Rocket Bomber

So, I was trading comments on Twitter with @Yuricon aka Erica Friedman of SocialOptimized, ALC Publishing, Yuricon, Okazu and many other administrative hats, over the topic of ebooks.

Erica Lamented [over consecutive tweets]

Here’s the thing wrong with all the various comics/manga digital formats right now – they are all various.

The thing about books are, you don’t need new anything to read them. Pick one up – start to read.

I don’t think I’m unreasonable to want to be able to just read my manga without having to have a new anything.

In response, some brought up the ePub format, citing it as an emerging ‘single standard’ and the e-book supported by nook, iPad/iBooks, Sony, and others.

Here’s the thing:

From Wikipedia

Basically, EPUB internally uses XHTML or DTBook (an XML standard provided by the DAISY Consortium) to represent the text and structure of the content document, and a subset of CSS to provide layout and formatting. XML is used to create the document manifest, table of contents, and EPUB metadata. Finally, the files are bundled in a zip file as a packaging format.

So, um, the ePub format uses HTML and CSS? Pardon, but what the flying flip is wrong with, say, using HTML and CSS, raw, straight up, no chaser?

ePub is specifically hobbled for no good reason, when apparently if it weren’t for the slight of hand in file extensions and a few things that aren’t kosher html, we could just read these things in a browser…

…A browser on any screen we already happen to own (and we own a lot of screens that support web browsing).

Hm? Publishers? Amazon, Sony, B&N? Anyone care to mention why you’re using tried-and-true open source code and standards but are trying to hide the easily comprehensible, utterly familiar bits behind this ePub screen. “Pay no attention to the open source code behind the curtain!”

Say, how long would it take someone to kludge together a Firefox and/or Chrome extension to read ePub-formatted “e-books” in browser with very little in the way of effort?

[who says Google isn’t already working on that for Chrome? Google Editions, anyone?]

Manufacturers, publishers, and Google are all likely scared stiff that we’ll figure this out on our own. There is nothing new about e-books; in fact even the fancy e-container is nothing new, as anyone who can use Wikipedia soon realizes:

E-books are web pages! [and Soylent Green is made of People!] The trick, apparently, is restricting access to web-ready text, keep us from copying it, and making it seem new and special and something that requires new hardware, when in fact we’ve been reading text on screens for a couple of decades now. Why sell us a system when you could just sell us a book: device agnostic, HTML/CSS configured, browser ready — just the file, dammit, why all the shenanigans?

With a simple browser extension or update, ePub is even worse (in a business sense) than MP3. MP3s require some sort of plug-in or app; text requires a pair of eyeballs (— sorry, didn’t mean to be discriminatory: a single eyeball, or a sensitive touch and knowledge of Braille will also do the trick) and everything we do on the web already supports that text function. The ‘T’ in HTML is text; this goes deep into the bones of the web we all already know.

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It’s not gloom and doom, though: Where a hit song can take up 3 1/2 minutes of your time, and a whole album (no matter how epic) seldom takes up more than 77 minutes, a book requires hours of your time and attention. That’s not to say people won’t pirate books — I think it’s fair to say people will pirate anything — but there is less of a potato-chip-factor to books [justonemore] as there was in the early days of downloading music.

Though I suppose that only applies to long works of fiction and literature; comics (particularly 22-48 page pamphlets) may be screwed and 200pgs of manga take, in my experience, about an hour to read the 1st time through. (Obviously I take more time on subsequent re-reading, though not all fans are plumbing books for depth of meaning and appreciation of the art)

But, still, after 15 years (Napster launched in June of 1999 — and only operated for two years — and Napster would have been impossible without the acceptance by so much of the user base of the .mp3 encoding and format, introduced in 1995)

Actually, I need to interrupt that thought — Please note, MP3 came first: small enough to be portable, good enough for most uses, widespread years before Napster. It wasn’t file sharing that “killed” music (if that is your corporate or legal position; and it’s a position that is debatable) it was the music files that made the sharing possible and piracy inevitable.

Anyway, after 15 years, digital music settled down into a new pattern and apparently, someone [*cough* Jobs, Apple *cough* *cough*] figured out how to make money off of it, and we currently enjoy a DRM-free music environment where we buy things and they’re ours, so long as we don’t lose the file. (I’ve lost more music to friends, borrowing my CDs and never returning them, then I ever will to hard drive crashes)

First comes the format, then the user base, then the tools, then the pirates, and then the new sales ecosystem. We’re still waiting on the ebook format for comics (raw image files don’t quite cut it) (and the ebook format for text is already out there: you’re reading a blog that uses it) and while we haven’t seen great tools or ‘mainstream’ piracy a la Napster, yet, I think we all know this is coming.

The trick is to leapfrog the mess and lost revenue and legal hassles and skip ahead to the stable, legal sales ecosystem.

Closed formats, DRM, and “walled gardens” are going to be part of that process. In fact, it’s the part that is currently trying to charge you $100-$250-$500 (and up, for some iPads) for a dedicated e-book reader. And honestly, much like the lawsuits and massive piracy, it’s a step most of us would be willing to skip.

There are just too many businesses, participants, and players out there looking to squeeze money out of the old system or cash in on the new system. This isn’t an open market; this isn’t free-market capitalism yet. People, customers, are going to get screwed over. Business, heck, whole industries may go under before the dust settles and the solution seems obvious.

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What pisses me off most is this assumption that borders on religious belief, that the old system and old players are somehow sacrosanct, and will always be able to stay in business, stay at the top of their business, and no matter what changes they are guaranteed a place at whatever new table gets set up.

In short: No.

And that’s how things work: Past performance is no guarantor of future success, all investment carries risk; innovate, adapt, respond, or die.

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So, I’m a bookseller, the endangered salamander of the old ecosystem, soon to die and not likely to stay open through next year, let alone the re-alignment to come.

Oh, really?

[image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chanc/2558304478/]

Say, combine this recent post by Seth Godin with my post of 10 months ago — hm. It seems I’ve a business that has nothing to do with ‘books’ and everything to do with the way you people *already* use my bookstore. So what if the books are only decorations, and you buy coffee while connecting to the internet through a portal on which I can sell ads — it’s not much, but the major payroll expenses are restocking and selling the books; if no one is buying books we can do more with less. (While also selling books online – oh, yeah, I’m thinking about this 5 different ways, including some I haven’t posted about yet) Don’t worry about the store; we may end up as nothing more than a fancy coffeeshop, but I’ll make out.

And new books will be released. Maybe not as many, to start with, but good content will win out.

The question, then, between 1970-publishing-and-retail and 2015-publishing-and-retail is how much bullshit they [“they” being corporations who control—but do not create—content] put us through and how much cash they con us out of, before we find the new model book paradise just past the horizon.

So sorry. one more click.

redirects here

Bah. I’m getting tired of talking about e-books. I think we all know which side of that debate I’m coming down on — even if you haven’t been reading my blog for years and only picked it up last week.

