I'll note that I visit Australia regularly as some of my family live there, and I'd noted the decline of A&R as a chain -- the local small town franchisee is still an excellent bookshop with a decent range given its physical size, but the nearest big town direct-owned shop has over the last few years turned into something that looks like one of those specialist remainder shops, only without the enticement of the large and quirky range. The above exchange of letters explained a lot...

Much praise to Michael Rakusin for his letter and for making both communications public.

"Cap in hand." Heh.

I know that Australia had a large initial population of theives and criminals, but I didn't believe highway robbery was still in vogue.

This Rimmer fellow, I think he might be a smeghead.

There were two big reasons for this. He was selling perishable goods to the supermarkets on a sale-or-return basis, and the local wholesalers and retailers accepted the risk of not selling all that they bought.

Second, he turned up with a pallet of strawberries on his pickup, unloaded, and drove off with the payment. Cash or cheque, he didn't have to wait thirty days for the supermarket (who had the cash for over three weeks).

As for the customers, I'm pretty sure that the strawberries spent too long going through the supermarket's distribution system.

Remember, the Asda supermarket business in the UK is now owned by Walmart. As Charlie Stross reminded me, Walmart have made official complaint of unfair competion.

We didn't manage to send all the thieves to Australia.

(shakes head)

Wow. Yet another example of people treating a business as generic inputs and outputs of money requireing no knowledge of the actual product.

Rakusin's reply was awesome.

"Evil" is the word that comes to my mind, but maybe that's overly judgmental.

I've seen two bookstores -- neither of them parts of chains -- that stocked only (well, mostly) bestsellers. In both cases it was the penultimate stage in a lengthy, drawn-out death spiral where the stores tried to cut costs by reducing the stock they had, and then got fewer customers (why go when there was less & less chance they'd have the book you were looking for, nor interesting ones you'd not heard of?), and therefore made less money, and had to cut costs some more. The end of this cycle, obviously, is having no costs through having no books, no space -- no store.

All of which is to say, I think that having only bestsellers is the bookstore's equivalent of a death-rattle.

And, in this case, it looks like Mr. Rimmer was the one in the dining room with the candle stick.

As a customer, this actually makes me feel better about US chain stores. I mean, whatever bad things you might say about Borders or Amazon, you certainly can't deny that they have lots and lots of different books.

Oh, well. Aside from boycotting Waldenbooks, I've lost count of the bookstores I should and should not be supporting. Very few seem to have a clue.

Bravo, Mr. Rakusin.

Of course then word gets around that Joe's hardware store doesn't carry nails and all the contractors and DIYers who are their best customers stay away in droves.

I can't help but link this up with the sidelight on Nardelli taking over at Chrysler, not to mention a thread some years ago about how President Bush is typical of Harvard Business School grads from his era. These people really believe that a knowledge of finance is the most important thing to running any business, and actually knowing anything about the business in question is only going to distract you from focusing on what's really important (i.e. the next quarterly earnings report).

mjfgates (11), I just hope Rakusin autographed Rimmer's ass before he handed it to him.

Remus (12), believe me, publishers need bookstores.

Don't forget to use the word 'malarkey'.

This is starting to sound like an episode of Red Dwarf.

Bravo, Mr. Rakusin.

"Dear Michael"

Tacky. When you’re sending a formal blackmail request, you should always use the recipient’s full name.

Gosh, I adore you.

I think I'm going to like this Mr. Rakusin fellow, too.

Sorry, but--I see in the signature that that book has won the Miles Franklin literary prize, which is mentioned in the paragraph above your note. Am I missing something?

A small point of correction: Tower Books is the distributor of the Miles Franklin winner, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (ie the company that ships it out to bookshops around the country). The publisher is Giramondo, a small Sydney press owned by Ivor Indyk and Evelyn Juers and run from the University of Western Sydney. They publish a very small number of books but interesting, ambitious, often uncommercial and yet a high proportion of award-winners.

Man, I've never been to Australia, but this makes me want to go just so I can not buy books from A&R. Thankfully the high cost of airfare makes me just give them a virtual raspberry.

I actually found it hard to spend. The city branch of A&R is big enough, and stocks many good books. Unfortunately the psychic fug emitted by the many thousands of mediocre and pointless books which lined the walls dampened my book buying senses, and I wandered around there for hours in a low grade depression, until I picked a couple of books at random, and made a dash for the outside world. And God knows, it's not as if Melbourne's not a good place to buy books.

I think Julia Jones nailed it in the first post when she compared the stock to a specialist remaainder shop - they lean quite heavily towards "Golfing for cats"(*). It's a pity - when I was a kid, growing up in regional Australia, A&R was where you went to get books.

(*) A book by comedian Alan Coren. It had a swastika on the cover. Inside he talked about how market analysis had shown that the three biggest selling categories in the book trade were sport, pets, and the third reich, so... Of course, *he* knew he was making a joke.

I understand that Crikey and its readers are alarmed by the negotiations that Angus & Robertson is currently seeking with a number of its suppliers. I also understand that the correspondence sent to some of our suppliers has caused offence.

I completely acknowledge that the tone of this correspondence was inappropriate, and I appreciate the opportunity to set the record straight on our intentions.

Firstly, I would like to assure you that the negotiations that are taking place between Angus & Robertson and our suppliers are not intended to have any impact on Australian authors and are purely about reaching a commercial arrangement with publishers...

As a commercial business, we have the right to make decisions about which suppliers we do business with. In our negotiations with suppliers, we are the customer. Unfortunately we cannot work with every publisher in Australia, particularly if the relationship is not commercially viable for us.

To give you some context, we currently have 1,200 suppliers to our business and have sent letters to 47 of those whom we hope to hold discussions with over the coming weeks. The payments we have requested from those suppliers represent a gap payment for profits that were lost or costs that were incurred as a result of our commercial relationship with those particular suppliers...

To give you some context, we currently have 1,200 suppliers to our business and have sent letters to 47 of those whom we hope to hold discussions with over the coming weeks. The payments we have requested from those suppliers represent a gap payment for profits that were lost or costs that were incurred as a result of our commercial relationship with those particular suppliers.

That second sentence reminds me the Bad Example in a 'how to write clearly' guide.

They've been steadily nailing their coffin shut from the inside for ages now, as far as I'm concerned. This was just the final nail going in. My principal objection is both as an Australian *and* as an Australian who writes, and who would rather appreciate being published one day (should I actually finish anything worthy of publication). The industry is already one of the more precarious ones - many of the small publishers barely survive from book to book as it is. This just sends a lot of them to the wall.

> Apparently Rupert Murdoch is a typical Aussie businessman.........

Now now - I try not to judge you lot on your countrymen's worst excesses...

