Rocket Bomber

“During the trip we saw several planned pilot breweries at these farms, and the farmers had as many questions about the brewing process as we did the hop growing process. One of these very generous and inquisitive farmers led us through a 16 acre breeding field with 8,500 plants of different, personally cross-pollinated varieties, most of them doomed to extinction by selection, but one or two maybe destined to be the nest [sic] Cascade or Simcoe. This symbiotic understanding of each others’ profession can only spark collaboration, innovation, and generation spanning relationships that will be the legendary brand building blocks of the future. It will be key for brewers and farmers to work together to ensure that the future of American brewing can realize its full potential. There will only be so much land, time, and resources to harvest the right amount of varieties and overall yield, and the hop farmers are ready to jump into the awesome challenges ahead of us.”

Weird Things Can Happen in a Hop Field at One in the Morning

[blockquote]
“This is when Amazon drastically expanded the number of warehouses to more than 10 around year 2000 and started stocking most products that it sold. The focus shifted to a business model built around excellent delivery performance and efficient logistics. Customers were amazed at how quickly their orders arrived on the doorstep.

“Amazon did not stop reinventing its business model here. In 2006 it went further and unveiled a program called Fulfillment by Amazon, whereby independent sellers could use Amazon’s warehouse network to fill orders and delegate to Amazon their logistics-related decisions.

“Under this new model, Amazon essentially became a wholesaler of goods sold by many much smaller virtual storefronts. What the distributors and publishers, in the aggregate, were to Amazon in its early days, now Amazon was to the participants in its fulfillment-for-hire program. What used to be outsourced became the core proposition and strength.

“Amazon’s recent decision to further develop its fulfillment capabilities (by spending close to $14 billion to build about 50 new warehousing facilities) to bring a large fraction of the US population in the same day delivery catchment area reflects that, for Amazon, the Internet retail model has now come full circle.” [/blockquote]

Amazon Constantly Audits its Business Model : Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine, 15 November 2013, Harvard Business Review Blog Network

“Even low-rise, mixed-use buildings of two or three stories—the kind you see on an old-style, small-town main street—bring in ten times the revenue per acre as that of an average big-box development. What’s stunning is that, thanks to the relationship between energy and distance, large-footprint sprawl development patterns can actually cost cities more to service than they give back in taxes. The result? Growth that produces deficits that simply cannot be overcome with new growth revenue.

“‘Cities and counties have essentially been taking tax revenues from downtowns and using them to subsidize development and services in sprawl,’ Minicozzi told me. ‘This is like a farmer going out and dumping all his fertilizer on the weeds rather than on the tomatoes.’”

Wal-Mart: An economic cancer on our cities: In Asheville, N.C., a dense downtown generated jobs and tax revenue and restored the city’s soul : Charles Montgomery, 10 November 2013, Salon.com

excerpted from Montgomery’s book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, isbn 9780374168230 [Amazon, IndieBound]

where’s the beef? actually, I suppose that should be “what’s the beef?”

beef /bēf/ noun secondary, informal use: a complaint or grievance. synonyms: complaint, criticism, objection, cavil, quibble, grievance, grumble, gripe, grouse [thank you, Google.]

##

This is not the first time I’ve used a ‘steak’ analogy; something about media consumption generally lends itself to the inevitable comparison. (DVDs have menus, social media and rss both have feeds, we even talk about information diets)

• Cheaper, faster, available from more outlets? Call that a ‘burger’.

• More expensive, often considered a prestige item at many vendors, and with a so-called-best expression found at decades-old establishments dedicated to it? Call that a ‘steak’

A steak can cost $25 or more, you make the purchase of it a special event, or part of a ritual. Oh, sure: a steak can be had for $15 from some neighborhood “bar and grill” but somehow the identical cut (often prepared the same) isn’t given the same regard: If you want a decent steak you go to where the chef and the cooks and the staff are all on board with the experience. You go to a steakhouse. If you happen to be at some other restaurant and take a flyer and order the steak, you’ll be pleasantly surprised if it’s any good and honestly, not really disappointed if it’s not. (Unless you’re the asshole who sends back plates at a Tuesdays/Fridays/ApplePepper… dude, …you had that option before walking in the door, don’t torture the staff)

In contrast: Burgers are fast and cheap; not $25 but to be had in under 5 minutes and for as little as 99¢ — and if the 99¢ burger is a little small and not as satisfying, you don’t complain.

