgling field of “psychoacoustics” (part of a general trend toward corporate research and development in the early part of the 20th century, as Sterne notes). “The more AT&T knew about human hearing, the more income it could extract from its infrastructure,” Sterne writes. By 1924 it had quadrupled its system’s capacity, “with minimal modifications of infrastructure and no price increase.” The company’s basic research into human hearing led to innovations in the technology of “compression”: i.e., the simplification and reduction of an audio signal to its most essential elements.

So the MP3 format has its roots in telephony efficiency, not file sharing. In fact, the infrastructure to share music didn’t yet exist:

These smaller, simpler files are much easier to distribute via “end-to-end networks” like the internet, in which “the vast middle of the network does relatively little to its traffic … while devices at the ends of the network do the important work.” MPEG (the acronym stands for “Motion Picture Experts Group,” the name of the organization that originally set the standard for the format in the late 1980s and early ’90s) files were meant to be unobtrusive, unheralded players on the global field of multinational corporate synergy: “Like a person who slips into a crowd, the MPEG audio was designed to disappear into the global network of communication technologies.”

They were not designed initially to be traded by consumers. Sterne points out that “at the time that MPEG came together, there was no world wide web, no internet as we know it today.” In a diagram of “Digital Audio Distribution Modes (Current and Proposed)” created by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1990, “there is no slot … for lateral exchange of recordings, nor even an inkling that it might be an issue, no discussion of mass customization, and little discussion of portable media beyond car radios.” The NAB had their eyes on digital broadcast and cable, not file sharing; the extreme ease with which MP3 files can be copied and played on a range of devices was the end result of a concern for “interoperability” across different industrial platforms.

Thus, Sterne argues, “the MP3’s rise to global preeminence was a product of contingency, accident, and opportunity”: it was not an inevitable logical step in the forward march of technological progress or late capitalism, but a fluke, an accidental collision of mutually conflicting corporate interests.

And like Marx writes of publishers and libraries, the relationships—cultural, commercial, and civic—are being redefined and reset before our very eyes, and it behooves all of us as creators and consumers of art to take part in the process.

The music industry as we knew it, with its shaky ad hoc compromises between art and commerce, is never coming back, but that’s no reason to resign ourselves to resentment or bad faith: we may yet look back on this time as the era of the emergence of a new politics of music. “The story of MPEG,” Sterne writes, “poses standards as an as-yet-unresolved issue of political representation in the development of new communications technologies.” The standards for the technologies that will shape music listening for the next fifty years are being set today; if we want them to represent us, we will have to find ways to make our presence and interests known to the people who write code and broker distribution deals as well as those who produce and consume music.

If you’re interested in music, business, the music business, the commercial history of sound, or just like a good story, Kindley’s article is definitely worth a full read.

➻ In a critique of another rapidly changing industry, “the news,” Paul Tucker wrote recently about A Thousand Braying Asses: Kim Gordon & Churnalism’s Busy Sewer at The Quietus. Tucker begins by bemoaning the way music websites turned by Lizzy Goodman nuanced profile of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon in Elle into sensational headlines that focused entirely on her split from bandmate Thurston Moore, and ends up on Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad.

Lizzy Goodman put the hours in. She conducted research, drew on previous meetings with Gordon, sat and spoke with her (presumably at some length) and then went away and wrote the piece for Elle. And then, hungry for content, content, content, the music website community scrambled to reproduce a small part of it, as if it was some kind of scoop. This sort of thing is not reporting, it’s selective cutting and pasting.

Like the pieces it spawns, this practice is everywhere.

[...]

editors send press releases to writers asking, “Will you write this up?”, the subsequent rewrites are then picked up by other editors, writers rewrite the rewrites and so it goes on until, barely transformed and rarely investigated further, a single snappily written press release has become news, featured on the front page of every website whose readership might have a vague interest in its contents.

This is the sort of detrimental practice that people like Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh have rallied loudly against in science journalism. It might seem odd to bring up science reporting at this point – no doubt the efficacy (or otherwise) of certain cancer drugs is infinitely more crucial than whether or not Jai Paul’s debut album has leaked – but regardless of the subject matter, journalism without a basic and objective curiosity is not journalism at all.

And here’s where Pope comes in:

In his satirical poem ‘The Dunciad’, Alexander Pope decries the mediocrity that he sees in the publishing world of 18th century London. New printing methods mean that many more people are suddenly able to print and reprint work without resorting to methods that are prohibitively expensive or even legal. In Pope’s London, the resulting cultural stagnancy is reflected by rivers of effluence that flow down the streets.

Meanwhile, London’s booksellers and publishers vie for attention by taking part in contests: which bookseller can urinate the highest; which political hack can make the biggest splash by diving into a ditch full of the city’s faecal matter (“Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around / The stream, be his the Weekly Journals, bound”), and so on. Amid these scatological scuffles are the writers, wailing en-masse with no other purpose than to see which can create the loudest racket. The result? “Now thousand tongues are heard in one loud din/ The Monkey mimics rush discordant in.” Sound familiar?

Admittedly things are not, nor have they ever really been as bad as all that; Pope was a conservative figure, and something of a snob. Almost 300 subsequent years of novels, poetry and journalism, as well as countless other published forms, prove him to be wrong. The thing is, Pope was wrong because enough people put those newly available tools to good use, and many of today’s publications are doing the same with the tools of our time. But by resorting to the kind of methods that see exemplary reportage reduced to a torrent of sensational headlines about a person’s marriage breakdown, we all risk drowning in effluence of our own creation.

I am in agreement with Sturgeon’s Revelation that ninety percent of everything is crap, and that even with the internet—perhaps especially with the internet—we still have to seek out, dig for, and discover the good stuff and pay the rest little mind. But it’s helpful, as Tucker is doing here, to call out the crap every once in a while and make sure we’re not making too big a splash diving into it.

➻ And to that end, Maria Papova has some Famous Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers gathered over on Brain Pickings. Henry Miller has both my favorite:

Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.

And, as my wife would tell you, the one I ignore most often:

Work on one thing at a time until finished.

Stephen King, who recently won his second National Magazine Award in fiction for his story Batman and Robin Have an Altercation in Harper’s Magazine, also has a good one:

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Though, I have to say… if he weren’t up on the rooftops, I might have actually heard him and stopped overusing adverbs as much as I do.

➻ If you’d like to celebrate the 5th of May with some reading this weekend, Galleycat has a list of Free Books for Cinco de Mayo.

➻ Or maybe it’s time for a breather.

➻ Andrew Albanese has an update on the e-book wars in Publisher’s Weekly today, as Booksellers Urge Court Not to Toss Amazon E-book Lawsuit.

Plaintiff booksellers this week filed an opposition motion urging the court not to dismiss their lawsuit against Amazon and the big six publishers, arguing that there is indeed enough evidence of restraint of trade to keep the case moving forward. The filing comes in response to independent motions filed two weeks ago by Amazon and the big six publishers, in which both defendants asked the court to toss the suit as without merit. But the booksellers say a basic reading of the facts is more than enough to sustain their action.