You know you have to read it when it contains bits like:

- All rebates are paid on a daily basis for ever and ever amen. You must ensure that the needle (provided) is inserted into your vein and a quart of your blood is received by us by the 7th of the month following the preceding month (which also follows the preceding month) . Any blood not received by this date will attract a daily 5% interest charge, payable in flesh.

Is this regional? Where I grew up, the jinxed person can't speak until someone says their name.

Well, that's a relief. And here I thought that publishers were somehow part of the distribution channel that allowed authors to get their works into bookstores.

It appears to me that the impact on the industry would be slight (and beneficial) if A&R were to close its retail stores. Somebody competent might buy them.

Here is the the ACCC, who describe themselves as 'Australian government organisation responsible for ensuring compliance with the Trade Practices Act 1974'. So I assume they are the relevant guys (I'm not myself an Australian, or even been there).

Hmmm, I wonder if there's a section in that Act about the practice of sending out invoices for goods or services nobody actually purchased, which tends to be rather illegal in lots of places.

...Ah found it here. Ayup, as I thought.

...

TRADE PRACTICES ACT 1974 - SECT 64 Assertion of right to payment for unsolicited goods or services or for making entry in directory

(1) A corporation shall not, in trade or commerce, assert a right to payment from a person for unsolicited goods unless the corporation has reasonable cause to believe that there is a right to payment.

(2A) A corporation shall not, in trade or commerce, assert a right to payment from a person for unsolicited services unless the corporation has reasonable cause to believe that there is a right to payment.

(3) A corporation shall not assert a right to payment from any person of a charge for the making in a directory of an entry relating to the person or to his or her profession, business, trade or occupation unless the corporation knows or has reasonable cause to believe that the person has authorized the making of the entry.

(4) A person is not liable to make any payment to a corporation, and is entitled to recover by action in a court of competent jurisdiction against a corporation any payment made by the person to the corporation, in full or part satisfaction of a charge for the making of an entry in a directory unless the person has authorized the making of the entry.

(5) For the purposes of this section, a corporation shall be taken to assert a right to a payment from a person for unsolicited goods or services, or of a charge for the making of an entry in a directory, if the corporation:

   (a) makes a demand for the payment or asserts a present or prospective right to the payment;

   (b) threatens to bring any legal proceedings with a view to obtaining the payment;

   (c) places or causes to be placed the name of the person on a list of defaulters or debtors, or threatens to do so, with a view to obtaining the payment;

   (d) invokes or causes to be invoked any other collection procedure, or threatens to do so, with a view to obtaining the payment; or

   (e) sends any invoice or other document stating the amount of the payment or setting out the price of the goods or services or the charge for the making of the entry and not stating as prominently (or more prominently) that no claim is made to the payment, or to payment of the price or charge, as the case may be.

...snipped section 6, as it's about directories rather than invoices, so is not relevant here...

(7) For the purposes of this section, an invoice or other document purporting to have been sent by or on behalf of a corporation shall be deemed to have been sent by that corporation unless the contrary is established.

...weirdly there is no section 8...

(9) In a proceeding against a corporation in respect of a contravention of this section:

   (a) in the case of a contravention constituted by asserting a right to payment from a person for unsolicited goods or unsolicited services--the burden lies on the corporation of proving that the corporation had reasonable cause to believe that there was a right to payment; or

   (b) in the case of a contravention constituted by asserting a right to payment from a person of a charge for the making of an entry in a directory--the burden lies on the corporation of proving that the corporation knew or had reasonable cause to believe that the person had authorised the making of the entry.

...

Quite possibly, all sorts interesting sections in that and other Laws that might also apply.

Dorothy 24: I've never been to Australia, but this makes me want to go just so I can not buy books from A&R.

My thoughts exactly.

I do plan to spend a couple of days in Australia early next year, but considering that letter I wonder if I will get a chance to boycott them. I will be disappointed if they crash and burn first and rob me of the chance to assist in their demise.

It's a woefully underappreciated principle of internet argument that the people you should be trying to convince are usually not the ones you're nominally arguing with.

In the States, the canonical everyone-wants-it book is "Abraham Lincoln's Doctor's Dog."

The best response to

I am writing to find out where you stand. For example, we have no record of your support for President George W. Bush.

In fact, we have no record of your support for a Republican Presidential candidate going back to President Ronald W. Reagan!

would be "That's because in this country we have a secret ballot."

(Actually, on a whim I looked the phrase up on Google, and was surprised to read on Wikipedia that we didn't start using secret ballots until the 1880s.)

Since I was an application developer for non-mainframe databases, I got to watch the Titanic s l o w l y crash into the iceberg without being able to do much about it, either. Eventually I was laid off when they decided they needed the budget to hire competent permanent SAP programmers to actually get it to run correctly, though to date it still isn't.

Oh -- anyway, point of story? Book publishing, top to bottom, side to side, is not just 'quirky' but is actually has its own strange rules of business for very good reasons that management dismisses at its peril.

Well, that sure brings back fond memories of my life as a full-time employee who's had to clean up after the mess of consultant programmers.

So far as I know, though, this pernicious practice hasn't been adopted by other retailers.

Does the dog fight Communists in a submarine? If it does, I'll buy two copies.

I've only had limited experience documenting SAP, so perhaps someone else can tell me to what extent thinking of large and small publishers as interchangable "suppliers" is an artefact of having spent too long with SAP methodologies? It struck me that it was great for things like general supplies (I worked with it at a University), but I just can't see it working here.

There's really two bits to that particular attitude, but they're related, IMO.

The one not shown here is "It's always possible to do more work with the same people, or the same amount of work with fewer people, by working smarter." Now, if you take out the word 'always', this is actually reasonable -- very often processes need a good overhaul and there's often some way to reduce the time it takes to do a given task, particularly in a business that's incorporated new technology recently. Eventually, of course, it gets silly -- I expect that should the people who believe that 'always' is the right word be put in charge of a construction project, they would end by having one guy with a hammer out there on the skyscraper construction site and wonder if there was a way to eliminate him, too.

The second, of course, is "There's always some way to reduce costs and therefore increase profit." I'd say this is the thinking that went into the original letter. Again, without the word 'always', this isn't such a bad thought, and when paired with the first part and someone who understands the notion of small changes and waiting for results, you can end up with a company that can handle more business with the same number of people, making more money. If the company is a good one, they may even pass some of that on to the workers*.

Of course, again, there's that 'always'... which leads to hare-brained ideas like this.

The return letter from Rakusin was a true work of art. The pair really ought to be printed and handed out to anyone with a upper-manager position in a corporation.

(*For a while, a place I used to work actually had the right combination of cost-cutting and process-improving -- and they were prone to giving twice-yearly bonuses to people just for sticking around, plus the odd performance bonus. Alas, they eventually started taking it further than I thought was reasonable, which seems to usually be the case.)