For a decent lunch — grabbed on the go — you expect to pay $2.99 or $3.99 (or maybe a little more, if you’ve ordered from this joint before and you happen to really like their burgers — value for the money)

Do the price points I’m citing (or the title of this blog post) give you an idea of where I’m going with this?

##

You go to the bookstore: you get recommendations, some guidance, some free samples [open a book, fool, that’s what they’re there for], they have a comprehensive ‘menu’ and even a comfy seat.

This costs more at the steakhouse; it costs more at the bookstore.

‘Steak’, right? Oh, but steak doesn’t cost $25, you say? You can get a decent rib-eye (about a half pound or so) for $4.99.

Sure you can. If you’re lucky you went to the butcher, but more likely it’s just the cut in a styrofoam tray at your supermarket. And then you’re on your own: how to season it, how to cook it, cast iron or grill? Is either of those even an option?

A cheap steak requires a certain amount of expertise. (AND I glossed over the choice of cut: sirloin, rib-eye, new york or kansas city strip, t-bone, porterhouse, london broil, flank, skirt, flatiron, top and bottom round — and those are the US cuts; a British or Brazilian butcher will take the same cow and divide it differently.) Hell, finding a cheap steak and figuring out what to do with it is work.

Any wonder why some would rather just get it from a steakhouse, inflated price be damned?

##

YES, OF COURSE if one believes in anecdotal evidence, we can all easily relate:

• that really awesome steak we had for like $12 at some hole-in-the-wall, mom-and-pop restaurant
• that $8 burger which was literally the best thing ever, transcendent really
• the diner with an awesome $4 burger — honestly I order like 4 without sides and that’s all I eat there
• the highfalutin’ hoity-toity place that made me put on a jacket, charged me $50, and the steak sucked.

Here I will note again: yes. That’s fine. Your experience is valid,
but this whole post is just an extended metaphor.

There are what, one hundred thousand restaurants across the US? More? A million? I don’t actually think it’s a million but hell, call it a million restaurants.

There are at least 129 Million Books and another million get added each year.

Relying on only anecdotal evidence: I could pick any one book and it would either prove or disprove any generalization. I could pick whole genres.

##

Let’s go back to customer experience and expectations:

If your budget is smaller, and you tend to “eat out” often, you’ll naturally gravitate to the Burger-end of the beef spectrum: give us this day our daily burger (and fries) and lead us not unto heart disease.

Expectations are smaller, price points are lower, we need something that satisfies but are not looking for transcendent experiences. You go through the drive-thru. Convenience matters more than quality. Sometimes you celebrate the quick-cheap-and-easy aspects, and might even be caught out saying A Good Burger Trumps a Mediocre Steak in my book, any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

(If you plan ahead and make a reservation, are bringing a date, plus fronting $30 bucks a plate just for the entrées: your expectations are higher.)

Let’s say you’re some kind of a douchenozzle and you demand home delivery from a steakhouse — your expectations haven’t changed (and the prices haven’t either) but the beef you end up eating is not what you ordered. (By taking the dining experience out of the dining room you’ve necessarily changed it — not just your time waiting but also the time entrées spend hanging out and cooling: time, distance, reality, etc.)

…so of course the first thing you do is spring to Yelp and write a scathing take down and denounce the steakhouse for not being a drive-thru or delivery joint and for serving you a steak that had already been off the grill for whole minutes by the time you saw it.

##

So. [putting my metaphors in a blender and hitting ‘frappe’]

By taking the ‘bookstore experience’ out of the bookstore: you’ve necessarily changed it.

Ebook consumers with a burger budget and burger diet complaining about the cost of steak kind of piss me off.