“Having developed and successfully exploited its Kindle e-book reader, which dominates the e-reader market, Amazon entered into written contracts with the Big Six that facially blessed the use of an Amazon controlled digital rights management technology (“DRM”) on the Big Six’s e-books,” the bookseller motion notes. “The restrictive DRM, in conjunction with the contracts with the Big Six, operates to protect Amazon’s e-reader monopoly. In addition, independent brick-and-mortar bookstores have been foreclosed from effective entry into the e-book market. As a result, consumers of e-books have been deprived of the benefits of choice and of the innovations that would surely have evolved had Amazon’s monopolies been challenged.”

[...]

The three named plaintiffs (The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza of Albany, N.Y.; Fiction Addiction of Greenville, S.C.; and Posman Books of New York City) seek to represent a class of independent brick-and-mortar independent bookstores, and are seeking an injunction prohibiting the publishers and Amazon from “selling e-books with device and app specific DRMs,” while also requiring the big six publishers to allow independent bookstores to directly sell “open-source DRM e-books.”

It seems odd that one would have to sue a business partner for the ability to sell their products, but publishing is nothing if not odd at times.

➻ After all, the idea that you could just walk into a building and borrow books from it was once an odd idea, too, and some people think it’s old-fashioned and unnecessary now. But Galleycat posted a great infographic from CityTownInfo this week that shows Americans Still Love Libraries. The folks at CityTownInfo had an intriguing question: The public library: Historic artifact or adaptive success? And this was the answer:

Courtesy of: CityTownInfo.com

➻ Leah Price wrote a meanderingly interesting piece on the many exaggerations throughout history that the book is dead, and how it is Dead Again. After sharing the vision of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and others in Science Fiction on the bleak future of books, she shares this take on the future library from Library Jokes and Jottings:

“There was a knock at the front door, and the young people slid up the moving stairway, anticipating the parcel of books delivered each morning by the public library aeroplane service. They returned disconsolate; it was only the sterilized milk. ‘You youngsters don’t know what hardships are,’ said the elderly uncle; ‘when I was a lad, back in 1913, I used to get up at 9 o’clock in the morning and walk the length of the street to get a book from a Carnegie Library.’”

And then shares the sad reality:

Writers foresaw space travel, time travel, virtual reality and, endlessly, the book’s demise; what they never seem to have imagined was that the libraries housing those dying volumes might themselves disappear. After a year in which 2,600 public library branches cut back their hours, some readers will need to walk a lot farther than the length of a street.

And the is no public library aeroplane service to replace them.

➻ But for those fortunate enough to have access to Wi-Fi outside the library, there is now Project Gutenberg, whose Massive Volunteer Collective [Has Proofread] 25,000 Public-Domain Books.

As of today, 100,000 people around the world have taken part in a massive proofreading project to correct the electronic texts of 25,000 publicly available books on the Project Gutenberg site.

Project Gutenberg relies on computers to “read” scanned books and convert the print into e-book-ready texts. The problem with this is that when it comes to reading a scanned text, a computer’s “eyes” are inferior to a human’s. In the process, tons of small errors creep in—and humans are the only machines we have for ferreting them out. This is where the Distributed Proofreaders project comes in.

Since these people obviously spent a lot of time in front of their computer screens, they might want to check out The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness by Cecil B. Hartley or The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness by Florence Hartley (because the rules are different) before reentering society. Or not…

➻ Etiquette books once dominated the self-help genre, though many of their suggestions seem in poor taste today—as can be seen in Arika Okrent’s list of How to converse properly: 18 tips from old etiquette books. Numbers thirteen through fifteen seem downright offensive nowadays:

13. “A little graceful imitation of actors and public speakers may be allowed. National manners, and the peculiarities of entire classes, are fair game. French dandies, Yankee bargainers, and English exquisites, may be ridiculed at pleasure; you may even bring forward Irish porters, cab-drivers and bog-trotters — provided you can imitate their wit and humor.”

[...]

14. “Never ask a lady a question about anything whatever.”

15. “In the company of ladies, do not labor to establish learned points by long-winded arguments. They do not care to take too much pains to find out truth.”

Nothing like a little xenophobia and misogyny to up your etiquette!

➻ But maybe it does no good to talk about anything.

➻ Regular readers and those that know us well know that our business was born in an independent bookstore, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, here in Milwaukee, and that those stores closed in 2009. The that know us really well know that former bookseller, book buyer, and general manager of those stores, Daniel Goldin, kept the Downer Avenue location alive as Boswell Book Company. For those looking for an update on how that venture is going, Claire Hanan penned an article on the Goldin Boy for Milwaukee Magazine. (Hint: it’s going really—maybe even magically—well.)

Without Goldin or Boswell, [Brent] Gohde says, “There would be an awful void in the literary culture of Milwaukee.” Part of that is the “magic” of bookselling. “The right bookselling experience is really intense,” Goldin says, and “just stays with you forever.”

He witnessed that magic during his Schwartz days: “You get a bunch of younger people working together, they’re all really creative, they’re all really engaged, they all like community stuff, and you think—holy cow!—there can’t be anything like this in the world.”

But there is. Halley, one of his young booksellers, recently told Goldin she thought Boswell had the magic, too. Goldin, of course, was dubious. But if the opinions of the myriad bookworms who step into Boswell are to be trusted, she might be on to something.

That Brent Gohde fellow quoted above is an old Schwartzy, and just happens to be putting on an Alverno Presents production this month called May the Schwartz Be With You celebrating the old bookshops and all they’ve done for Milwaukee culture. Also, if you’re interested, Rebecca Rego Barry of Fine Books & Manuscripts has Ten Reasons a Pessimist Can be Optimistic About the Future of the Book, but a Kindle ain’t one.

➻ Being a bookseller is certainly a noble calling, but salespeople in other fields often get a bad rap. In a recent installment of strategy + business‘s Author’s Choice series, Mastering the Complex Sale author Jeff Thull says You Gotta Serve Somebody, and introduces an excerpt from Dan Pink’s To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others that “overturns negative stereotypes about sales.” He writes:

Let’s … set aside outdated sales stereotypes once and for all. I’ve always found that the most successful sales professionals are what Dan Pink would call servant sellers. In the excerpt that follows, Pink hits the nail on the head when he quotes Robert Greenleaf’s vision of servant leadership—“do no harm…listen first…accept and empathize”—as a model for sales professionals. … The thinking and behavior of top salespeople are a close match to those of the best doctors. They diagnose and prescribe while keeping the well-being of their clients foremost in their minds.

Thull’s choice is a good one; To Sell is Human won the Marketing & Sales category of our business book awards last year. Here’s the greatest nugget of the excerpt:

An effective seller isn’t a “huckster, who is just out for profit,” [Alfred Fuller once] said. The true “salesman is an idealist and an artist.”

So, too, is the true person. Among the things that distinguish our species from others is our combination of idealism and artistry—our desire both to improve the world and to provide that world with something it didn’t know it was missing. Moving others doesn’t require that we neglect these nobler aspects of our nature. Today it demands that we embrace them. It begins and ends by remembering that to sell is human.

This is especially true of booksellers, I think. Daniel Goldin and the sales staff of Boswell Books and the old Schwartz stores—specifically Stacie Michelle Williams, Carl Hoffman, and Sarah Godsave—have all provided me with “something it didn’t know it was missing” in literature. All have introduced me to new authors, new ideas, and made my life richer with their recommendations.