With more relevance to the main subject: A&R was once an honourable name in Australian publishing and bookselling. Harper Collins Australia still have an A & R imprint, but personally I haven't darkened the doorway of an A&R bookshop for decades. Bibliophiles intending to visit Australia would be better off dropping in on Readings (Melbourne) or Gleebooks (Sydney) and the equivalents that surely exist in other cities.

But A&R are doomed. After this, I don't expect them to be in business as a bookstore chain after next year. Their franchises may survive, perhaps rebranded. As noted above, the ACCC is taking an interest. I have no doubt that the lawyers are talking even now, and mentioning figures with dollar signs in front. Rimmer is about to be fitted with concrete pyjamas. It'll all end in tears.

Mind you, that doesn't mean we can't laugh now.

I also have to compare it to a similar appeal I got from the Democrats a couple years ago. The Democratic appeal claimed that I had been identified as a local leader and they wanted to survey me to help guide the future of the party. I'm sure that the survey was used for little more than helping them decide what issues they talked about when they hit me up in the future, but at least the Democrats made the pretense of trying to make me feel involved and wanted. The Republican appeal seems purely aimed at scaring people that they'll be kicked out of the party and become unable to vote if they don't send any money.

I'd be curious to see the return numbers on that letter. I'm guessing the return rate will be pretty good, but the average contribution will be low. After all, I always try to give a little more than the minimum asked for when I'm supporting a charity or a group who's work I care about, but I've never decided to chip in a few extra bucks on a registration fee or on any sort of club dues.

"Screen Directors Playhouse" Lincoln's Doctor's Dog (1955) Lincoln's Doctor's Dog on IMDb: Movies, TV, Celebs, and more...
www.imdb.com/title/tt0696445/

Not even with a BORROWED pen.

You owe me money because I don't like how much money I'm making if you don't send me money.

Seriously that's good business, I don't know why anybody hadn't thought of it before. Well, if you take the part about it being a letter out, then it is really comparable to heirarchical organized crime payments, isn't it? "Hey, Tony, Tony Senior says you owe a thousand more this month!" "Why, I paid the same every month." "Yeah, Tony Senior lost on some horses, so you owe him a thousand more." "*sigh*"

The attitude of the mismanaging class that management is somehow not connected with the product or service a company offers really has to end this way, because they have no other way of increasing their profits. What you don't understand or respect you can't control, so they try to control what they can. And it all ends up with parts of dead horses in people's beds ...

Thank all the gods for people like Michael Rakusin, who aren't willing to take that kind of abuse, and tell the thugs where to get off.

* "You just use right off the shelf. It's got everything you need." Yeah, right.

** I was going to write that figure in scientific notation, as I usually do, then I thought, no the zeroes make it look a lot more impressive.

The story at TPM is more worrisome than mine; one of Josh's readers' 83-y.o. father got it, worried about it and asked his son to look at it. Mine was addressed to me, and for whatever reason I actually opened the envelope rather than dropping it into the trash immediately and washing my hands thoroughly thereafter, which is my normal practice when receiving correspondence from the Republican party.

I know that Australia had a large initial population of theives and criminals, but I didn't believe highway robbery was still in vogue.

Dear me - you seem to be terribly misinformed about Australia's colonial past. It's been accepted here for years that convicts transported here only committed victimless and romantic offenses, like Stealing a Loaf of Bread To Feed Their Starving Family, Making Off With A Bit Of Rope (*coff* without noticing there was a horse attached to it, honest *coff*) and Breathing While Irish.[1]

The catastrophically inept Charlie Rimmer and his tragically comic boss Mr Fenlon are both scions of the Evil UKnian Powers who transported so many innocents, and who are clearly still intent on opressing good honest folk.

[1]OK, also occasionally Highway Robbery. But only to Feed Their Starving Family/Give To The Poor In A Dick Turpiny, Robin Hoody Fasion.

When 'they' tell me that the merger of two systems will be totally transparent, I grab the bottle of extra-strength Windex.

Then I send the forms back. For some reason I seem to forget to fill them out first.

If I could still tape them to a brick, I would.

#60: That reminds me of an old joke among programmers. It's been observed that any nontrivial program can be written more compactly, shortening it at least by one instruction. And it's well-known that any nontrivial program has at least one undiscovered bug in it. Applying induction, we can see that any program can, with enough effort, be optimized down to a single instruction ... which will be incorrect.

The way the original phrases (the ones containing "always") are usually used is by that high-tech management technique of Increasing Productivity. The dirty little secret is that productivity as defined by managers is just dollars of profit divided by hours of work*. So you either want to increase dollars of revenue, decrease dollars of overhead, or increase hours, in each case without changing the other two. The simplest way to do this is to either pay the employees less or work them harder, usually by getting rid of some of them and making the remaining ones do all their own work and that of the ones you dumped. That in a nutshell is what a corporate turn-around specialist (also called a "strip and flip") does.

* I know, this is a terribly naive way to describe it. Exactly my point.

(Having caught up with the thread since typing that para, I see y'all have confirmed that, in fact, they are and it is. Well done.)

As regards the volubly hilarious follow-up, I can only say to Mr. Rimmer, "I, too, am a customer, and there is no law against my choosing not to do business with a particular vendor... but I never dreamt of demanding $25/wk from King Soopers to guarantee my return business! How brash! Do you think that might work for me, too, or do you reckon my having a conscience instead of big brass balls might get in the way?"

Daniel @6: Wheee! In the thread early. Do I really get to be the first person to say it?

Well, with 75 comments already on the docket, I knew better than to hope it could be me. First thought that crossed my mind, though.

(I will admit to running to the bookshelf to double-check with Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers that the hologram's first name wasn't, in fact, Charles. Of course it wasn't. I knew that.)

OP: When you’re sending a formal blackmail request, you should always use the recipient’s full name.

Teresa, you are totally going to dominate my random quote generator if you keep making me *snrkle* my tea like this.

When 'they' tell me that the merger of two systems will be totally transparent, I grab the bottle of extra-strength Windex.

...although you might get some competition from Serge.

Jonathan Shaw (#61), I'm fond of Abbey's (and its sister science fiction and fantasy store, Galaxy). Gleebooks is very good, but inconvenient if you just want to duck into the city and out again. But all of those book shops are my main regret about not living in Sydney anymore. It's a 2 and a half train trip to visit them now *sniff*

*goes back to lurking*

Aren't these the same people who came up with the "Impeach Clinton / And Her Husband Too" bumper stickers? If they believed Hillary was the power behind Bill's throne, why would they now believe that Hillary, having attained a throne of her own, would cede the power behind it to Bill? Or do they simply expect the pair to take turns? How very... progressive of the Republican party to consider that possibility!