So, let’s assume for a moment that Jobs and Bezos sign a non-aggresion pact, divy up book retail, distribution, and publishing like so many polands, and as a bookseller I’m shipped off to a “retirement farm” or re-education camp [with a free iKindle, a pacifier to keep me quiet] — or if I decline, forced to fight on as a guerilla bookseller, part of a small, scrappy resistance facing insurmountable odds and a quixotic fight against not just big corporations but also my former customers (who no longer have need for a ‘bookstore’ in the 20th-century-sense. That’s so… last millennium.)

But so long as hot blood and cold beer still run through my veins, I will be a bookseller, and I can harness creative self-delusion, technical prowess, and years of experience to aid me.
“Vive la Résistance! ¡Por Cuba Libre! Free Tibet!”

…actually, I could go for a Cuba Libre right now… I wonder if we have any rum…

[image credit, Iliad Bookshop, North Hollywood, by Zach Schrock http://balcony-smoker.tumblr.com/post/59996549/zach-schrock]

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Rethinking the Box is a collection of ruminations on retail & bookselling, with an eye towards comics (as one goal of the exercise is to guage the viability of a graphic novel superstore).

Previously:
Study your History. Recognise your Motives. Location, Location, Location. Know your Customer Base, and your Staff. Find your Niche. Consider your Product Lines, Stock Your Shelves, Set your main-aisle displays, consider Alternative display strategies, take a second look at What the Customers Want and Why Even Annoying Customers are Important. Answer for yourself whether raw dollars or customer service is more important to your store, and its future. Stare again in dismay at the Profit Margins. Try calculating your upper-limit affordable rent and affordable salaries along with revenue from inventory (with a side of coffee) and compare your numbers to average industry per-storefront sales.

Chronologically: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 – 17 – 18 – 19 – 20 – 21 – 22 – 23 – 24

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So, while not part of the Rethinking the Box column proper, I’ve written quite a bit about the book-as-form, book-as-object, publishing history, and with glancing blows at piracy and some random thoughts on how it might affect retail:

17 Nov ’09: Form, Content, Copies, Rights, and Plato
22 Nov ’09: Same story, different perspective — which links to this post by Clay Shirky [see also]
15 Dec ’09: The Other Shoe: Borders partners with Indigo’s Shortcovers for E-Books
4 Apr ’10: The iPad is merely incidental to the rest of the ongoing discussion
4 Jun ’10: Publishing Buggywhips
and most recently, 7 Jun ’10, E-books, retail, publishing: One More Time

It was the ‘buggywhips’ thought-piece where I half-promised, half-threatened to write a post explaining why “[in a thread I’ll pick up on in the next rethinking the box column] there is still a place for bookstores: there is still expertise, and enthusiasm, and atmosphere, and experiences to be had, even in a world without ‘books’”.

In a post-Amazon, post-Kindle, post-iPad, post-Nook world (yes, even my employer has abandoned me) what use is there for a bookstore, or a bookseller? What the heck does a bookseller really do, anyway?

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As a practical matter, day-to-day, we spend quite a bit of time cleaning, straightening, re-organizing. From coffee cups to soda cans, discarded food containers, chicken bones, used tissues, abandoned clothing — and occassionally, human waste (the way you people treat public restrooms is appalling, really beyond the pale) — there are also the stacks of magazines and half-read books left in piles all over the store.

Dude. It’s not enough you destroy the product while you ‘browse’ it; it’s not the way customers unpack and totally camp out, stealing electricity and clogging up tables that might have been used (ever so briefly) by a paying customer with a legitimate need to look through a stack of [$60 and up, large-format art] books — it’s not the folks stretching out in the aisles, taking their shoes off and literally laying down while they read a book — a book they have no intention of buying, more often than not…

I’ve been a bookseller for a decade. I have seen and mostly understand all of this. But:

It’s the damn sense of entitlement, of ownership over the bookstore, most especially from those who spend absolutely no money that might lend even a thin veneer of truth to either assumption. Good Gods Damn, People — what do you think a bookstore is? A public reading room with a public bathroom and free wi-fi? Even a library gets more respect.

Here’s the short course: At a book store, we sell books — shocking, I know — and we also sell the magazines you love to read for free, and newspapers, and the bibles you love to steal [book retail trivia: #3 most-stolen items? Bibles. Yep, ‘struth. Think about it…] and the computer books that no one buys because they’re cheaper online but that everyone expects us to have, in stock, today no matter how obscure the topic and that get stolen anyway. [book retail trivia: #2 most-stolen items? Computer Books. Even though everyone says our selection is crappy, somebody is still stealing ‘em.]

Apparently, if I were to really listen to my ‘customers’, the bookstore would be a library that stocks everything but where you don’t have to bother to check anything out, just walk home with it, where we supply both device recharging though multiple outlets placed every two feet on every available wall (and some just randomly in the middle of the floor) & free wifi that is faster than your broadband or cable connection at home, and where we don’t hassle anyone about how much all this costs or try to guilt anyone into actually buying anything unless they really need a copy or just happened to be feeling charitable.

In the face of all this… an uncaring, downright abusive public who positively delight in telling me daily how much cheaper Amazon is while completely discounting the things we do that Amazon can’t (and taking advantage of all of it either unknowingly, apathetically, or callously) and with a casual disregard for both the expertise of veteran booksellers, or even the basic respect due a fellow human being —

[it’s not always that bad, all the time… Decembers are brutal, tho]

Despite all this I still love books, and I still love bookstores, and it may be hard to believe but I Love My Job. After 40+ hours a week, I still think obsessively about my employment and employer, and blog about how we can do it better — what more can I say?

Dear Customers: even though your demands are unreasonable and unprofitable [for me, as a bookseller] I’m still willing to work with you, compromise, meet you half-way on some points, and totally capitulate others. You win. Take full advantage.

The only thing I ask (and what will keep the store open, in a post-book era) is that you recognise what a bookstore is and what it does. A little respect, some props. Least you can do while you put me out of business.

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Yeah, the web is great. Cheap. Fast. All of that.

If you know what you want then you can order it on the web within minutes of thinking of it. You don’t even have to call my store to bug me about it. Just order it online already. Sure, if you want to come in and see if we have it, that’s great too. Buy a cup of coffee, ask us about it, maybe browse the store, maybe buy something. But the phone calls? Just a waste of my time. [I’ve noted previously, this is a good problem to have but to go through all the work just to have someone say, 9 times out of 10, “nah, I’ll just order it online” — dude: you could have done that before you wasted my booksellers’ time.]

If you kinda-sorta know what you want, sure, come on into the store: we’ll try to help. If you can’t find it in an internet search, well, we’ll try, but Google is pretty damn good and while I’m better than the average bear at gaming an internet search, I’m only as good as my inputs. I can’t spin half remembered compost-fodder into gold no matter how much faith you have in me. But we’ll try, and please, come on into the store: this kind of thing is so much easier face-to-face, where I can turn the screen around to show you the search results; maybe you see something that prompts further recollection, & together we refine the results, in steps, down to what you’re looking for. Once again, this is hard to do over the phone no matter how earnestly you’d like to think I can read your mind over 19th-century-era copper wire.