➻ TED has carved out a very large space in “ideas worth spreading”—at times too large, it seems. Some of the ideas presented at TEDx events are, in fact, not worth worth spreading at all. Some of the ideas are fanciful, as in not true or, as Stanford professor Jay Wacker put it, “Such f—ing bullsh-t.” Nilofer Merchant, author of the excellent book The New How, wrote recently in the Harvard Business Review about what happened When TED Lost Control of Its Crowd, concluding:

Anyone leading an organization today is already managing a crowd—whether it’s composed of consumers, the media, or citizens of the towns in which the enterprise operates. What TED faced is the new reality for all of us. “Nothing is predictable,” Stein concludes. “This flies in the face of leaders’ being asked to plan and predict and know more than others. Today we have to create scale for our mission by being open. The TEDx construct is an example of how being in a community lets us learn, adapt, and grow together.”

Even though management experts have long argued for looser organizational models and against command-and-control leadership, most executives are still ill equipped to manage crowds. As humans, we want to be perfect and in control. We like knowing more than we enjoy learning. We want to get it right the first time rather than iterate. But crowds—and the community constructs we’re talking about—are not about flawless execution; they are about allowing anyone (quite possibly everyone) to contribute and gathering a large volume of potentially powerful ideas from which to pick the best.

And the community is still growing.

➻ For those of you enjoying Masterpiece’s Mr. Selfridge, maybe you’ll want to know know How Mr. Selfridge Created the Modern Economy, and even, perhaps, how the department store supported early feminism? Virginia Postrel at Bloomberg has you covered:

When department stores were new, people understood that they were significant institutions—liberating in the eyes of some, threatening or corrupting to others, but obviously important. Nowadays, we treat shopping as silly stuff. “When I tell people I’ve written on shopping, I still get giggles,” says [historian Erika] Rappaport, whose 2000 book Shopping for Pleasure describes the development of retailing in London’s West End, focusing particularly on women shoppers. “People are uncomfortable: ‘that’s not real history.’”

But ignoring consumer culture produces a bizarre mental picture of the Industrial Revolution that features textile factories but includes no one buying or selling clothes. By downplaying the pleasures of newly inexpensive goods and the shops that sold them, the production-only version of history also misses the everyday meaning of a rising standard of living—the satisfaction, for instance, of having multiple outfits, or even a variety of hat trimmings, that allow you to express your mood or personality.

“The appeal just of the stuff is a really major part of all of this, and that of course is only made possible by manufacturing,” says Linda M. Scott, a professor at Oxford’s Said Business School and the author of Fresh Lipstick, a history of the relationship between feminism and the American beauty and fashion economy. In researching the book, Scott says she was surprised to discover just how important the desire for cash to spend on consumer goods was in drawing young women out of domestic service and into factories. “Even middle-class girls who weren’t supposed to work would talk, in interviews and letters, about envying the working-class girls,” she says. “Because if you couldn’t work you could only get the stuff you wanted by manipulating a man.

[...]

For the early women’s movement, department stores were “flash points, places where it mattered,” says Scott. “Mr. Selfridge” hints at the connection when Lady Mae, the hero’s fictional patron, demands a reciprocal favor: a weekly luncheon for suffragettes in the store’s Palm Court tearoom and the sale of suffragette merchandise in the store.

The real Selfridge’s did carry such goods, including Suffrage Christmas Crackers, and department stores on both sides of the Atlantic furnished meeting spaces for women’s groups. The U.K’s most radical suffragettes ran fashion articles and ads in their journals, and they broke store windows not to protest fashionable images of women but, on the contrary, because they knew stores cared about their business. “They understood,” says Rappaport, “that women had power in that sphere.”

Also, did you know that the real Mr. Selfridge wrote a book? Even better, it’s called The Romance of Commerce.

➻ I love Roger Ebert, and of all the tributes that have been making the rounds since his death, The Onion writing that Roger Ebert Hails Human Existence As ‘A Triumph’ is my favorite:

Calling the overall human experience “poignant,” “thought-provoking,” and a “complete tour de force,” film critic Roger Ebert praised existence Thursday as “an audacious and thrilling triumph.” “While not without its flaws, life, from birth to death, is a masterwork, and an uplifting journey that both touches the heart and challenges the mind,” said Ebert, adding that while the totality of all humankind is sometimes “a mess in places,” it strives to be a magnum opus and, according to Ebert, largely succeeds at this goal. “At times brutally sad, yet surprisingly funny, and always completely honest, I wholeheartedly recommend existence. If you haven’t experienced it yet, then what are you waiting for? It is not to be missed.” Ebert later said that while human existence’s running time was “a little on the long side,” it could have gone on much, much longer and he would have been perfectly happy.

Sometimes satire just works best, and gets to the point quickest.

➻ Neat and strong.

Friday Links has been on hiatus for quite awhile now while I went to Japan with the wife, completed our annual review of the finest business books of 2012, and then took some time off to spend with my first child. That hiatus ends today.

➻ First up, as Amazon Buys Goodreads, let’s take look at a quote from the Goodreads team’s letter to its users (as reported by Rachel Deahl and Jim Milliot of Publisher’s Weekly) to see if we can gauge their reason for selling:

By joining the Amazon family, the Goodreads team will be able to invest more in the things that our members care about. We’ll also be working together on inventing new services for readers and authors. As part of this, we’ll be increasing the size of our team over time, and will be able to add lots of great new features that members and librarians will be excited about! … We said in our blog post that our team gets out of bed every day motivated by the belief that the right book in the right hands can change the world. Now Goodreads can help make that happen in an even bigger and more meaningful way as part of the Amazon family.

There are a few enthusiastic users of Goodreads here at 8cr, and we’re certainly big believers that “the right book in the right hands can change the world,” so we wish the Goodreads team the best of luck continuing their good work under the tutelage of the ever-expanding Amazon Empire.

➻ Of course, not all Goodreads users are fans of the news. Our friend John Ecklund’s survey of the publishing scene got a little grimmer upon learning the news, an attitude summed up in the headline of his post this morning: Goodreads Joins “Amazon family.” Please. Just in case the cynical quotation marks and sardonically placed please didn’t communicate his feelings well enough, here’s more:

Once, when I was a bookseller, I sent out an April Fool’s fax announcing that a German conglomerate was buying Random House and was turning it into a cog in a quest for worldwide media domination. It seemed so preposterous that it was funny, until it happened a couple years later.

I wanted to do an April Fool’s blog post today but Goodreads and Amazon beat me to the punch. And we don’t even have to wait to find out the joke is on us!

For those that will inevitably wonder where the joke is in all this, Ecklund explains:

One of the clever things about social media is that it facilitates backlash when something ugly or sneaky is underway, and I can’t think of anything nastier right now in the book world than the prospect of this behemoth acquiring even more intimate knowledge of my buying habits than it already has. Enough is enough.

I don’t begrudge the Goodreads entrepreneurs their decision to sell. The phrase “social media” may imply some sort of common good philosophy, outside the reach of filthy lucre. But like everything else under capitalism, even a somewhat charming and innocent website for aggregating reading lists has its price. Sure, partnering with indie booksellers, libraries, book media or other players would have been more in keeping with that collaborative ethos so bragged on by young techie entrepreneurs. But then, money is money.