(1) For safe highway use, vehicle spacing should be based on the stopping distance, which is proportional to the square of the speed.

(2) Halving traffic speed quarters the safe interval. So a mile of read carries four times as many vehicles, which take twice as long to pass any arbitrary point.

(3) So speed tends towards zero, road capacity tends to infinity.

What's the error, the missed reality? It's assumed that vehicles have zero length.

You can cut the empty space, or the wasted time, but you can't cut out the vehicle.

And some wasted time is there because, if something goes wrong, you'll need that time. Even something as simple as sometimes getting a red light at a junction.

(Which reminds me of the time I watched 'The Sixth Sense' in Bucharest, and was the only person in the theater who laughed at the 'it was much better than Cats' line. SNL, how you have warped me.)

> Steve Taylor #31: I must point out that I'm a Pom....

Oops. I plead guilty to assuming that everyone on the net is a white male American in his mid 30s who works in IT. Even though I know better. I was writing at around 5 or 6 am in the grip of mind altering insomnia.

Though I guess "I try not to judge you lot on your countrymen's worst excesses..." could reasonably be said to anyone from any country :)

Serge, what good is it to drink Windex(R)[1]? When fed a line like that, I prefer to wash it down with single malt scotch.

[1]Windex is a registered trademark and blah blah blah. Writers and publishers are made too aware of this fact on a far too frequent basis.

"They've been steadily nailing their coffin shut from the inside for ages now"

Dang, but that was a beautiful turn of phrase

Every single organization I've ever been part of that got involved with SAP spent years throwing money out the window in return for absolutely no benefit over when they started. I don't know what the S and the A stand for, but the P is obviously Ponzi.

I particularly like the phrase "core incompetencies".

Dear employer,

I am writing to you because our economic relationship falls into the category of unacceptable profitability.

As a consequence I would invite you to pay the attached invoice by Aug 17th 2007. The payment represents the gap for our relationship, and moves it from an unacceptable level of profitability, to above my minimum threshold.

What caught my eye at once was the fact that A&R is currently owned and operated by a private equity outfit, which to my limited understanding of the current biz environment means 1) Finance Rulz, 2) Everything Is Abstract and Nothing Is Particular, and 3) Gut It and Cut Out. I keep getting flashbacks to the leveraged-buyout days and marvel at how the financial world keeps inventing the same pathological pillaging schemes, and the putative grownups in charge of the universe keep letting them get away with it. (Yeah, I know--grownups are a myth and we're all at the mercy of the playground bullies. I considered stopping even carrying any lunch money, but they'd just take my sneakers instead.)

See this RISKS Digest article about IEFBR14 (John Pershing's post), which, I must explain for the benefit of those readers who have not had the joy of dealing with IBM mainframes, is the null program.

Yes. The null program. It does nothing. It intentionally does nothing[1]. Originally, it was just one instruction, "return to caller". Unfortunately, that meant it had a bug; it didn't set the return code to show successful completion. Further discussion is also online.

[1] This is important for doing data definitions in JCL. I'm very sad that I still know and understand all this.

Steve Taylor (#83): As the preceding might suggest, I fit a number of the criteria in your assumptions. (That number being 100%, in fact.)

I suspect that, from a psychoanalytic point of view, it could also be described as a corporate deathwish.[/aside]

Makes you feel like a dinosaur, eh? I managed to make the transition (which I guess means I'm now a bird), but I still get to dabble in the world of mainframe programming (which makes me more like a chicken than an eagle?)

I look forward to some publisher eventually sending their accountants to Las Vegas or Atlantic City for a day, with firm instructions that they are to place money only on the bets which win!

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/11/understanding_austra.html

Note: www.boingboing.net is a very popular and influential blog in America. Expect a traffic bump.

We'd get a whole different kind of rule-based screwup by numbers instead, I'm sure.

Still, thanks for the courtesy. And welcome.

Because most of its target audience already has a copy.

It's not an acronym or an abbreviation, it's a word. Just read it aloud and you'll understand how much respect some software vendors have for their customers.

Chris W. @ 64: I bet the wording will actually work -- these are, after all, the people suckling at the poisoned teat of Fox News; if the message is "OMG!scare!OMG!notconservativeenough!" they'll automatically assume it's true.

That type of tactic always reminds me of this track.

Clifton Royston @ 100: I believe I've seen a memo from a Hollywood executive, somewhere, containing exactly that instruction.

Also worth underlining that a lot of A&R stores are owned by Franchisees, who are free to continue business relationships with 'unprofitable' distributors. That the public won't be able to tell what stores are franchises and what stores are owned by PEP will surely hurt them too. I'd be feeling quite angry with head office right now if I was one of their franchisees.

A&R, as part of PEP's plan is also rolling out a large on-line retail strategy. We don't have a local version of Amazon (in OZ, if we buy on Amazon, we're either paying for shipping from the states or the UK) and their strategy is to try and snare the local (and SE Asian) online English book market. This, combined with their play for Borders at the moment, means that their stocking decisions have much greater impact than just the 20% of the retail market they currently hold.

(It's also amusing that they haven't offered any of the things that make Amazon interesting, like big discounts or free domestic postage. Half the time it's still cheaper to order internationally and swallow the shipping than to buy online locally.)

Most especially will be the underlings who already despise them and hate working for them, who will almost imperceptibly smirk when passing them in the halls and in the car parks. They will be eating this dish cold for a very long time.

Let's see. There's the KJV that was given to my maternal grandfather over 70 years ago when he was first named as a sitting state judge, it has his name stamped in it, it was published by Oxford University Press; there's the Viking Studio edition of the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible designed and illustrated by Barry Moser, and anyone who has never seen those incredible illustrations is missing something; there's Eugene Peterson's eccentric and delightful contemporary language translation of The New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs, titled The Message; there's another KJV, "arranged for family reading" by Ruth Hornblower Greenough, with illustrations from designs by William Blake, yes, that William Blake... I can't imagine not having any one of them.

The SAP company is worldwide and has sold a lot of product, so they must be doing something right. But any computer system can be implemented badly, as we see far too often. The golden rule of SAP seems to be that if you need to spend millions customising it, you're using the wrong product; but if native SAP suits your way of working, it'll do you a good job.

Michael Rakusin writes: "Multiple suppliers—that is, a broad range of publishers and books to choose from—is a good thing, if a bookstore chain knows what it’s doing."

... and this is an important point here: They often do NOT know what they are doing. Their buyer might be a 20+something-year-old chick, buying books for thousands of stores all around the country. What does he/she know about the desideratum of any local community? He/she relies (... if at all) on sales mumbers her computer spits out ... of already sold books.