If you have only the vaguest memory and just one applicable clue (“the cover is red”) I really wish you’d just forget about the whole thing and move on. Still, as a business, and in the business of customer service, I have to pretend I can help and must feign surprise when searches of ‘the red book’ only pull up $150 dream journals by Carl Jung

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The internet is great and grand. Everything and anything, so long as you know what to look for.

but: what if you could find something you didn’t even know you wanted yet?

What if there was a website where books were presented with expert reviews and recommendations, and available for immediate purchase? Hell, what if most of those books were in stock at a nearby physical storefront, to take home today?

Maybe, between expertise and depth of selection, we’ve discovered one thing a bookstore could do better than a website. Or: I’ve identified a role for a unified blog-and-bookstore where the booksellers are paid to post reviews and previews to the web. An Amazon where product reviews aren’t written by sarcastic/ironic/sardonic hipsters, or the clueless but earnest, or the haters who couldn’t even finish the book — but instead were all written by booksellers.

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- Let’s say I win the lottery, not only enough to pay my debts and start up a scrappy new manga publisher, but with enough left over to buy a building, $5 Million in inventory and set up my dreamland, destination bookstore (with a pub in it, alongside the coffee shop). Who do I hire to staff it?

Fans.

I’ll pay them to work the bookfloor 4 hours a day, I’ll pay them to read at work for at least an hour a day and I’ll buy them a laptop but I expect them to blog (for me) for an hour each day. [35 hour work week for my full-timers; I’m progressive like that — and we can work out a 4-day or 5-day work-week from these basic expectations]

So, my ideal bookseller is also a blogger, posting reviews or business analysis or thought pieces, or WTF else – I don’t care. So long as it’s on-topic and on-schedule it helps. I’m not just starting a bookstore, I need a search-engine-ready social-media-footprint & continuous online presence. “oh ho!” you say, “The brave bookstore advocate is finally admitting he is beat, and wants to hedge his bets, starting a web site just like Amazon [*knowing smirk*]” – Of course I’m beat. The web in general has me beat on price, to the tune of at least 10% and often 40-50% (my entire profit margin on a book) and sometimes even deeper, if we consider used offerings. But my group blog would not be a sales site. In fact, hell, we could sign the whole thing up as an Amazon affiliate, let them worry about procurement & shipping & margin, and just take our cut from the internet sale. I don’t need a warehouse and fulfillment protocols for millions of titles if I can get Amazon to do that for me — I’ll take the booksellers, thanks, the ones who know and love the product, and we’ll do just fine.

So why bother with a bookstore at all, if I have this shiny new books blog with it’s own business model, marketable moniker, much lower overhead, and humongous potential employee pool?

The largest part of that is going to the “bookstore” part. No matter how much you think you know or how closely you follow the publishers’ web sites, the Times’ book review & The New York Review of Books (or Otaku USA, depending on your preferences), and no matter how ‘plugged-in’ to the market you feel, nothing beats the awe and wonder of taking something out of the box on the day it comes out, or finding a hidden gem tucked away on a bookshelf. We need a physical bookstore for that.

We need the ‘hook’. Beautiful photos of books on shelves, Author signings, book clubs, writing workshops and in-store events — we need a bookstore. It may just be a 7 million dollar prop, but 75% of that is inventory ($5 mil would be ~350,000 books on shelves: I dream big and this is already a “what if I won the lottery” piece) and there is nothing in the world quite like a bookstore.

We need the workplace. Online communities are great, but bloggers write better when they can meet face to face, and are more productive when they go to an office. “The office” in this case is a bookstore and coffee shop — but that makes it that much better.

And we need customers, and customer interaction. Nothing has taught me more about books (or life, or anything) than working in a bookstore. Every day, people ask me questions and I discover titles I would never have thought of or even thought to look for. A job in a bookstore is an education in itself. Yes, customers are frustrating — but that’s because they are people (& needy people at that).

Who do you trust?

The averred conclusions of an algorithm that “customers who bought this also liked…” or the opinion of an Actual Human Being who can point you to books & series that are similar but only tangentially related to your current favs? Do you buy based on categories and tags, or on the recommendation of someone who’s actually read the damn thing? Bookselllers have an expertise not found at Amazon or other on-line sales sites: we love and read books. “Love” doesn’t have an algorithm yet.

Can I beat Amazon at it’s own game? No. That battle is lost.

Can I game Amazon and make money at what I do best? – Oh, hell yes. (If I weren’t hung up on the ‘bookstore’ thing I could probably launch that review site in two weeks.)

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So.

Post-book era.

Everything is E-

Nothing is print.

How does a bookstore work?

—

Here’s what the bookstore can do:

• We can sell books, in the exchanging-money-for-goods meaning of the word ‘sell’
• we can sell books, in the telling-you-what-is-fantastic-about-this-book meaning of the word ‘sell’ — and honestly, that’s what we do best, and it’s something Amazon can’t do yet.
• we can use the internet for you. No, honestly: for the most obscure title requests, or the searches based on incomplete information this is exactly what I do 10 times an hour (when I don’t just happen to know the answer off the top of my head, which only happens once a day or so but you should see the look on the customer’s face when it does).
• we can order, ship, receive, and hold for pick-up any title in our database. It’s not fancy, but it’s what we do everyday. For some, the convenience of pick-up (as opposed to UPS or Fed-Ex just leaving packages on the doorstep) is a service worth paying a little more for.
• we stock thousands (~100,000+ at my branch, other stores have more) on shelves for purchase today. It’s not much, actually, given the embarrassment of riches available, but we try to guess what’s going to be popular, and stock bestsellers in fiction & biography, at a minimum, and in as many other categories as we can manage.
• we try to hire book-lovers with years of experience, decades of personal reading history, and steel-trap memories that allow them to recall, with the fewest actual facts, the books they’ve read (or browsed, or read reviews or even just the jacket-copy on) and we try to keep them at the information desk for as many hours a day as possible, given that most of the work in the bookstore is, as previously cited, cleaning up after your lazy ass and the sisyphean task of keeping the stacks in any sort of proper order.
• past that: we can keep the doors open — for you to hang out, arrange meetings with friends, kill time, read books, nap, log onto and browse the internet, blog, write, research, collaborate, network, tutor, learn, connect, launch a business or idea, and recoup after a long day of doing all of the above with a slice of cheesecake and a latte.

[If I have my druthers, you’d also be able to do all this with a pint of Guinness or a glass of port, as I’d love to run a bookstore with a pub on the bottom floor. I am a visionary. I dream Big.]

Say people stop buying ‘paper’ books entirely:

What is my raison d‘être?

Experience, expertise, product knowledge, and internet savvy. And a love of books.

No matter what the format, I am a bookseller. E-books complicates the whole mess but doesn’t change my goals:

I Am A Bookseller. And I have a backup plan: I’ll blog about and sell you e-Books, if that is my last option, though I hold a special place in my heart for the physical books printed on dead trees. But I plan to keep the doors open as long as I can, for all those non-book uses for a bookstore that everyone loves but nobody pays for.