And I suppose books are books, but seeing that Amazon [is] Still Featuring Porn as “Teen Books for Girls” four months after a customer complaint, lets hope the good folks of Goodreads keep up their own quality controls on book recommendations and steer clear of Amazon’s algorithms.

➻ Aaron Stanton, founder and CEO of BookLamp.org and the Book Genome Project, reacted to the Goodreads/Amazon news from another angle, writing Hats Off to You, Bookish: Goodreads Acquisition Validates the Bookish Strategy. And here’s why:

It goes to show that to some degree, Bookish is being successful at one of its primary roles already, regardless of its actual success at gaining traffic (which remains to be seen); it provides a foil in the conversation about the role of publishers in retail and the online space. In fact, in that sense, the timing of the acquisition coming shortly after Bookish’s launch is really well-suited. Can you imagine the discussion today had Bookish still been delayed when this happened? Or five months from now, when Bookish’s launch buzz had faded a bit and the daily grind of building a successful site was underway? Either way, it’s clear that Bookish is a different beast in the space, if nothing else because it seems unlikely that its long-term goal is to simply grow large and eventually be purchased as part of an exit strategy. Whether Bookish.com will ultimately be successful at occupying mindshare and traffic, or whether it’s the right “next contender” in the space, remains to be seen. [...] I do believe this, though … Goodreads’ step out of the independent space leaves a vacuum for someone else to step into, but they won’t do it by trying to repeat more of what Goodreads already does. It’s going to have to be something fundamentally different.

But in the mean time, hat’s off to you, Bookish. Well done.

The praise may be premature, but I think Mr. Stanton is right that Bookish does show that traditional publishers are at least making an effort to stem the tide of Amazon’s influence over the industry.

➻ BrainPickings’ Maria Popova reminds us of the importance of the human touch, and so much else, in her review of (fellow Milwaukeean) Faythe Levine and Sam Macon’s Sign Painters. Writing about What a Disappearing Art Teaches Us About Creative Purpose and Process, she says:

In many ways, the individual journeys of the featured painters embody Daniel Pink’s concept of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the trifecta of success.

A quote from Keith Knecht “who passed away in 2011 and to whom the book is lovingly dedicated,” Papova tells us “frames the historical context of sign painting as an intersection of art and commerce.” More simply put, it reminds us that the art of marketing and advertising began, quite literally, with the art of putting paint to wood in a eye-catching way. From Keith Knecht:

Sign painting, as we know it here in America, is a good 150 years old. It all started when growers and manufacturers began to brand their products. Before that, if you needed flour, you went to the general store and the shop owner would have a barrel of flour and would fill up a canvas bag for you. Manufacturers realized that they had to market their products to show that their goods were better than the competition. That’s when Gold Medal flour, Morton Salt, and other brands were introduced. In 1840 there weren’t big advertising agencies on Madison Avenue designing logos and creating campaigns for these companies. Sign painters designed these logos.

At the end of a great post filled with interesting quotes from artists, intriguing pictures, and an inspriational trailer to the documentary, we have Papova to put it in all in a poetic context and bring it to a purpose-filled conclusion.

[U]nderpinning the entire cross-section of sign artists is a quiet yet unflinching testament to the ethos that the best kind of success is the one you define yourself, based not on prestige or money but on process and happiness. And what makes Sign Painters particularly alluring is its focus on something so tangible and lasting, on permanent atoms in the age of ephemeral bits, reminding us that these artists are not remnants of a bygone era in the evolution of creative culture but a vital signpost pointing in the unchanging [direction] of what’s truly and everlastingly human.

The line about the allure of “something so tangible and lasting, on permanent atoms in the age of ephemeral bits” also happen to perfectly describe the spell physical books have over me.

➻ Writing cleverly about the spectrum of substance and speculation, and of “a place where relationships have become purely transactional,” George Packer talks about When the Money Gets Too Big and does it all in the midst of a wonderful review of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. In doing so, he brilliantly exposes the moral relativity and ambiguity of decadent—yet still fundamentally democratic—societies.

Greed can be the leading wedge of freedom.

Something similar is true of the glittering capital of an American empire perched on a speculative bubble. There’s no limit to the money accumulating at the top of New York (and other centers of wealth), no limit to the fascination it exercises over the rest of the country. Every time it seems as if the tide of fantastic wealth is going out—after 2008 was the most recent moment—it surges back, higher than ever. Greed is eternal, but when the money flows as plentifully upward as in London circa 1873 or New York circa 2013, and is as unequally distributed, it becomes a moral toxin, saturates the world of culture, makes relationships more competitive, turns desire into the pursuit of status, replaces solid things with mirages.

And, as in Trollope’s London, money and its pursuit can have a democratizing effect. Old social codes, some worthy and some iniquitous, give way because money makes them matter less. Formerly oppressed groups, once-despised minorities, and the foreign-born, along with wife-beaters and ex-drug dealers, all have a shot at the top in a society that is much less equal and much more free than the one most of us grew up in. Scandal, cheating, and even crime are only short-term obstacles—there’s always a second chance if you’re the head of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs were in the same business, doing the same things, until 2008—now the first is a disgraced pariah while the second continues to receive White House invitations and sit on philanthropic boards. The only difference is between failure and success. You have to go bad to the extent of a Madoff, or a Melmotte—that is, you have to lose your money, along with everyone else’s—to be banished from the game for good.

It’s not often I believe I would enjoy a review more than the book it’s reviewing, but I think Packer has done just that here. Of course I’ll never know, as the chances of me reading Trollope’s The Way We Live Now in this life are slim to none.

➻ Finally, and more positively, we have Susan Dominus looking at Adam Grant’s upcoming book, Give and Take, and asking Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?

➻ And speaking of giving, that sound you hear is coming from a 100-year-old banjo.

➻ First up, we look to James Hannaham at the Village Voice for a review and interview as Stats Man Nate Silver Releases His First Book, The Signal and the Noise. “Speaking with the Odds God,” Hannaham discusses Silver’s rise from semi-obscurity in the world of sabermetric baseball statistics to wild success on the national stage in the political prediction game. It all came to pass because of the remarkable accuracy of his predictions during the 2008 presidential election on his FiveThirtyEight blog (538 is the number of votes in the electoral college)—which has since been picked up by The New York Times.

That site proved to be one of the most accurate political meta-polls during the 2008 presidential race (he called every state except Indiana) and continues to testify to Silver’s influence. So swift was his rise to King of Geekdom (TIME named him to its 100 Most Influential People list in ’09) that his followers lacked a bible. Now, though, he’s releasing his first book, The Signal and the Noise (The Penguin Press, 352 pp., $27.95), a substantial, wide-ranging, and potentially important gauntlet of probabilistic thinking based on actual data thrown at the feet of a culture determined to sweep away silly liberal notions like “facts.” For Silver, the key to successful prognostication is a clear-eyed examination of the difference between “noise,” misleading or biased methods or faulty data sets, and “signal”—that which is likely to turn out to be true, and whose significance often seems obvious in hindsight.

In 13 chapters, he covers a panorama of the unpredictable and the state of mankind’s ability to conquer it. Or come close, anyway.

[...]