What can this method possibly tell him/her about NEW publications?

As Marshall McLuhan would say:
"He/she's looking into the future through the rear-view mirror." [LOL!]

Any independent bookstore owner/buyer, who knows his neigbhorhood, is way superior to those guys.

But this must be said too: Independent bookstores cannot afford to sell books below their official retail price. We, as consumers, carry a certain responsibility too for the emerging of those monstrous chains.

I think your theory about the quick slash-and-burn raid is probably closest to the mark, although not by A&R management, likely higher up the chain. A&R/Whitcoull's is a retail chain of 180 stores which was recently purchased by a private equity fund called Pacific Equity Partners (PEP). Private equity funds are on an acquisitions frenzy over here in Australia right now. I believe PEP have already made public plans to float the Whitcoulls/A&R retail chain on the ASX. So this new buying policy makes sense (to them!) in the context of PEP wanting to plump up the company's bottom line to get a higher share price at float.

I feel terrible for a lot of small publishers and independent distributors who will be hardest hit by this turn of events, but I also sympathise with the franchisee A&R stores most of whom are small family businesses in small towns who will be caught up in the backlash. It is, frankly, outrageous.

I represent the state association of writers in Queensland (as my day job) and we'll be adding our media release of protest to those already issued by the Australian Publishers Association and the Australian Society of Authors.

Cheers,
Kate.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/pacific-equity-opening-the-books-on-borders/2007/04/30/1177788056848.html

The article explains that PEP has emerged as a front contender to purchase the Australian Borders chain from the US parent and merge it with Angus & Robertson. It also predicts that PEP will therefore be seeking to "reduce costs by cutting back-office overheads and achieving efficiencies through greater purchasing power with suppliers."

That's exactly what has happened.

Kate.

If A&R and other chains keep this despotic moneygrabbing up, authors will turn to services like www.lulu.com to publish their work more effectively. It's what I use for my books, check out the link. Lulu is the best thing my Uncle John told me about since he informed me about Terry Pratchett.

#80: I've gotta remember that example; I've been using one (from an economics game) that takes \much/ too long to explain, where this is nicely compact.

#112: I saw a couple of pages of the ...Moser Bible and remembered his lecture mention about how unforgiving a medium woodblock is. Came very close to buying it for looks and connection, but I'm already short of space for art; what I'd like to complement my confirmation copy (Holman Study Bible) is something that does context without the HSB's credulity.

#115: TNH has occasionally railed about a consequence of your point: mechanical buyers who say "We bought X copies of Y's last book last time and sold X/2, so this time we'll order X/2." The problem is that this \still/ means some stores won't sell out, while others will sell out quickly then lose sales to another store (if the author is lucky) or cost the author total sales (more typical). IIRC, 50% "sellthrough" (purchase by customers of books delivered to stores) is a very good number for mass-market paperbacks, but try to explain something that feels like chaos theory to a bean-counter.

(Why yes, I am female and 20-something. But even if I weren't... Also, I'm not a book buyer by trade.)

In Oz, Bibles are brought primarily through the Christian Book and paraphernalia chain, Koorong Books. Thats a whole other story.And I have seen Bibles for sale at A&R. Often wonder if Bible publishers feel guilty about making a profit.
I have several on my shelves, including a couple of Moffart translations, several Bibles with the Apocrypha and a US Catholic Good News with the Deuterocanonicals. Don't ask.

1: Bean counting school teaches you to count the beans. If they do not know how count the beans, or know where the beans come from and the relationships between the various stages of beanness, those bean counters need to go back to school.

2. Finance whizzes in buyout (or as the 80s parlance - corporate raiding) firms are usually NOT trained as bean counters. Many of them do not understand how beans are grown. They only know how to measure the performance of moving beans ex-post, drawing up arcane projection formulas, forgetting that they are then applying it to a projection of future bean sales onto current operations ex-ante.

3. Businesses rise, businesses fall. Bad spirals are not improved by a Private Equity firm not understanding what it bought.

The distance your car takes to stop has two components, thinking distance and braking distance.
Thinking distance is the distance you travel while your brain reacts to what's happening in front of you, thinks "Holy smoke!" and tells your foot to go from gas to brake, and while your foot moves across. This distance is proportional to speed because the time is constant.
Braking distance is the distance you take to stop once your foot is on the brake, and is proportional to the square of speed, besides depending on your weight and how good your brakes are.
So stopping distance isn't quite proportional to the square of speed, and halving traffic speed doesn't quarter the safe interval, because of the thinking time.

So if you were calculating it that way, which I'm not sure that highway engineers actually do, the formula for theoretical road capacity (vehicles passing a fixed point per hour) would be something like
v/(L + t*v + k*v-squared)
where v is speed, L is average vehicle length, t is thinking time, and k is a deceleration factor.
So if speed is zero, road capacity is zero, both obviously and by the formula. Incidentally, the maximum tends to come at quite a low speed - 30-40 mph, I think.

I'm pretty sure there's a highway engineer in here somewhere, so I hasten to add that practical road capacity doesn't just depend on that formula, but on other factors according to the type and condition of road.

Aieeee!!!

[runs to cuddle her KJV]

As a lifelong lefty, I feel intuitively that the free market does not serve the interests of society at large, and this is surely a fine example.

Michael

But here are a few Bibles I think we can do without (from the article I linked to in #111):

“Revolve,” a New Testament that look[s] indistinguishable from a glossy girls’ magazine. The 2007 edition features cover lines like “Guys Speak Their Minds” and “Do U Rush to Crush?” Inside, the Gospels are surrounded by quizzes, photos of beaming teen-agers, and sidebars offering Bible-themed beauty secrets.
...
This year’s annual trade show of the Christian Booksellers’ Association, in Denver, brought such innovations as “The Outdoor Bible,” printed on indestructible plastic sheets that fold up like maps, and “The Story,” which features selections from the Bible arranged in chronological order, like a novel. There is a “Men of Integrity” Bible and a “Woman, Thou Art Loosed!” Bible. For kids, there’s “The Super Heroes Bible: The Quest for Good Over Evil” and “Psalty’s Kids Bible,” featuring “Psalty, the famous singing songbook.” The “Soul Surfer Bible” has notes by Bethany Hamilton, who lost an arm to a shark in 2003. “2:52 Boys Bible: The Ultimate Manual” promises “gross and gory Bible stuff.” In the “Rainbow Study Bible,” each verse is color-coded by theme.

Julia @ 130: Indeed.

I'm wasting my time reading Making Light instead of working. C'mon everybody, out with the chequebooks. Let's see five dollars from every reader of this forum. I want more money in my life.

I don't expect any store to stock the books I want, but with groceries, it annoys me.