Ebook consumers with a burger budget and burger diet complaining that the Bookstore (our Steakhouse stand-in) doesn’t serve burger — or sell the burgers at a whole dollar mark up — kind of miss the point of bookstores.

Ebook consumers with a burger budget and burger diet complaining about the Cost of Steak also kind of miss the point: A good burger, prepared well and plated with exceptional skill, is a meal that often exceeds the customer expectations and also quite often is even more satisfying than a steak. This is attributable to the skill of the staff, and the chef/author, and should be considered only on a plate-by-plate (book-by-book) basis.

One-off experiences are not how we price burgers *or* steak. You had an exceptional meal; great, go you.

A single reaction to a single experience is not how pricing works.

Authors have been turning dog food into Delmonico’s for decades, and the list of genres that started out as pulp that have been rehabilitated into literature starts with mystery and is rapidly gaining on erotica. Science fiction and romance gained on the first rehabilitation, and in the current climate, are still gaining in comparison.

##

So, why is the quality/price dynamic — even with the many context-specific nuances — easy to understand when we talk about Hamburgers vs Steak (with the implied associations provably false as we have all been served transcendent Burgers and Inedible steaks) but in an Ebook vs Hardcover/Paperback debate it always comes back down to price?

No consideration of the discovery process, or the venues that enable the discovery process?
No consideration of the differences between products, and between markets?
No consideration of quality as a differentiator, or something that might—in a completely free and open market—be a factor that demands a higher price?

There is no steakhouse in the hybrid-bookstore-and-ebook model, just varying degrees of fast-food joints?

Since it’s all just beef (just books), it should all be available from just one source and all at a single price point?

This is the position you’re staking out as a starting point?

BruceMcF</a> I&#39;d also like to see &quot;Silicon Valley&quot; become a neighborhood in every urban area, like a 21st century Little Italy or Germantown</p>&mdash; Matt Blind (ProfessorBlind) November 10, 2013

[blockquote]
“Portland Mayor Charlie Hales, in touting Portland’s growth and development acumen, said Wednesday the region needs to continue to avoid the kind of sprawl that has plagued other American cities.

“Take Atlanta, for instance.

“‘Atlanta’s a mess,’ Hales said during Wednesday’s Portland Business Journal Power Breakfast. ‘Sorry, but Atlanta’s planned so poorly, it’ll take generations to change the shape of the place.’

“Hales was responding to a question about whether Portland’s penchant for transit-oriented development would translate to other places, including, hypothetically, Atlanta.”[/blockquote]

http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/blog/2013/09/hales-lets-avoid-atlanta—and-dc.html?ana=twt

##

So, so true. And the city can’t really do anything in the infrastructure-improvement line until they finish fixing the century-plus-old sewer system — which they’ve been working on for decades.

Atlanta sucks. I know, I live here.

Atlanta differs from some other cities in that it experienced the greatest growth after widespread adoption of the automobile. The city mostly missed out on early (pre-1920) transit development — and the little we had was scrapped — the metro area was defined by the building of the interstates (I-75, I-85, and I-20) in the 1950s, then locked into its current configuration with the opening of the I-285 Perimeter loop in 1969. (While the I-285 Perimeter was meant as a bypass around Atlanta, it soon became a magnet for its own sprawl, spawning numerous edge cities, especially along the northern arc.)

Atlanta, like Houston, is a poster-child for sprawl, car-focused urban planning, and widespread general dumb-f*ckery when it comes to regional cooperation — about the only thing the smaller municipalities and neighboring counties can agree on is that no way in hell will Atlanta’s transit system, MARTA, be allowed to expand any further. And that is, dare I say, because of lingering racism and for no other reason. (Economic growth, reduced car traffic and pollution, and providing this essential service for their own constituents be damned.)

Needless to say, I have some strong opinions on this matter and the prevailing stupidity of local governments — there are more than 100 city and county governments; less than 1 person in 10 who lives in “Atlanta” actually lives within the city limits of Atlanta. The state government seems unwilling to provide leadership; the assorted regional commissions set up for transportation, planning, and “cooperation” are toothless.