“This is not a postmodern kind of book,” says Silver … “It’s saying there is truth, but we can’t know it, and it’s hard for people to accept both those propositions. It requires you to accept that you’ll always be a flawed, imperfect creature who’s struggling to get better.” …

As far as Silver is concerned, no one in a business or institution that relies on prediction can afford to accept their preconceived notions as fact.

I think this will make for a fascinating, down-to-earth contrast to a highly anticipated book being released by Random House next month, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.

➻ Next we turn from “the unpredictable and the state of mankind’s ability to conquer it” to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, A Post on the Occasion of Facebook’s Billionth Member, and the mankind’s future capacity to experience—and/or conquer—boredom.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that David Byrne was correct and that the distinguishing characteristic of paradise is the absence of event, the total nonexistence of the new. Everything is beautifully, perfectly unflummoxed. If we further assume that hell is the opposite of heaven, then the distinguishing characteristic of hell is unrelenting eventfulness, the constant, unceasing arrival of the new. Hell is a place where something always happens. One would have to conclude, on that basis, that the great enterprise of our time is the creation of hell on earth. Every new smartphone should have, affixed to its screen, one of those transparent, peel-off stickers on which is written, “Abandon hope, ye who enter here.”

[...]
Forget the Turing Test. We’ll know that computers are really smart when computers start getting bored. If you assign a computer a profoundly tedious task like spotting potential house numbers in video images, and then you come back a couple of hours later and find that the computer is checking its Facebook feed or surfing porn, then you’ll know that artificial intelligence has truly arrived.

There’s another angle here, though. As many have pointed out, one thing that networked computers are supremely good at is preventing their users from experiencing boredom. A smartphone is the most perfect boredom-eradication device ever created. (Some might argue that smartphones don’t so much eradicate boredom as lend to boredom an illusion of excitement, but that’s probably just semantics.) To put it another way, what networked computers are doing is stealing from humans one of the essential markers of human intelligence: the capacity to experience boredom.

And that brings us back to the Talking Heads. For the non-artificially intelligent, boredom is not an end-state; it’s a portal to transcendence—a way out of quotidian eventfulness and into some higher state of consciousness. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, but that’s a place that the computer, and, as it turns out, the computer-enabled human, can never visit. In hell, the house numbers, or their equivalents, never stop coming, and we never stop being amused by them.

It’s also a place where partisan cable news can never visit, but that’s a story for another time.

➻ In the meantime, we turn to The Daily Caller (cofounded by cable news pundit Tucker Carlson) and Matt K. Lewis’s review of a book on the positive possibilities of the networked age that Michael has covered extensively here on this blog—Future Perfect. Lewis writes that Steven Johnson’s ‘Future Perfect’ Puts the Political Left and Right on Notice:

Author Steven Johnson is a rare individual these days: A genuine optimist. His new book, Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age, preaches a gospel of an emerging worldview that “doesn’t map on to the existing left/right political categories.”

He swears he’s not selling “cyber-utopianism,” but Johnson believes the “peer network” structure of the Internet can help us meld the best qualities of conservatism and liberalism into a more visionary third way.

And he might have a point.

Consider the website Kickstarter, which allows individuals to voluntarily support creative projects. As Johnson notes, the site is “on track to distribute more money than the National Endowment for the Arts” (a potentially positive development for conservatives who lament having their tax dollars involuntarily go to such projects.) Why couldn’t, as Johnson suggests, local governments incorporate a similar sort of “participatory budgeting” model to decide which projects to fund?

This might sound like a quixotic attempt at “direct democracy,” but Johnson (who is the author of several other terrific books, including “Where Good Ideas Come From” and “Everything Bad is Good For You”) insists that finding new solutions requires casting aside cynicism and embracing optimism.

And it is refreshing to read an ostensibly political book in which the author genuinely seems to have no ideological agenda or partisan ax to grind. Johnson’s advice, thus, rings at least sincere.

“I think one of the key things that the Left needs to acknowledge is that the libertarian position that kind of comes down from Hayek,” he tells me, “in the long run, will outperform and out innovate centralized bureaucratic institutions.”

But while Johnson dismisses the notion that elite planners can solve all our problems, he also argues that tomorrow’s best innovative solutions won’t come exclusively from the market-based sources. “The idea is not to replace the market with the state,” he avers, “but to enhance and extend the market with other decentralized systems that aren’t necessarily driven by profit incentives.”

If this sounds naive, think of Wikipedia. Thousands of people voluntarily contribute to creating and maintaining this online encyclopedia — for free. (As author Dan Pink, has pointed out, sometimes financial incentives actually reduce motivation and participation.)

Achieving Johnson’s vision won’t be easy. A lot of people are invested in preserving the current political system. ”The Left needs to get rid of the idea [of] top-down, state-centralized master plans [and] big, top-heavy unions — all of these things that have been institutions of the left for a hundred years,” he says.

“But the Right has to give up the idea that everything is going to be solved by the market.”

You can listen to An Interview with Steven Johnson Michael posted on our Daily Blog earlier this week, and check out the one Matt Lewis’s did with him on his website.

➻ One thing Douglas Rushkoff would like you to know about the future is that the iPhone is Not Your Saviour

Yes, we’ve been here before.

First time, for me anyway, was the CD-ROM craze. Flashy interactivity, new authoring tools and seemingly infinite storage space led many media publishers to believe that CD-ROMs would be to the digital era what books were to that of text. They obsolesced themselves as a viable format (mostly by being slow and boring) even before networking speeds made disks irrelevant.

The dotcom boom appeared just as infinite to those in the know. While Amazon has been left standing, Pets.com and Etoys crashed as quickly as they rose. The vast majority of online retailers surprised the Wall Street analysts betting on them.

Social media was supposed to solve that problem for the tech industry and NASDAQ alike, but climaxed in the IPO of Facebook, a disappointment so far-reaching it has dragged dozens of social media companies along with it, and sent investors and entrepreneurs looking for greener pastures.

Like wireless handheld devices and the apps running on them.

Everywhere I turn, every conference I attend, every magazine story I read seems to be based on one aspect of these technologies or another. Everyone is hard at work on an iPhone app that lists, maps, or socializes some data set in some new visual way. Pictures over text, text over maps, restaurants close to subways, or apps showing subways with WiFi to download more apps.

Don’t get me wrong: Wireless is big, and these devices are here to stay, at least until we get comfortable with apps being embedded in objects and technology being implanted in our bodies. And while the opportunity for corporations to make billions on these apps may be overstated, we may still see a new peer-to-peer marketplace emerge between independent developers and the users of their bounty of applications.

But the extent to which entrepreneurs, developers, and even columns like this one depend on Apple and the rest of the wireless computing industry for new grist far exceeds their true impact or potential.

So go, get an iPhone. Enjoy it. But find something or someone else to save you.

Or, possibly, maybe you can find something or someone else to save? It would probably be more rewarding.

➻ And then there’s Dave Pollard, author of Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work, who would like you to know Why We Cannot Save the World at all.

➻ So, I suppose the Mayans had it right. It’s the end of the world.

➻ So it seems that, for all the folks out of work, and despite the fact that the median wage in this country has remained stagnant for decades and actually declined over the last ten years when adjusted for inflation, the only way the national conscience is stirred on labor issues these days is when it affects the outcome of a National Football League game.