Actually it's an example of how the market can work just fine. I have no doubt that as a result of the publicity this has received A&R will see a direct hit on their profit margin as outraged bookbuyers take their custom to other stores. Some because of these letters, some because of other practices that these letters are emblematic of, most because using these practices A&R will gradually devolve into stocking only best-sellers and discount books and customers will be unable to find what they want.

The trick is to make the market transparent and use only enough regulations to control criminal abuse.

* I worked for an insurance company and every now and then someone would ask if we could sell policies only to people who don't make claims, to general amusement.

Indies often also can't afford to stock as many books.

And in many areas, credible indies simply never appeared. All the time I was growing up in central Connecticut (70s, 80s, much of the 90s), the only convenient bookstores were manky little mall chain shops. The arrival of Borders and Barnes & Nobles has been *wonderful* here.

Perhaps, but there's probably also an executive search firm jotting down "Now there's just the guy we want!"

All those people then went on to run health insurance companies...

> Apparently Rupert Murdoch is a typical Aussie businessman.........

The offending letter was written by one of your lot. you see, Charlie Rimmer is a Pom.

Janet at 132: I forgot, I also have a Jewish Publications Society translation of the Tanakh, somewhere. But you make your point. Those versions you describe sound utterly hideous. Drat. Where's dread Cthulhu when you really need him/her/it/them?

As it happens, I know the answer to that question. (Scroll down.)

> On Jinx-Where I grew up

Hey! I've fallen into a Larry Niven story. As long as it's pre-Pournelle I'm pretty happy with that.

inge, #134, I'm disabled, so I have heavy and bulky things delivered once a month, but I only go to one grocery store because that's all I can manage. If they don't have things I want, I buy them online.

There ain't no such thing as a free market.

Oh, the humanity!

Traffic formulas get worse than that - due to Braess' paradox, putting in a new faster road can SLOW TRAFFIC DOWN !!!

One nice explanation is here: http://www.davros.org/science/roadparadox.html

(It uses an over simplistic formula that mixes up units when it works out vehicle speed, but don't get too fussy - it is just to demonstrate the paradox. Believe me - it works in real life ... even with calculating the speed of IP packets across the Etherweb..)

Yes - someone adding a router in a network (even a very fast router) can slow the network down.

Mac

No. The ACCC were pretty quick to point out that the acts (however low) don't fit under 'unconscionable conduct' - which is the closest match for what happened.

It's just bad policy - not illegal.

Mac

This letter came with a small 'sales premium' sewing kit (a small pack with a needle, a couple of buttons, and small amounts of thread in various colors); I read this as the brush-off for the 'thread-bare' clients.

This company isn't around any more.

http://pics.livejournal.com/beable/pic/0000asrz/g15
http://pics.livejournal.com/madfilkentist/pic/00062pce/g21
http://www.flickr.com/photos/94645399@N00/435411686/

It's nice to know I'm not the only one who's been savaged by SAP.

Anticorium @ 88:

Every single organization I've ever been part of that got involved with SAP spent years throwing money out the window in return for absolutely no benefit over when they started.

P J Evans @ 99:

Adding a SAP story ... my company uses it for things like expense accounts. Everyone who has to use it hates it,

etc, etc.

John Stanning @ 114:

The SAP company is worldwide and has sold a lot of product, so they must be doing something right.

As the excerpts above illustrate, this last would require a specific definition of "right." If "right" means successful advertising for your product in glossy journals such as, "Yes, You Clueless Executives Know Twice as Much about Information Technology as Those Snotty Computer Nerds," leading said executives to enthusiastically embrace an expensive, closed solution that is loathed by those who actually have to implement it, and is a poor match for what the institution actually needs...[Pause to draw breath] ...then I suppose they're indeed "doing something right." Though some of the credit lies with the "consultants" who push plans that are unsuited to the client's needs but which maximize consulting fees.

Hopefully, all of the companies in the above anecdotes learned their lessons... and switched to Oracle / PeopleSoft.

(Speaking of which, did Cleveland State University ever get their bajillion-dollar student records system to work?)

(Personally, I think the fact that Enterprise Resource Planning is referred to as *ERP* really says it all.)

(This parenthetical comment intentionally says nothing. This is important for doing data definitions in JCL.)

My US Borders store (meaning the one I normally go into) has the 3-for-2 table back by the stationery department, behind the three new books tables. It's the first one you see coming in the 'back' door (meaning the door that doesn't open directly to parking). The books on it can be very good.

In my household, which consists of one lapsed-Catholic religious-studies major and one non-religious, Catholic school grad, religious-studies minor, we own no fewer than four Bibles. His Catholic school Bible, my First Communion Bible, one NRSV used in all Bible-related college courses, and one EXTREME TEEN BIBLE! picked up at Walmart because he thought it was funny.

He also thinks it's funny to shelve the EXTREME TEEN BIBLE! next to our abridged Origin of Species. I think it's funny too.

The EXTREME TEEN BIBLE! is not particularly offensive in the text, although it's that dreadful oversimplified English that's just flat and dull. It just has cover pictures of teens doing extreme things, like skateboarding and rock-climbing, while holding out a generic Bible.

My First Communion Bible, a Precious Moments Bible covered in pastel pink with my name stamped in gold, bothers me more -- only because of one color plate. It depicts a Precious Moments-style child, with big sad eyes, carrying a little lamb, also with big sad eyes. And underneath it says "Is your all on the altar?"

It upset me a lot when I was a child. Poor little lamb.

* cue jokes about driving one through the heart of SAP - yeah, yeah.

Businesses move in cycles for a reason. Right now, we're seeing consolidation in distribution. Now Baker and Taylor is in trouble. But Amazon and the Internet have made the small press work again. It is likely that the non-corporate publishers and the authors will eventually win. It isn't a sure thing, though, and people need to vote with their dollars and their feet.

I know it is a PITA to do that, but if you want Mr. Rakusin's reply to be more than entertainment, you need to back him up in the only way the Charlie Rimmers of the world understand.

Take away their business, and keep telling them why.

Somebody upthread said that Rimmer would make a great record company exec. Yes, he would. It is the same mentality. Same song, different verse.

Walt Boyes

* cue jokes about driving one through the heart of SAP - yeah, yeah.

Personally, I'd try for something about heartwood, sap, and stakes, if I were better at that sort of thing.

Of course I wasn't accusing you of being a consultant; I'm sure you're a fine person. And I'm glad that SAP has been satisfactory for your company's needs. There have just been numerous horror stories, in this thread and out of it, that could be considered cautionary about the "one size fits all" approach that is more prevalent in ERP than it should be. I should have appended the obligatory YMMV. And perhaps a LOL; I have trouble keeping up with the young people's slangs, blings, iPods, and such.*

Hmm, perhaps what's needed is some sort of new argumentative fallacy that encompasses use of anecdotes.**

*This reminds me of the last comment thread (at another site) where I facetiously invoked young people's slang... and Mr. Nielsen Hayden himself appeared*** to explain the perfectly ordinary meaning of the old-fashioned expression in question. It's a small world, though I'd hate to implement an ERP for it.