[This started out as an editorial to the lead story for this week’s Geek Biz Report; about 10 paragraphs in, I realized this would be it’s own column.]

So, the news: Borders gets it’s sh!t together, investors shrug: stock price goes up a whole 10¢

[editorial]

here’s the breakdown: Borders isn’t going out of business. Yet. So, there’s that. Invest if you want to.

But: no matter who throws money at Borders or what kind of wet dreams they have about a Borders/B&N merger to form The One True Book Retailer, it’s still not going to happen. If you buy Borders & think BGP can buy out BKS — hell, if you have that kind of money you could rebuild Borders from scratch. And B&N isn’t shopping right now, so a BKS x BGP merger is even less likely. In fact, B&N is still busy digesting the College division, launching a digital division, and generally flopping around – waiting for someone to tell them what the e-book answer is.

There is no e-book answer. There wasn’t an e-book question.

& Just because Amazon shows up late and comes up with a half-assed, proprietary approach to a “problem” which already had a solution, thanks and manages to dupe people into buying yet another device (no matter how spiffy) doesn’t change the fact that e-books aren’t any newer than a paperback. Books are books.

oooo… there’s a new format and a new business model and Publishing Will Be Changed Forever! — yeah, yeah, whatevs. Check that wikipedia article I just linked to on ‘paperbacks’: 75 years ago there was a new format, and new business models. You know what happened? More people could read more books, for cheaper.

That’s about all that happened.

yeah, there was some business stuff, and book retail moved out of stuffy, out-of-the-way bookshops and into the mainstream. This is the embarrassment of riches you currently enjoy: some shops closed but nationwide mall chains, followed by the major big-box retail booksellers, arose from that mess and these days you can drive 5 miles to buy a book, just about any book, today — or, upon asking, have it in a scant 100 hours – so long as a copy of the book still exists somewhere on the market.

That is what’s amazing, if you ask me.

Books are still being published; hardcover books are still being published. “But, but, why would anyone pay $27 for a hardcover when they can get it as a $15 paperback?” Good damn question. The answer, of course, is that publishers introduce artificial scarcity: the paperback isn’t available yet. Buy it for $27, or wait a year.

Why this isn’t applied to e-books, right now and retroactively, is a mystery to me. Just tell Amazon No. Tell ‘em to sit down, shut up, and go sit in the corner. Amazon is a parasite; gaming the system for their own profit. Amazon is perfectly within their rights to do so: there is no law that says you can’t take advantage of a decades-old multi-tiered distribution system designed for nationwide retail sales, lay down some internets on it and squeeze it for profits. But, Dear Amazon, there is also no law that requires publishers to gamely take a reaming up a nether orifice just because you have some market share that you’ve had for a couple of years now and that you think is yours by right and into perpetuity:

Amazon, What do you do when they say ‘no’? When e-books are fully integrated into the system, what makes you think you’ll have access to all titles, all the time? — what, just because you’re Amazon? Hubris, much?

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There are a number of readers—the true book lovers—who actively follow new releases and published reviews and favourite authors, and this number is proportional to the overall population (and so is growing slowly, along with population) but is for all intents and purposes static. Only so many readers.

The publishers, so long as they were in control, knew and pwned this market. First the hardcover, for the critics and libraries and collectors, and then the paperbacks for book clubs and the mass market. And this works: not every book merits a paperback reprint, and the reception of the hardcover informs the way the book is released (and occasionally re-introduced) in paperback formats. There are the book awards. There’s the occasional ‘break-out’ title. For the most part, it’s a meritocratic system (once one makes it over the curb—the steep curb—into actual publication) — the market decides the bestsellers, those worthy of paperback reprints and eventual acceptance into either heavy-bookclub-rotation or inclusion on school reading lists.

Parallel to the ‘literary’ track: some books go direct to paperback, skipping the hardcover release because it’ll do better as a ‘pulp’ anyway. 99% of Harlequin releases are pulp paperbacks — 110 new titles a month, shipping world-wide — so there is already another publishing model out there, past Amazon’s wet dream of ‘all e-book, all the time’ and the traditional publishing most of us are used to.

If Amazon were smart (and not just big and full of themselves) instead of attacking and emulating all of a clunky, internally inconsistent, and thorny publishing market as a whole — they’d just buy Harlequin: built-in catalog, built-in subscriber base—who are more interested in reading stories and not so much the book-as-artefact—and an established content-producing-engine that churns out 200pg books by the metric tonne yearly. Take out printing costs and the $3.99 e-book is handily the successor to the $5.99 pulp paperback and you don’t have to pretend you’re anything you’re not — and you’ve also bettered your strong conviction of $10 as an e-book price point by better than half.

It’s not that $10 is a bad price, or the wrong price — but it shouldn’t and honestly can’t be applied to all books, willy-nilly, just because you’d like it that way, Mr. Bezos. Books aren’t widgets. Books aren’t “content”, at least not in the internet-sense where content can be produced by skimming web-bots or tricking your users into writing ‘reviews’ for you.

Books are books, and books are special. If there is anything I hate ([gollum]hates hates hates it, Bagginses[/gollum]) it’s this idea that books are just another thing, to be bought, traded, commoditized, digitized, and sold sold sold.

Sure, e-books seem new, special, different — but they’re not so different. We’re actually arguing about the container, merely the outer wrapper —
iPad, iPhone, Kindle, ePub, PDF or just plain text: whatever the platform or filename, what’s inside is still a Book. This isn’t even a technological problem, just a cognitive one: how often do I have to repeat myself? Books are Books and almost by definition, books are not the internet.

##

Publishing is a dynamic business. Right up until the 1990s, in fact, there were precious few publishers who’d been in the game for a whole century; it was all 1890s and aughts & 1910s & 20s & 30s. Publishing as a whole (going to the etymological roots of ‘publish’: the act of making things public) is an extension of centuries and millennia of writing, printing, and culture — but the actual business units (as are currently extant) all seemed to spawn in a 50 year period prior to 1939. Someone with better academic chops than I should take that particular nugget and run with it; there’s a doctoral thesis right there just waiting to be written. And while a lot of brand-names are the same, actual ownership and management is not

Ownership has changed hands several times over, and many new publishers entered the field, and there was a time when no Major Media Conglomerate felt quite right unless and until they ate a major publishing house — consider Random House and it’s maze of imprints: many represent former competitors (Anchor, Ballantine, Bantam, Crown, Doubleday, Knopf, Pantheon) gobbled up over decades, and Random House as a whole was bought by the privately-held Bertelsmann group in 1996. This is a different business than it was 70 years ago; it’s big business. *Really* Big Business. And yet, there were no economies of scale to had in consolidation. The book business still hangs on by it’s fingernails, hoping for that next bestseller to pay for years of debut novels and careful editorial wagers — good books, all, for the most part, but break-even publishing at best.