Forgive me for quoting a partisan source here, but it seems to me that Dave Zirin at The Nation has the right perspective on this whole debacle:

[T]he entire country received a high-def, prime-time lesson in the difference between skilled, union labor and a ramshackle operation of unskilled scabs. When [Wisconsin governor] Scott Walker is sticking up for the union, you know we’ve arrived at a teachable moment worth shouting from the hills. People who care about stable jobs with benefits and reversing the tide of inequality in the United States should seize this moment. We should ask … politicians of both parties drinking from the same neoliberal fever-swamp, Why do you think we need skilled union labor on the football field but not in our firehouses, our classrooms, or even our uranium facilities? Similarly players need to be asking questions to the owners: how can you actually posture like you care about our health and safety ever again after subjecting us to this hazardous environment the first three weeks of the season—or, as Drew Brees tweeted, “Ironic that our league punishes those based on conduct detrimental. Whose CONDUCT is DETRIMENTAL now?”

I think using this as a teachable moment for the larger economy would be apt. First of all, it seems to me that the reason the economy tanked in the first place is that we removed the referees from the field of finance and business. It turns out that the economy, like football, is a lot more free when it is fair, when the playing field is level, when everyone’s playing by the same rules, and when the rules are enforced evenly across the board. Second, maybe we can find a way to put our teachers in shoulder pads or pinstripes and turn schooling into a spectator sport? Spelling bees do seem to be becoming very popular these days. Can we look into full contact spelling bees?

➻ Turning to those that train our workforce, Nicholas Carr—author of The Shallows—had a great piece yesterday over at Technology Review about The Crisis in Higher Education. With college tuition forever rising and (as mentioned above) wages stagnant, many are turning to online education.

Carr sets the scene by turning the clock back a century:

A hundred years ago, higher education seemed on the verge of a technological revolution. The spread of a powerful new communication network—the modern postal system—had made it possible for universities to distribute their lessons beyond the bounds of their campuses. Anyone with a mailbox could enroll in a class. Frederick Jackson Turner, the famed University of Wisconsin historian, wrote that the “machinery” of distance learning would carry “irrigating streams of education into the arid regions” of the country. Sensing a historic opportunity to reach new students and garner new revenues, schools rushed to set up correspondence divisions. By the 1920s, postal courses had become a full-blown mania. Four times as many people were taking them as were enrolled in all the nation’s colleges and universities combined.

The hopes for this early form of distance learning went well beyond broader access. Many educators believed that correspondence courses would be better than traditional on-campus instruction because assignments and assessments could be tailored specifically to each student. The University of Chicago’s Home-Study Department, one of the nation’s largest, told prospective enrollees that they would “receive individual personal attention,” delivered “according to any personal schedule and in any place where postal service is available.” The department’s director claimed that correspondence study offered students an intimate “tutorial relationship” that “takes into account individual differences in learning.” The education, he said, would prove superior to that delivered in “the crowded classroom of the ordinary American University.”

We’ve been hearing strikingly similar claims today. Another powerful communication network—the Internet—is again raising hopes of a revolution in higher education. This fall, many of the country’s leading universities, including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, are offering free classes over the Net, and more than a million people around the world have signed up to take them.

Now, obviously the U.S. Mail is not the internet (after all, mail service is reliable in rural America), but it’s always helpful to look at analogous circumstances when deciding how to proceed with a similar idea or innovation. Albert Einstein famously said that the definition of insanity “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I would argue it’s also insane to deconstruct what has worked very well in the past. An affordable education and an organized labor force built the strongest middle class in the world here in America. Online education has the chance to be a great force for good, even freedom, in the world if we can figure out how it supplements (rather than supplants) the current educational infrastructure and helps keeps costs down, rather than becoming our generation’s mail correspondence courses.

➻ Now, on to publishing—another former ivory tower losing its luster. Peter Osnos, founder of one of my favorite publishers—PublicAffairs—wrote an interesting article for The Atlantic last week about Paul Krugman and the Economics of Books.

Krugman’s publisher is the highly respected W. W. Norton & Company, founded in the 1920s and notable because, among other reasons, it has been owned by its employees since the 1960s. Norton’s other authors include Michael Lewis, Joseph Stiglitz, Stephen Greenblatt, and Fareed Zakaria, as impressive a group of writers and thinkers as any in the country. Fortunately for Norton, it was not one of the five major publishers targeted by the Department of Justice in its antitrust allegations over e-book pricing.

[...] The list price for the book is $24.95, and every bookstore I called is selling it at that price. You can also order it directly from the publisher’s website, but that comes with a shipping charge and sales tax where required.

Here is where the pricing becomes interesting. Amazon’s hardcover price is $14.71, with no shipping charge for customers who pay an annual fee of $79 for Amazon Prime and two-day delivery. The Kindle edition is $9.48. At BN.com the hardcover is $14.71, but the e-book price is $13.72 (BN.com has free shipping for orders over $25). Moreover, in the Barnes & Noble bookstore, the hardcover is $24.95. On Apple’s iBook, the price is $11.99. The Sony store charges $14.99, and on Kobo, which was recently named the e-book provider in the coming year for independent booksellers, the price was $15.49. Only Google Play matched Amazon at $9.48.

So, given these choices, what would you do? [...] Publishers believe that Amazon’s goal is to condition its millions of customers to the lowest prices available for the hardware it sells and the content they carry, with the ultimate intention of driving vendors to accept less for what they sell. Mike Shatzkin, an oft-quoted publishing consultant, told the New York Times, “I think everybody competing with Amazon in the ebook market had better fasten their seatbelts.”

In her opinion, approving the DOJ settlement with the publishers, Judge Denise Cote removed any obstacle to discounting with the argument that consumers have the right to expect the lowest possible price. “It is not the place of the court,” she wrote, “to protect these bookstores and other stakeholders from the vicissitudes of a competitive market.” For now, the estimable output of W. W. Norton, including Krugman’s End This Depression Now, will continue to be available at a variety of prices. But over the longer term, with possibly serious consequences for the viability of publishers and booksellers, the odds favor the public’s instinct to get the best bargain. To reiterate a crucial point I have made before: Publishers will always need the revenue to support authors and the staffs that edit, produce, and market their books, and to provide a reasonable profit for their owners. If the squeeze becomes too tight, the result will be fewer books that matter—like End This Depression Now—whether in print or digital formats.

Low prices moved consumers from the Main Streets of America to shopping in big box stores on the edge of town a generation ago, and now they’re moving us from the edge of town to shopping online. The publishing industry is a microcosm of this trend, a bellwether of where we shop. Neighborhood bookstores took a hit when Barnes & Noble and Borders arrived on the outskirts of our communities, and now both the big box stores and independents must compete with Amazon, a company that employs no one and pays no taxes in your hometown (though I suppose that may change when same-day delivery becomes a reality—as it surely will). I just hope we don’t all pay a price for the low prices we’re paying, and that the companies keeping consumer prices low are also keeping the well-being of the American worker in mind—being that the consumer and worker are largely the same people.

After all, if Gallup Chairman James Clifton is right, the real battle for economic ascendance is not going to be in the price wars, but in The Coming Job Wars.

➻ But, as Wal-Mart stops selling Amazon Kindles, it seems that the war for consumers, not skilled workers, is only escalating.