**Yes, I know.

***Well, he commented in the same thread, as opposed to actually appearing, which would have been both scarier and cooler.

If you don't find one on the shelves of your local bookstore, order one.

A simple thing that ML readers can do.

I recall hearing Art Ryan, CEO of Prudential Insurance, on the occasion when he was introduced to product profitability reporting.

He said,"You mean we lose money on 20% of our customers?"

First, yes, we factor in the size of the cars in calculating capacity, thank you very much. The size and # of large trucks is also factored in, since even a small % of them in a traffic stream take up a lot of space on any given road.

Second, the rule of thumb is that at capacity, one lane of a freeway will carry around 3000 vehicles/hour. The speed of the traffic stream at capacity, however, is about 30-35mph. The capacity curve is a parabola with the closed end facing to the right and the two sides of the graph representing speed and vehicles/hour; lower speeds mean fewer cars/hour pass a given point, but so does higher speeds since the space between the vehicles increases. This is a theoretical maximum capacity; things like lane widths, horizontal distance to obstacles, grades, weather conditions, big trucks, etc, can degrade this.

Third, stopping distance for a vehicle at a given speed is made up of three parts, not two; perception time, reaction time, and the ability of the vehicle to stop once the brakes are applied. Perception time is how long it takes the driver to recognize there's something going on that he needs to react to; reaction time is how long it takes him to actually hit the brake. The third category is dependent on several non-driver related factors, such as tire condition, brake condition, and environmental conditions. If you're driving a car with worn brakes, bald tires, and in a heavy downpour, don't expect your stopping distance to be very good.

Fourth, yes, opening a brand new road touted to reduce congestion and decrease travel times can actually increase both, in a macro-transportation view. While someone going from Point A to B using the new road may get there faster, if all the cars trying to get to Point B from A use the new road, the destination point is going to become very congested indeed. That's why traffic operations and capacity studies now use computers to analyze not just one road's capacity, but the entire network of nearby roads to see how adding a new route will affect the overall traffic operations.

Oops. You are absolutely right. In my defense, I've had a sinus headache for going on three days; it's beginning to get to me and affect medium-term storage.

When you said that I frantically scrolled back
up-thread to see if I did post in the wrong discussion. I agree it was a minor sub-thread in the larger one, but my wife noticed the comments and encouraged me to throw my $0.02 into it.

Canadian funds, or American?

I know the feeling - mine are generally low-level sinus (very dry weather does this) or full-on jobs from getting dehydrated. Either way, thinking hurts.

There's a difference still?
[Check's latest exchange rate]

Only 7% now... ($1 US = $1.07 CAN)

Back-on-topic comparison:
$1 US = $1.20 AUS

To start with, none of the higher up decisions have anything to do with me. I just help run the shop - organise the stock, make the shelves look pretty, order books in for customers, etc. etc. So all of this was a bit of a surprise to me! From what I've seen working there for nearly three years, we have a good range of books, a loyal customer base, friendly staff, and we make a good profit. I've really enjoyed working there, because I love books, I love reading, I love doing the little "I've read it and loved it!" signs to put with my favourites. I think that any slander against the store staff is really unjustified.

However, I'm incredibly morally opposed to the letter Charlie sent, and incredibly shocked - I've MET Charlie, he's a lovely guy. Doesn't come through in his letter, huh? I hate what's going on, and I hate having to be ashamed of my workplace. Again - I disagree with this whole thing. I think the higher-ups are clearly in the wrong. But I don't like the fact that the whole book chain is being hated on because of a wanky executive letter.

Also, while for the most part I was cheering Michael Rakusin on, I was pretty damn insulted by this: "one has to train sales people of competence". Come on, now. Don't pick on the little employees - everyone that I've ever worked with has had a love of books and a great way with customers. We just doing our jobs, selling books. Hate on the execs, not us.

But if you think they value you and your fellow-employees any more than they value their suppliers, think again. They've proven that they'll trash and burn profitable relationships of many years' standing the instant they think it'd make next month's bottom line look better. They'd think wrong, of course, but a mind that imputes no value to human relationships cannot see the error.

Charley Rimmer is probably sitting in his office at this moment asking himself "What did I say?", and honestly not knowing.

mds 162: By your "Yes, I know" do you mean this?

Apparently.

[Angrily tears up partially-filled-out patent application]

One of the old Unixes (irix?) used an empty file with the executable bit set as its implementation of the program "true". The system thought it was a shell script, loaded it, ran it (which did nothing), returned success. Clever, eh?

Except it didn't _quite_ do nothing. When running a new shell script, the shell reads and executes the script in /etc/profile first,to set up the environment. Now what happens if you use this version of "true" in /etc/profile? It caused an endless loop, spawning processes recursively until memory filled up.

Piggy noted that this was an infinite bug density. One bug in zero bytes of code.

It's been my habit lately to buy new books from smaller publishers directly from said publishers, while buying books from larger publishers from Amazon or Barnes & Noble (which is much the closest bookstore to my house; I also buy stuff, mostly used books, at an independent store in Decatur when I make a trip thither every few months). Does it make sense to do that? Or would I benefit the smaller publishers more by buying their books, when possible, from B&N so B&N will order more of the same next time? Do the chain stores keep track of sales records by publisher as well as by author, so sales of, say, _The Atrocity Archives_ are liable to influence them to order more stuff from Golden Gryphon in general and not just more stuff by Charles Stross?

In the olden days I worked in the A&R Imperial Arcade shop in the now defunct Customer Service Department. There were two of us working flat out to process special orders from schools, businesses and individuals - as well as a full-time typist who typed up orders and sent them snail mail. Patrick White would shuffle up to the window to order and collect his books. There was a fantastic art department (where gleebooks’s Ingrid also once worked) and a foreign language section staffed by two European women who had about ten languages between them. Older Sydney-siders would have very fond memories of the old premises and now A&R, which was once the flagship of bookselling in Australia, is run by the worst kind of bean counters. Oh dear…

Hmm. I posted links to some pictures on August 13th; my submission was held for moderator approval because of the number of links. (It appears that something like <a href="http://www.url.com">http://www.url.com</a> counts as two links.) The message now appears in my "View all by" list, but doesn't show in this thread. A glitch in the message-approval system..?

True, but you'll note that no one has said it doesn't--merely that insisting on those rights in this particular form is stupid. With a side dish of "and the way the demands were presented might count as extortion".