The amazing thing: no one knows what’ll be that next breakout title. You, as an editor, pick books you like, you help the author polish her work, tighten it up, and then you release it into the wilds of the book market and see how it fares (while marketing the hell out of it). Sometimes, you get a Da Vinci Code or The Help. Sometimes, you sell just enough to break even. Most often, the book doesn’t even pay off it’s advance, particularly for a first novel. For years, decades, publishers didn’t sweat it; so long as the enterprise as a whole broke even year-to-year, great: keep going. A surprise bestseller would fund a publisher for a couple of years, a new opportunity to find new authors—deserving authors—and maybe, just maybe, the next surprise bestseller.

So long as the people making books also love books this system not only works it produces real gems – not the Da Vinci Code, but the smaller, exceptional titles that people love & that sell well, but fly just under the New York Times magical top 15.

Amazon hasn’t done their homework: they want to destroy the publishing business but haven’t thought about what the publishing industry is or does. Sure, you can look at King, Patterson, Steel, & Roberts, and say, “Hell, these guys don’t need a publisher… we’ll sell the manuscripts direct to the public as a digital file—no publishing costs—and share the profits and abandon the printed page for good!”

Sure, for an author that has a built-in fan base…

But how do we discover new books, new voices? And do you even know what editors do? It’s not just proofreading, I’ll tell you that.

Books are not files. Books are not widgets. Books are experiences, better than Hollywood, better than cable TV, sometimes better than real life.

And to succeed at publishing, or at book retail, One Must Love Books. Whole-heartedly, and with all our intellect and soul. Amazon can beat me on price, but Amazon can not create new readers. Amazon can index the entirety of the backlist, and the well-known names, and bestsellers — but Amazon does not put new books into the hands of customers, Amazon does not foster discovery and conversations, Amazon does not sell books. Amazon cannot put a book into the hands of a 5 year-old; Amazon can’t read that book to a child. If Amazon succeeds at supplanting book retail, they’ll also severely damage their own customer base, perhaps permanently. People turn to Amazon last, after talking to a friend or reading a review or following a link on a blog — or after going into a store. Amazon delivers the world to your doorstep, but can’t sell anything. Selling is a personal interaction; sales is a skill. Sales happens person-to-person, millions of times a day.

At the bookstore: We sell books — Amazon is merely an overgrown warehouse, a delivery system that ships the books after the hard job of selling the book is done. And like all parasites, Amazon is the only one that benefits, at the expense of the host.

When the host dies, what will Amazon do? And after Amazon kills off both book retailers and book publishers, then who the eff is actually still making the books?

Is this a good thing? I can publish to the internet right now, skipping retail, publisher, and Amazon: why do I need Amazon? Do they provide editors, or marketing? [editorial and marketing cost money] Do they put my book on shelves in stores, to be discovered by browsing readers? [Amazon has no brick-and-mortar storefront, let alone multiple storefronts, and e-books are hard to shelve in libraries] Does Amazon do anything, besides list the book, with a page & a search engine, and a “buy” link?

I can set up my own page, my own ‘buy now’ button. And there are at least three major search engines out there that not only index the web, but also occasionally are the best way to find something on Amazon.

Amazon does nothing that I can’t do myself. Heck, I could even print and ship physical copies of the book myself: Ask Howard how well self-publishing works.

##

E-books are new, and the future is uncertain. But, 75 years ago there was also a new format, and new business models. You know what happened? More people could read more books, for cheaper. And that’s exactly where we’ll be, 10 years from now. I don’t know how Amazon will cope, but if they want to provide books (either as a retailer or publisher) then they need to study the system they’re breaking, and spend the time, money, and effort to replace it.

If they don’t, we will, and we won’t need Amazon to do it.

[/editorial]

Lead Story: Borders gets it’s sh!t together, investors shrug: stock price goes up a whole 10¢

there is an extended editorial posted in the article above this one.

& Just quick links for the rest this week (I’m already posting late)

Publishing

► Yet another article on self-publishing, but this one is from the Wall Street Journal.

► I’ll note here that the WSJ has been publishing a whole series on The Future of the Book

Hardware

► Not really news: it pays to buy last year’s tech — in the midst of iPad post-launch-glow and the leaks and subsequent nerdgasm over the 4G iPhone it’s good to note that the iPhone 3G S is only $97 from Wal-Mart.

Yes, Wal-Mart. Early adopters and continual upgraders pwn the web coverage of these devices, but from this point forward, it is the Wal-Mart masses that will truly be the Apple user base. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!.

Editorial

► This is just too weird not to link to, though there is absolutely no factual basis to the claims. (I think) Apple Didn’t Beat Microsoft, Robbie Bach Did: Apple’s Secret 5th Column

related: Mac Daily News does they own takedown of the Enderle column.

I firmly believe that in a heads-up contest between conspiracy theory and Human Stupidity, stupidity and incompetence is always the most likely answer. Occam’s Razor.

RBGSX

Aggregate prices on the Rocket Bomber Geek Stock Index fell 37.57 points (-3.85%) to 937.36. This doesn’t reflect poorly on the industry, which is chugging along as well as can be expected, but is merely an expression of broader doubts about things like oil spills, the Euro, and the lingering recession.

Charted: 23-week RBGSX Aggregate Price

[past 23 weeks, starting from 12/31/09]

& the 25 stocks: CBS Corporation (NYSE:CBS), The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWSA), Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE), Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX), Viacom, Inc. (NYSE:VIA), Wiley John & Sons Inc. (NYSE:JW.A), The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (NYSE:MHP), Lagardere SCA (EPA:MMB), Pearson PLC (NYSE:PSO), Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ:SCHL), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Books-A-Million, Inc. (NASDAQ:BAMM), Borders Group, Inc. (NYSE:BGP), Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), Hastings Entertainment, Inc (NASDAQ:HAST), Indigo Books & Music Inc. (TSE:IDG), Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX), Navarre Corporation (NASDAQ:NAVR), Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASDAQ:ATVI), Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS), GameStop Corp. (NYSE:GME), Nintendo Co., Ltd (OTC:NTDOY), and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Please note: nothing here is investment advice. full disclaimer

From Wikipedia: Buggy Whips

A buggy whip is a horsewhip with a long stiff shaft and a relatively short lash used for driving a horse harnessed to a buggy or other small open carriage. A coachwhip, usually provided with a long lash, is used in driving a coach with horses in front of other horses. Though similar whips are still manufactured for limited purposes, the buggy whip industry as a major economic entity ceased to exist with the introduction of the automobile, and is cited in economics and marketing as an example of an industry ceasing to exist because its market niche, and the need for its product, disappears. In discussing market regulation, it is often held that the economy would be disadvantaged as a whole if the automobile had been banned to protect the buggy-whip industry.

Buggy whips are not entirely gone. A resurgence of interest in the international sport of combined driving and historical carriage driving, sports enjoyed by people of all ages, has allowed some buggy whip manufacturers to stay in business, serving this specialty niche market. Foremost among these is a company in Westfield, Massachusetts.