➻ All this while another of my favorite publishers Knopf Remembers Longtime Editor Ashbel Green. From Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke at The New York Observer:

Mr. Green, who was known as “Ash,” started working at the publishing house in 1964 and went on to edit over 500 books by a stable of well-known authors, political figures and journalists such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vaclav Havel, George H.W. Bush and Walter Cronkite.

[...]

“I really think that most editors wake up each day hoping they’re going to find something they love,” Mr. Green told the Missouri Review in 2000. “I have a real sense of excitement when a new writer comes in with a novel or a collection of stories or an idea for a political book–someone you feel has a fresh voice, whom you can publish with a lot of enthusiasm.”

Mr. Green was also known for helping young editors.

He was both a friend and mentor to Andrew Miller, who came to Knopf from Vintage to take over Mr. Green’s stable of writers when Mr. Green decided to retire in 2007.

Mr. Green would invite Mr. Miller and their assistant over to his Upper East Side apartment for drinks about once a month—a kind of involvement with younger editors that is rare in book publishing.

“He was a mentor to me by example,” said Mr. Miller. “He never had a bad thing to say about anybody. He was unflappable. He handled bad news with equanimity. He handled authors and agents so well and was always so kind—which is harder than it seems.”

Hopefully some of the editors he mentored are passing that spirit on, keeping the industry honest as they strive to keep it up-to-date.

➻ We’ll get there, but Why Is It So Hard?

➻ Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, had a great piece in The New Yorker about Big Med, wondering if “Restaurant chains have managed to combine quality control, cost control, and innovation. Can health care?” This question came to him after dining out with his children at a Cheesecake Factory that left them all completely satisfied, with options ranging from beet and goat cheese salads to Hawaiian pizza.

I wondered how they pulled it off. I asked one of the Cheesecake Factory line cooks how much of the food was premade. He told me that everything’s pretty much made from scratch—except the cheesecake, which actually is from a cheesecake factory, in Calabasas, California.

I’d come from the hospital that day. In medicine, too, we are trying to deliver a range of services to millions of people at a reasonable cost and with a consistent level of quality. Unlike the Cheesecake Factory, we haven’t figured out how. Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and the quality is unreliable. Every clinician has his or her own way of doing things, and the rates of failure and complication (not to mention the costs) for a given service routinely vary by a factor of two or three, even within the same hospital.

It’s easy to mock places like the Cheesecake Factory—restaurants that have brought chain production to complicated sit-down meals. But the “casual dining sector,” as it is known, plays a central role in the ecosystem of eating, providing three-course, fork-and-knife restaurant meals that most people across the country couldn’t previously find or afford. The ideas start out in élite, upscale restaurants in major cities. You could think of them as research restaurants, akin to research hospitals. Some of their enthusiasms—miso salmon, Chianti-braised short ribs, flourless chocolate espresso cake—spread to other high-end restaurants. Then the casual-dining chains reëngineer them for affordable delivery to millions. Does health care need something like this?

It’s a long read, but a fascinating juxtaposition, and very worth the time.

➻ The Peer-Reviewed By My Neurons blog recently looked at two studies in the Journal of Economic Psychology to explore Why It’s Important For People to Know Experiences Are Better Than Possessions. It turns out it’s important not just to our level of personal happiness, but affects how well we manage our finances, as well:

The tendency for experiences to create more happiness than material possessions is one scientific finding that’s recently received a lot of attention. While most media coverage about the joy of experiences has focused on the abstract question of how to be happy, evidence is building that beliefs about materialism and happiness can also have concrete implications for a person’s day-to-day to life. For example, two recent studies have found a connection between materialism and poor money management. This means that convincing people material possessions aren’t the key to happiness won’t simply help them spend their Christmas bonus more wisely, it may also lead to better overall financial management.

I have a feeling that the Cheesecake Factory can help out here somehow, as well. Of course, being from Wisconsin, I tend to equate any experience involving a form of cheese as a possible solution to all of life’s problems.

➻ Bill Taylor weighed in on another important lesson recently in the Harvard Business Review: It’s More Important to Be Kind than Clever. Relating a touching story from Adweek about How a Fan Post on Panera’s Facebook Page Got Half a Million Likes after a simple act of kindness for a woman with cancer, Taylor talks about the lesson marketers and businesspeople should be taking away from it all.

Marketing types have latched on to this story as an example of the power of social media and “virtual word-of-mouth” to boost a company’s reputation. But I see the reaction to Sue Fortier’s gesture as an example of something else—the hunger among customers, employees, and all of us to engage with companies on more than just dollars-and-cents terms. In a world that is being reshaped by the relentless advance of technology, what stands out are acts of compassion and connection that remind us what it means to be human.

Media has always worked best when we feel there is a human touch rather than a ghost in the machine. Social media amplifies that tendency. When a story originates from an authentic human connection rather than a marketing campaign, we can usually tell—and we usually respond.

➻ Which brings us to our next issue, Art and Manipulation, and Shawn Coyne’s reaction to Nick Carr’s article in The Times about Journalists Dancing on the Edge of Truth. Well, he didn’t so much react to Carr’s piece as much as he used it as a jumping off point to critique modern media values, the now seemingly standard practice of placing profit over the public interest, and the creeping commoditization of, well, everything—but he made some great points on his way there:

To Carr, misrepresenting, fabricating, or stealing other people’s words and ideas is as fundamental a transgression as THOU SHALT NOT KILL. Carr’s probably not a sweet and a hugely talented guy, but veracity and full disclosure is his code. It’s a damn important code shared by, I fear, fewer and fewer of his colleagues in the journalism “business.”

Everything wasn’t always a “business.” We didn’t always look at the world in terms of return on investment, quarterly profits, or net worth. We didn’t follow Presidential elections based on how much money a candidate raises per month or define the American dream based purely on the pursuit of Ayn Randian self-interest.

We admired people for what they did. Not how much money they made.

As a boy, I remember passing an overly serious lady in the street and making some smart aleck remark. My mother spun me around, grabbed my shoulders and with fury in her eyes said, That woman has the most important job in the world . . . She’s a teacher!

There used to be something called the “public interest.” And it wasn’t all that long ago. The Federal Communications Commission used to require television networks to devote a certain number of hours of programming per month that discuss “public issues, serve minority interests and eliminate superfluous advertising.”

And, man, he was only getting warmed up. If you’re picking up what he’s putting down, or happen to love James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News, you’ll want to continue reading.

➻ Of course, maybe “It is already too late, and it will go on being even later.”

➻ And then again, maybe it’s just stuck in the Metronomic Underground.

➻ Devin Leonard of Bloomberg Businessweek interviewed Dave Eggers on His New Novel and Globalization recently. I’ve always been a fan of Eggers’ writing, and look forward to diving into A Hologram for the King very soon. But even more than I appreciate his writing, I’ve always truly admired how he parlayed his early success as a writer into founding his own independent publishing house—the decidedly uncynical, often hilarious yet intellectually expansive McSweeeney’s—to bring the work of others into the world. That he continues to build organizations and centers around McSweeney’s to promote human rights, support youth literacy and literature, increase access to education in South Sudan, aid the rebuilding of New Orleans, and work on many other worthy causes puts him in a rarefied air of individuals who use their personal success to promote the well-being and success of others.