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales lives on the other side of the country, and even from 2500 miles away, our problems are obvious. Well, “obvious” unless you’re a local Atlanta-area politician.

Being an ‘object lesson’ for poor urban planning shouldn’t be a point of civic pride.

Burn. I feel chastened. I feel schooled.

Why the “Next Silicon Valley” Doesn’t Really Exist: Lots of people want to create another innovation hub like Silicon Valley. Here’s why they’ll all fail. : Mark Zawacki, 7 November 2013, MIT Technology Review

“It’s understandable that so many places around the world want to re-create the economic engine of Silicon Valley, as MIT Technology Review wrote about in its recent business report (‘The Next Silicon Valley’). But creating another Silicon Valley will be far harder than anyone imagines. That’s because the Silicon Valley ecosystem is now far more sophisticated than just startups.”

##

My argument was a bit more focused (not recreating the Valley but instead trying for relatively small local solutions) but this is still a burn.

“This is Silicon Valley’s superiority complex, and it sure is an ugly thing to behold. As the tech industry has shaken off the memories of the last dot-com bust, its luminaries have become increasingly confident about their capacity to shape the future. And now they seem to have lost all humility about their place in the world.

“Sure, they’re correct that whether you measure success financially or culturally, Silicon Valley now seems to be doing better than just about anywhere else. But there is a suggestion bubbling beneath the surface of every San Francisco networking salon that the industry is unstoppable, and that its very success renders it immune to legitimate criticism.

“This is a dangerous idea. For Silicon Valley’s own sake, the triumphalist tone needs to be kept in check. Everyone knows that Silicon Valley aims to take over the world. But if they want to succeed, the Valley’s inhabitants would be wise to at least pretend to be more humble in their approach.”

Silicon Valley Has an Arrogance Problem: It’s Too Proud, Too Self-Centered, and That’s Not Good For Anyone : Farhad Manjoo, 3 November 2013, The Wall Street Journal

So let’s start with the links, shall we?

Hana Doki Kira, a shojo comic and illustration anthology Kickstarter project
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1191994790/hana-doki-kira/

From their pitch:
“An original art anthology in homage to Shōjo, showcasing a diverse group of over twenty artists!

“Hana Doki Kira is a collection of comics and drawings from a fantastic group of artists all inspired by Shōjo – a sub-genre of comics that for many of us were among the first illustrated stories we fell in love with. We asked over twenty artists with diverse skills and styles to consider what Shōjo personally means to them, and to create art based on their interpretations.”

##

Hana Doki Kira will be a 120 page ‘limited edition’ book (another way to say, ‘small print run’), “filled to the brim with lovely illustrations and comics from our participating artists. Our goal is to print the book and compensate our contributing artists for their hard work!”

also: “107 pages of illustrations and comics!”
with 23 artists, that’s 4 pages each?

Obviously some submissions might be longer, and of course advertising “illustrations” as part of the work means we’ll be getting some splash-page-type single page contributions, leaving more room for the rest. And of course a decent little story could be packed into just 8 or 12 pages, but I still feel that this is going to be much more of a sampler: Heavy on the Art Book, rather light on “shojo” comics.

I’m being prejudicial, and also being unfair. But I am still skeptical.

I personally am not backing the project.

With all that said,

I don’t think my bias should stop you (or anyone else) from backing this particular project:

• if you feel like any effort along these lines should be supported, just to help these particular artists a bit and perhaps encourage others to experiment with print projects.
• if you think $5 isn’t that bad price a for a PDF copy of a book like this.
• if you are much more optimistic about the contents than I am.
• if you are interested in seeing this American/Tumblr take on Shōjo (of course there is a tumblr).
• if you just want to pile on:

The project is 90% funded with 3 weeks to go, so it looks like it should fund anyway.

I’m just being old and crotchety — but don’t let me and my grumpy-blogger act get in the way: Please visit the links, judge for yourself, and see if this is a project you’d like to get behind. I certainly support the idea of “roll your own”, minis, zines, and “authors doing it for themselves” comics in theory, but this project didn’t grab me. Your mileage may vary.