##

When the motor car (the automobile, the self-powered quadricycle, the horseless carriage, by whatever name) got an internal combustion engine, the game changed almost overnight.

Suddenly we could go further, faster, and without leaving dung in the roadways. It was a revolution in transportation technology. Several interdependent industries and networks developed to both support and take advantage of the car (not just car manufacturers: rubber & tire production, the transition of the oil companies from lamp oil to gasoline and the retail network that followed, car sales, and service stations) and our underlying social infrastructure was also forever changed: drive-ins, drive-thrus, motels, interstate highways, suburbs, exurbs, and sprawl — to say nothing of taking a date to a secluded spot, parking, and making out in the back seat.

The Car Changed Everything.

And no doubt, sometime between 1895 and 1910, some internet pundit was immediately on his telegraph key to broadcast to the web (such as it was, at the time) that the Day of the Horse was over, and the Age of Automobile had arrived.

Of course, this is a gross simplification of economic models, as the horse-as-transport is just one aspect of overall animal domestication [food being primary, then and now] and the horse was much more important in that day and age as the horsepower that drove agriculture — interstate commerce was largely done by rail (and rail continued to be important until the 50s, when Eisenhower lobbied for—and eventually signed—the legislation that would found and fund the US interstate system) and personal transport, back in the day, was trolley car, subway (what little mass transit there was at the time) — or shoe leather. Most commuters, as we now understand the term, wouldn’t be able to afford a horse — let alone a pair or team of horses & a carriage, to say nothing of the driver and footmen and grooms and stablehands, and feed and fodder and saddle and tack or harness — this was a major production, getting around by horse.

…which of course is why the car took off, after Mr. Ford manufactured ‘em in quantity and proved the business model and made the car affordable (after a fashion; a single horse was probably still cheaper but it didn’t seat four) — and hired assembly line workers and actually paid them enough to afford the machines they assembled. (Fair wages are Ford’s legacy, more than Model T’s and assembly-line-methods. Ford realized the first customers for his product should be the people working for Ford.)

The introduction of specialized tractors and combines for agriculture has done more than the car ever did to improve your daily lot in life — and did more to change our world — but this idea of car-replacing-horse has made itself a home in the public’s collective memory, and of course more people drive cars every day, as opposed to taking the train (to say nothing of riding a tractor to work)

In areas where dense urban centers had already formed, the impact of the car was lessened (while traffic became even more of a headache, the car was not an engine of geographic destruction) but for much of 50s America, booming with babies and with cheap money for new mortgages via VA Loans and cheap cars rolling off of the same assembly lines that had recently built jeeps and bombers, the modern suburb in all of its ugly glory was born.

##

I know I’m the only manga (or comic, or even book) blogger who gives a crap about urban planning and the future of our cities, so I’ll just have to ask that you forgive that last digression. But I do have a point, dragging a dead horse into a editorial on publishing [to be flogged, yet again, only this time not metaphorically]:

The car replaced the horse. Given.

So, all of our horses were converted into baseballs, glue, hamburgers, and fry oil decades ago and the only horses left are in zoos and [mounted and stuffed] in private collections? right?

Actually, no.

Between 59 and 100 Million horses are still employed daily: in sport, recreation, and yes, farm work [the number varies depending on which actual, quoted figure on horses you’d care to believe from the same damn wikipedia article, about six paragraphs apart]

Some people still own horses because they are the best way to do a particular job, even given all other options. Some own horses out of a sense of tradition. Some own them for sport or hobbies. Some own them because horses are beautiful, and there is a bond between us and horses that nothing else can replace.

There may be “better” solution out there, for most needs (but not all) —

but for those who value historical models, or who just aren’t on this tech track just yet, or for whom a technologic-one-size-fits-all solution still doesn’t quite fit: There is still some value in a horse. And it would seem that the Amish may provide a new model for publishing — just because we hadn’t thought about books in quite this way yet.

##

50 years from now, Steve Jobs has had his way, and was elected to 2 [non-consectutive] terms as US President and later appointed as Chief Justice to the US Supreme Court. Apple is the new default format; everything and I mean everything is available from the iWhatever store, we only get dissenting news via our inboxes or from RSS feeds, and the wild internets fills in whatever gaps might be left over from your corporate-government-Apple-spoonfed-feed.

The e-book will replace the book. Again, I’ll accept that as a given.

And again I have to say, yes… but no. There will still books.

A book requires no power, no backup, and no support past light enough to read by. There will always be situations where what you need is a book.

And in much the same way that the horse is still used in sport, Books will still be used as a way to convey Art. There may be a billion e-books, and only a scant hundred thousand books, published each year — but each and every one of those books will be worth something. Books will populate many private collections, as some books have intrinsic worth for what they are, and others are just a valuable for what they contain —

##

The e-book will replace the book, in the same way that the car replaced the horse.

Sure, if you want to phrase it that way.

But I also hope that even the most fervent e-book advocate will admit that there is still a value in some physical books. If nothing else, the last books will be much like Gutenberg’s first: a bible. No getting around that, no matter how pro-technology you are.

I can see moving almost all of my collection to an e-book format, if and when those volumes become available. Some things (newspapers, magazines) have already been handily supplanted by open web standards and the wealth of information available on the internet. Unless it takes hours to read, we’ve already moved past the printed page. And in time, I could adjust, from reading a page to reading a screen, if the user interface and display technology catch up just a bit more.

I might not miss physical books, just like currently I don’t necessarily miss horseback riding.

But the two experiences are not identical: e-books aren’t books. Riding in a car is no where near the experience of riding on a horse.

This is where publishing will go: the experience that can not be had on a screen.

##

And [in a thread I’ll pick up on in the next rethinking the box column] there is still a place for bookstores: there is still expertise, and enthusiasm, and atmosphere, and experiences to be had, even in a world without “books”

Just added this

to the top banner to make my position clear. I give you, and your friends (and the next guy) permission to take anything I post [like say, the charts or the 7 types of customer] and remix, remux, and re-process at will.

Just don’t steal. And link back; it’s only polite.

And of course, if you’d like to add a similar image (or the exact same image) to your blog graphics, I release the .jpg above without conditions for any re-use. This is what the symbols mean in plain English and the same in Legalese

Lead Story: “FUNimation Entertainment’s strategy and capital requirements are distinctly different from those of the Company’s core business. While FUNimation’s recent results have generally met expectations, the strategies required to grow the business include co-productions of original anime content, social networks and digital broadcasting. The Company anticipates that those plans are best executed with ownership that has assets or expertise in those areas.”

That’s from Navarre’s Official Press Release — and word that Navarre is looking to maybe sell FUNimation isn’t bad news. They’ve highlighted that this is a business that could grow, with more capital and the right ownership. They’ve noted that FUNi’s day-to-day operations (production of localized DVDs) is outside of their other, core business lines. They aren’t making any rash moves: the PR, in fact, merely says that they’ve hired expert help to look at the situation.