There was a contrast in the interview that I found rather striking. Let me see if I can set it up by excerpting pieces:

Devin Leonard: Several characters in the novel talk about the decline of America’s can-do spirit. One observation that sticks out is from the architect at a party in KAEC [King Abdullah Economic City], “… in the U.S. now there’s not that kind of dreaming happening. It’s on hold.”

Dave Eggers: You know, I interviewed a noted architect who designed the financial center for KAEC. I saw an American name on the plan, and so I looked him up and it turns out he was part of the Burj Dubai design team, and he has designed, I don’t know, four of the top 10 tallest buildings in the world. But all in Dubai and China and other parts of Asia. None of them are in the U.S. When I called him, he said, “Oh boy, I can’t remember the last time I did something in the U.S.” He went on and on about why that was. He would love to, but he said that those very bold dreams and visions, and also the wherewithal and political acumen and will—it isn’t really there. Of course, architects like places like Dubai because they aren’t democratic countries. They aren’t subject to the same sort of political push and pull and voices being heard.

DL: The architect aside, do you think that American can-do spirit has moved elsewhere?

DE: Well, the architect wants it to be otherwise, and Alan [the main character in the book] wants it to be otherwise, but it’s not in the air right now.

This exchange is followed by an exchange that shows this kind of American can-do spirit is, in fact, in the air right now.

DL: Bringing it back to you as an entrepreneur, you make a point of thanking a Michigan-based printer in the book’s acknowledgments. Was it important to have your novel about globalization produced in the U.S.?

It’s funny—we’ve been publishing for about 13 years, and we started by printing in Iceland. That was really done because I wanted to spend more time in Iceland. Our books were printed outside of Reykjavik by Icelanders in blue jumpsuits. But then those prices were too high. And it was not very practical. So we started printing mostly in the U.S. and Canada. Then, some years ago for the higher-end art books, we were printing some of those in China and Singapore. But we had some problems with the printers in terms of communication and shipping and customs. It takes a long time to print something in Asia, and so we just started bringing more of our production back to the U.S.

Two years ago, I learned of this printer. We have a nonprofit writing and tutoring center outside Detroit. Thomson-Shore was providing pro bono printing of student work and doing these beautiful books. So I went to visit them and found it was a relatively small plant in the middle of homes and farms. They did exceedingly high-quality work and had an archival bindery, too, and so I just was really taken with the whole enterprise. We started getting estimates from them, and they were competitive. It’s so easy to print in the Midwest. You’re saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there. We were really gratified to see how well this one turned out. When I tell people what we paid per unit, they can’t believe it, because it’s right in line with any other hardcover book. Here and there you’re seeing other people bringing manufacturing back for all those same reasons. We’ll see. I hope it starts a trend.

It would be great if we were still digging raw materials out of the Earth and hiring the most sought after architects to fashion it into the world’s tallest buildings here on American soil. But, given the choice, I’d rather have a printer in Michigan printing the world’s best literature. It all comes down to what we value as a society. Of course, I suppose we could have both.

➻ Richard Posner’s critical review of Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s How Much is Enough, along with his description of just how shabby, shoddy, and uncomfortable England was as recently as the 1980s and his pooh-poohing the very idea of Working 9 to 12 (the primary argument of the book is that the evolution of developed economies should lead to us all working fewer hours), led me back to Giles Fraser’s review of Two books [that] ask about the morality of the market and the nature of value—one of which is the Skidelksy’s book, the other being Micahel Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy.

Economics, [the Skildelskys] insist, needs to be impregnated with purpose, with some human‑centered teleology.

In other words, markets were made for man and not man for markets. This is a commendable insight, but whether their prescriptions for an economics of the good life are sufficiently inclusive to work at the level of the poorest in our society—those for whom growth and accumulation are what mostly happens to others—was something about which I was less convinced. [...]

In What Money Can’t Buy, Michael Sandel comes at things differently. He too would subscribe to the need for a more confident articulation of the good life, having built his philosophical reputation attacking the idea of a free-floating “unencumbered” self that is at the heart of John Rawls’s hugely influential Theory of Justice. It is this same rootless self that he regards as unable to resist the power of the market to redefine our deepest values.

Thus, where the Skidelskys are prepared to leave certain liberal assumptions unchallenged, Sandel wants to draw attention to the ways in which the underlying liberalism of the marketplace wipes away a horizon of ethical significance—which is, roughly speaking, what the Skidelskys mean by the good life. In other words, Sandel insists that market values crowd out all other values like a cuckoo in the nest. “There are some things that money can’t buy,” he begins, “but these days, not many.”

The value in these books may not be in the answers they provide, as there may be few to none, but in the questions they ask.

➻ Speaking of working fewer hours, Tim Ferriss wrote this morning about How Bestseller Lists Work… and Introduc[ed] the Amazon Monthly 100. If you’ve ever wondered how books end up on those lists, Ferris’s post is a very quick and helpful synopsis. Coming from someone who has worked intimately in publishing and has two bestsellers under his belt, it is a very valuable one.

➻ Wendy Welch brings it back home, writing of The Importance Of Local Bookstores for the Huffington Post.

When I say, “local bookstore,” odds are good the first thing that comes to mind is not a book you’ve bought, but a person, a sense of place, even just a vague cozy feeling. [...]

So bookstores always seemed wonderful places, but it wasn’t until my husband and I opened one in rural Virginia that we began to understand the practical realities of their magic.

When people come into our 39,000-volume-strong shop, their breathing changes. Their expressions soften, steps slow, eyes stop darting. Hands unclench from cell phones as they mutter, “Call you later.”

And then they just stand there, letting their eyes drift over the shelves while that indefinable bookshop magic does its work.

They relax.

That doesn’t happen with online selling. (When was the last time you relaxed in front of a computer?) Online sites pepper us with pop-up ads. Booksellers listen. We read your face. We see the tears in your eyes when you ask for a large print book because your mother’s sight is failing. Booksellers make you a cup of tea in the café. We know that the sweetest, saddest, scariest stories in our stores aren’t in the books, but in the customers. We value those stories.

Who values local bookshops? Well, you do, if you’re reading this—for which all bookslingers everywhere thank you. [...] book lovers understand their local shop’s role in painting the world with bright colors rather than shades of grey. Bibliophiles are smart: we know, when Amazon offers $10 off a book’s list price, what false savings lie within that tenner. There’s short-term and long-term; there’s economy, and then there’s community. You pay your money and you make your choice.

Not everyone has enough money to take the high road; only you know what you can afford, and what you can afford to lose. Because, God bless us every one, independent bookstores help us find the others like us. Booksellers hear customers’ voices in the shop, and hook them up with the voices they will value on the printed page. It’s so much more than a sale. It’s an affirmation.

We’re an online retailer ourselves, so maybe we’re not one to talk (link?), but our roots are still firmly planted in a local bookshop Harry W. Schwartz started in 1929, and we strive to reaffirm the ethos of those independent bookshops in every transaction we make, and every blog post, manifesto, or exploration we publish. The bookstores we were born in have passed into new hands, so we can no longer look directly into your eyes, but we pride ourselves on being able to hear your voice—both figuratively as we try to gauge what books and ideas you’d be interested in, and literally through our excellent and long-tenured customer service staff that’s always here, ready to take your call. Well, at least Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 5:00 Central Standard Time.

➻ Until Monday…