The last time I remember something like this, B&N spun off GameStop — and we all remember what has happened since then: store closings, drop in stock value, sliding market share, looming bankrup…

What’s that? GameStop now operates 6,450 outlets in 18 countries — and even in a recession has been opening new stores and growing revenue and is the market leader? All because someone made the choice to let GME stand on it’s own, and seek new money in the market: GameStop raised $325 Million in it’s initial public offering back in 2002, and they’ve used it well.

Navarre is looking to sell FUNimation, as a unit, outright (I bought a lottery ticket today, just in case) rather than spin it off — but the fact that they are looking to grow their brands through considered investment (& perhaps, careful divestment) rather than kicking FUNi to the curb (or having a fire-sale) should be considered, with a few tiny reservations, as good news.

Media Conglomerates

► So, did you know General Electric bought Universal from French conglomerate Vivendi SA and merged it with NBC into a new standalone company, not surprisingly called NBC Universal? That’s old news, happened in ’04; But were you aware Comcast, cable operator of note, was buying controlling interest (51%) of NBCU from GE for $30 Billion Dollars?

This one kind of slipped past me because it was announced back in December, when I was a tad busy running a retail store during the holidays. It’s also been a slow simmering process, not a lightning strike, not least because of the anti-trust issues this raises. If approved & completed, Comcast takes ownership of NBC in about a year, no sooner.

Related: Universal rebuilds & improves their back lot

► TV Sucks. That’s why I don’t own one. [oh, fine, the actual headline is “CBS Cancels 7 Shows”]

Related: …CBS may lag in the ratings but they’ll have to pry it from Redstone’s cold, dead fingers: He’ll Never Sell CBS or Viacom

Book Retail

► Amazon reconciles with Penguin

► Borders may have new investment, and a new chairman, but the man behind the curtain is still Bill Ackman if he exercises all the warrants he ‘bought’ by loaning BGP money during the depths of the credit crunch. If he felt the (additional) investment was worth it, Ackman’s Pershing Square could end up owning 36% of the company.

Related: Ackman also buying major holding in Citigroup and is the focus of a new book, Confidence Game: How A Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street’s Bluff

► It happened in Canada, so you likely never heard and don’t care, but a mistake by Penguin CA compounded by some seemingly preferrential shipping terms meant Chapters had copies of the year’s most anticipated book in stock and for sale up to 11 days before smaller independent retailers even saw the book. This has many otherwise polite Canadian bookstore owners pissed.

In the U.S. there was an embargo on the book (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest in English translation, isbn 9780307269997) until the official release date, 25 May.

This is standard operating procedure; there are at least two major releases with strict on-sale dates each and every Tuesday that I, as a retailer, have to observe else I face fines [per contractual agreements] — or worse, delayed or even cancelled shipments of future hot new releases. How Penguin CA missed this is odd (though oversights do occasionally happen) and I hope, at the least, they can offer additional discounts on Stieg Larssen titles for the affected Canadian booksellers.

DVDs

► Coinstar drops electronic payments division to focus on their RedBox self-serve DVD kiosks. This seems to be where the DVD rental business is heading, at least as a stop gap for a decade or so, until even Grandma streams all her video from the net.

► Speaking of which, Blockbuster is failing, hard, and I’m not sure what, if anything, is proping the comapany up. — yeah, Blockbuster has kiosks too, but those are built and run by NCR [an ATM manufacturer, among other things] and I get the feeling Blockbuster only gets a licensing fee for the name. NCR won’t step in to bail out BB, if it turns south; if anything they’re likely salivating at the chance to buy the brand on the cheap.

Video Games

► Electronic Arts filed their Annual Report this week – highlights: while 2010 wasn’t as big a year for EA as 2009, they still reported net revenue of $3.6 Billion (down from $4.6 Billion in 2009, & about what they did in 2008). Billions. So, how much of that ended up as profits? Ah, um, well, they actually reported a loss of $677 Million. Video Games: not recession proof. The good news is that losses were less than what the company dropped in 2009; last year they reported losses of $1 Billion.

aside: Doesn’t this EA map of operations look like a Bond Villain’s?
“Number 2, have the data and agents for the next operation in our Singapore office by Tuesday.”

Digital/Hardware

► Tivo also reports losses, now into a sixth straight quarter

► Apple is getting some pushback from NBC and Time Warner on lack of Flash for iPad

► Acer, the laptop manufacturer, announces new slates in both an e-reader and tablet form factor

► Missed it last week, but the headline is too good not to post — CNN: “What’s the bug up Apple’s @$$?”

► Sony partners up to launch e-books in Japan.

Editorial

Not much in the way of commentary this week, past what I posted above in the lead. Added some section headers to make the breakdown (and potential relevance) of links a little clearer. That’s all folks. Now, let’s run the numbers:

RBGSX

Aggregate prices on the Rocket Bomber Geek Stock Index rose 31.86 points (3.38%) to 974.93. As you can see from the graph below, we’re yo-yoing right now and I couldn’t begin to tell you why.

Charted: 22-week RBGSX Aggregate Price

[past 22 weeks, starting from 12/31/09]

& the 25 stocks: CBS Corporation (NYSE:CBS), The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWSA), Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE), Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX), Viacom, Inc. (NYSE:VIA), Wiley John & Sons Inc. (NYSE:JW.A), The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (NYSE:MHP), Lagardere SCA (EPA:MMB), Pearson PLC (NYSE:PSO), Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ:SCHL), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Books-A-Million, Inc. (NASDAQ:BAMM), Borders Group, Inc. (NYSE:BGP), Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), Hastings Entertainment, Inc (NASDAQ:HAST), Indigo Books & Music Inc. (TSE:IDG), Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX), Navarre Corporation (NASDAQ:NAVR), Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASDAQ:ATVI), Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS), GameStop Corp. (NYSE:GME), Nintendo Co., Ltd (OTC:NTDOY), and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Please note: nothing here is investment advice. full disclaimer

Lead Story: Japan Recovers. W00T!

[a new spring, after a near-20-year-long winter. Image Credit, non-commercial CC license]

Deflation is still an issue, as consumer prices fall in Japan and the effects of global commerce continue to give headaches to those who must traffic on such wild waters, but growth is growth — and if the sum creative output of Japan from 1990 on is what they as a nation managed in a slump, well, maybe suffering is good for art but one also hopes that good times for Japan means good times for Japanese Consumers and good times for Japanese Manga and Anime; and as one of the bottom-feeders who only get to dine of the mere scraps of Japanese Content that manage to filter down through mulitple layers of muck before it is available to my (American) market, I look forward to more and tastier tidbits.

##

► “The news story speaks for itself, but this one has really caught us by surprise as CMX is one of the few imprints we considered ‘large’ and ‘safe’”

I’ll skip my first response to the news (though it’s still up, two posts below this one) and instead link to my more reasoned analysis

► Navarre (NASDAQ:NAVR) owns Funimation, anime localizer of repute and the reason NAVR garnered a place on the RBGSX, but Navarre is quite a bit more than just a content company; it’s one of those ‘consumer & lifestyle brand’ companies (like Conglom-O in Rocko’s Modern Life) so occasionally there’s an announcement like this:

Navarre Corporation Announces Encore’s Acquisition of Punch! Software

…which has nothing to do with anime or Funimation, but thank several gods that at least one anime DVD house has a successful corporate parent that isn’t betting it all on otaku.

► Disney [pre-Marvel] tries a type of comics; fails. (in related news, [as linked] Disney as a corporation has it’s own shudder-inducing fan sites.)

► Best Buy expands to UK. Hey, you know who else tried that? Borders.

While on the topic: Best Buy also making forays into streaming video

Good Luck. …but nothing says desperation (or perhaps, “oo, oo, me too!” -ism) like showing up late to the party in last years trendy kit.

► Axis of Evil: “Amazon.com Inc., the biggest online retailer, created a shopping application for Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet computer, expanding its reach with the help of a rival device.”

► Three Hundred Sixty Five. – submitted without further comment.

► Wired.com has a roundup of available tablets, kinda like the iPad though all are lacking, one way or another similar to their previous roundup of e-readers

► You know all that licensed crap? No, not the cool lunchboxes or Japanese Figma (or manga and anime, which are also ‘licensed’ but in a different sense) but the crap: trinkets, tchotchkes, t-shirts, jigsaw puzzles, bad board games, pens, journals, vibrators, bondage wear, and other apparel — you know, the crap? Crap has it’s own expo

► Throw Down: Apple says search is dead, Apps the future – so

[Geek Biz Editorial]

Yes, Apple is right. Apps are the future, in that tailored, curated experiences seem to be all the general public wants, so long as all the ‘general public’ wants is a set of predefined experiences anticipated for them in advance by Big Brother Apple or whichever gate-keeper we choose for ourselves.

Weather, Scores, Headlines, Funny?

Sure, queue it up.

But every now and then we need something we don’t even know the name of yet. Or we want it all, without filters. Or we just want to double-check your ass. We want to drink from the firehose, even if initially we don’t know what to make of all that info (right away) and our underwear gets wet.

Apps are Apps, the Internet is the Internet, and it’s best not to confuse the two.

And the Internet is literally [literally and without irony literally everything] so:

There are four sliding scales: User Experience, Information, Accessibility, and Veracity.

The best information means nothing if we can’t find it. The most accessible information means nothing if it’s not true. A slick UI is criminal if it only points to incorrect info, and even when it’s easy to find verifiable, comprehensive, and close to exhaustive data on just about any topic — the system is still broken

My point would be that the internet, and the iPad, are still human systems and subject to human error, whether that be an open honest system that is vulnerable to concerted attacks, or the hubris of a Steve Jobs who will claim to know every last thing we really want to do with a computer, and so closes out options of what we might or could do with the hardware.

Neither side of this debate is right. But, given an option, I’ll take a Mad Max Thunderdome of competing ideas, some of which try to kill me but all of which are available, over a Zardoz artificially-created walled garden, which seems perfect but piggybacks (and is parasitic upon) the wild internets just beyond the protective bubble.

[Do I have to provide links? One hopes you get the pop-culture references, or can wiki them.]

[/editorial]

► So, my notes on this next link (past “Dear Matt: re-read and comment on this when you are sober.”) were “First Impression: Someone Needs to Synthesize This with McCloud and Start Preaching the Effin’ WORD.”

Since there wasn’t time for sober reflection this week, I’ll let my first impression stand.

##

Retailer News:

► Borders gets $25 mil, new chairman. I’ll also note the current [interim] CEO of Borders, Mike Edwards, really wants the job. Since he was the VP of Merchandise prior to the temp-stint at the top — and as such, is a bookseller — I hope they give the opportunity to him. It takes a brave person to stand on top of a huge steaming pile that was someone else’s fault and say, “No, I really like it here; please, give me the job, give me a chance to make this better” [that was a paraphrase and putting words I’m not sure he ever said into Edwards’s mouth. That, and He Must Be Nuts but more power to ‘im]

► Bamm reports Q1 earnings – highlights: sales down but company still makes money. (and really, that’s all we need to know)

And almost not-news but everyone is going to make a fuss about it:

► Barnes & Noble to offer digital self publishing

[yeah, and I suppose this is editorial too, but it feels more like common sense]

That is to say, if you have a book, and since the actual costs to bring most books into an ‘e-book’ format are minimal, if not semantic, and since B&N has this huge honking website anyway (to say nothing of the new e-book appliance they’re shoving down the throat of an almost-ready market) – Your hopes and tears and e-book-ready manuscript can be swept up by a major company with nothing but the promise of a database listing & a contractual agreement to give you ‘some’ of your profits.

Sure: Now folks can buy your e-book on nook or bn.com; but: you still have to sell it yourself. B&N is providing access, not support. This isn’t even a Faustian bargain, this is more like the book deal we’d offer to Sisyphus.

[once again, I’ll ask you to wiki any reference you didn’t get — classical, not sci-fi, but really: those are interchangeable (if not overlapping) fandoms]

this is actually B&Ns second foray into self publishing, though B&N only took a 49% stake in that company. B&N sold the entirety of the self-pub. business to their largest competitor and washed their hands of this mess years ago, until the new technology made it stupid-easy:

“Say, I’m looking for a broadcast platform but instead of facing the internet, which is bold, brash reality, I instead insist that I’m an Author and the message I intended to relate is Most Definitely A Book. No, not a blog, a book. I find it hard to believe my doc file is only 60 pages, you’re formatting it wrong; did you try a larger font size? Or a different font?”

more on self-pub — Cory Doctorow @ Publishers Weekly – first column (of five, so far) & the latest

[/editorial]

##

Aggregate prices on the Rocket Bomber Geek Stock Index fell 31.37 points (3.22%) to 943.07. Again, this has nothing to do with the actual companies traded, it’s just the markets are fragile (between the euro-crisis and BP attempting to sell us the gulf shrimp & seafood plate , blackened, and dressed in oil.)

Charted: 21-week RBGSX Aggregate Price

[Went back for historical prices to 12/31/09; we’re slowly working up to first, a 26-week graph, and eventually a full year. After a year, presuming my attention span holds out, I’ll graph-and-post a rolling 52 week window of the RBGSX]

& the 25 stocks: CBS Corporation (NYSE:CBS), The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWSA), Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE), Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX), Viacom, Inc. (NYSE:VIA), Wiley John & Sons Inc. (NYSE:JW.A), The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (NYSE:MHP), Lagardere SCA (EPA:MMB), Pearson PLC (NYSE:PSO), Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ:SCHL), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Books-A-Million, Inc. (NASDAQ:BAMM), Borders Group, Inc. (NYSE:BGP), Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS), Hastings Entertainment, Inc (NASDAQ:HAST), Indigo Books & Music Inc. (TSE:IDG), Best Buy Co., Inc. (NYSE:BBY), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX), Navarre Corporation (NASDAQ:NAVR), Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASDAQ:ATVI), Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS), GameStop Corp. (NYSE:GME), Nintendo Co., Ltd (OTC:NTDOY), and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Please note: nothing here is investment advice. full disclaimer