What's offensive about it is that A&R is saying "We don't understand our own business model, so we want to screw you over to fix the 'problems' we perceive".

Perhaps if you actually, I dunno, read the original letter and reply? They're quoted right there. The reply not only discusses why the original is offensive, it goes into great detail about the matter.

And what is a business model, if not the whole portfolio of decisions starting with where to place stores, how they're going to look, how to staff them, and finishing with wholesaler discounts and rationalising accounts management and supply channels.

Then I fear I don't understand where our disagreement lies.

A&R sent out a letter to its smaller suppliers which bordered on extortionate. One of those suppliers responded saying, in essence, that A&R needed them more than they needed A&R and A&R could get stuffed if it thought the supplier was going to pay its Danegeld. The content of this thread has been pretty much, "Wow, A&R looks stupid and the supplier looks awesome."

No one's arguing that A&R didn't have a right to send out the original letter, just that it was very very stupid of them to do so.

Yes, yes, it's very wicked of me, I know.

[1] The "Del Monte" ads, which James Nicoll has quoted from on rasfw.

I don't presume to answer for Carrie, but the crux of the matter here is that books are not like groceries. A tin of tomatoes is, broadly speaking, able to be substituted for any other tin of tomatoes. So, you go to Aldi and buy the cheap ones and don't suffer for it. You get what you want.

But one book is not able to be substituted for another. People who want to buy books are not merely looking for paper with words on; they are looking for authors, ideas, award winners, sequelae or whatever.

I know people play slotting fees for supermarket produce, and they have to because when you get right down to it, one fizzy black drink is much like another (except to the tastebuds of love, for which I gather some people swear undying loyalty to a brand). Not so with the written word.

Carrie S thinks you're trolling, is what she thinks, and that you're being disingenuous in a fairly typical attempt to support an unsupportable point.

And she also thinks you need to be acquainted with the concept of "paragraph break". And "strawman argument".

And further, she thinks she's not going to be arguing with you anymore, because you're clearly not interested in actual discussion and it gets tiresome trying to have a battle of wits with one who is so willfully unarmed.

Which doesn't mean there's no place for pared-down retail outlets, of course, or that anyone's business decisions to increase or cut back on the choices they offer are "wrong." It does suggest that there are solid business reasons for going in either direction. Books may or may not be just like groceries, but in fact grocery stores that offer a huge range of options appear to be doing very well.

And "chris oliver" (199) according to View All By, is not the same person as "Chris Oliver" (earlier posts). Perhaps it's the same person using a different email address, and the lack of spaces between paragraphs is consistent across both.

Christopher Davis: I have a sentimental attachment to small, aesthetically pleasing bookshops but everywhere, it seems to me, the market is voting with its feet: Small bookshops are in decline, discounters who merchandise and sell books very much as they do beans or tee shirts are on the rise.

Vian: a similar point, but you underestimate the loyalty consumers feel to particular brands. Very strong brands like Coke pay substantial amounts to keep their brand prominent. Likewise, especially in the States, publishers put enormous effort into getting prominent displays knowing that if they do, they're more likely to get onto the New York Times bestsellers list, which in turn will give the book greater prominence and force major chains into discounting.

Carrie S: don't be so dyspeptic. Books compete with all manner of things, including food, for discretionary spend. And here in Australia they often don't seem like good value. For example, I can buy American Beauty or The House of Sand and Fog 2 dvd sets, with commentary tracks and all sorts of add ons, for $9.95, whereas contemporary novels from Penguin or Random retail for between $23 and $28.

Patrick: I agree with #204. The average size of bookshops went up from the mid-1980s. The problem is, as you say, people are reassured by range but don't necessarily buy it. The minimum range people find credible in a Borders or Barnes and Noble would be around 100,000 titles (compared to maybe 25,000 items in an average supermarket). Publishers use lousy quality wood-based paper in a bid to lower costs and increase their gross margin. The books go yellow within months of being removed from plastic shrink wrap. Backlist (books published more than a year ago) are usually non-returnable, so bookshops have to choose between marking down books, which cuts their margin and erodes the acceptable price for other books, or looking increasingly tatty. For the record, Aldi is doing substantially better in Australia than its full-service, full-range, more attractive rival, Coles.

Xopher: yes, we're both the same people - me and him. The beauty of blog sites is that they allow free, direct, open discussion about serious topics and don't degenerate into adolescent exercises in coercive groupthink. In my dreams.

There's a good conversation to be had on this subject, and you obviously have useful and worthwhile knowledge to contribute. But if you're going to escalate the level of ire and confrontation any time you encounter disagreement or criticism--as you've done here repeatedly, in just a few exchanges--you're going to have a lot of suboptimal conversations.

I haven't seen anyone here argue that A&R should not be allowed to attempt to set conditions on its suppliers. What has been argued here is that their attempt was unforgivably rude, borderline extortionate, and, most importantly, counter-productively foolish. Note that both of our hosts have a vested interest in both bookshops and publishers staying profitable.

You seem to be quite vehement in proclaiming Tower a minor distributor of no consequence, best avoided by publishers in favour of 'more credible' outlets. If this is so, why do publishers continue to deal with them? If they were to disappear, would people really not feel their loss? In your bookselling experience, are books really that fungible?

While I agree with you on (and deplore) the bad paper and production quality of all too many new books, I don't see how the race-to-the-bottom Aldi model will do anything but impoverish the choice of books available, shed readers, and ultimately destroy a viable publishing and bookselling industry. Again, books are not fungible.

Unless the nature of the business relationship really is along the lines of "Jump!" / "How high?", how could one respond to such a declaration except with a "f*ck you" or the equivalent? This is not how one deals with other people/organizations.

Then why bother mentioning it at all?

Hmmm. Let me think about why you might have done that.

Could it be--possibly--to call Patrick pretentious and suspect in such a way as to be able to say that you hadn't actually done so?

That couldn't possibly be it, could it? No one would sink to such a transparent trick in a supposedly rational conversation, right?

don't be so dyspeptic.

Oh, sweetie, you haven't begun to see dyspeptic yet. I've given up trying to debate, and am now toying with you for the entertainment value (cheaper than books!). I'm betting that even though I'm saying flat out that this is an attempt to bait you, you're still going to rise to the bait. If you do, more entertainment; if you don't, you'll go away. Either way, I'll be happy.

Books compete with all manner of things, including food, for discretionary spend.

*cough* That's "spending"

Well then, Mr. Oliver has my apology for that bit.

For example, I can buy American Beauty or The House of Sand and Fog 2 dvd sets, with commentary tracks and all sorts of add ons, for $9.95, whereas contemporary novels from Penguin or Random retail for between $23 and $28.

This is an apples and oranges comparison. The movies you mention were released years ago; the prime market for them is long gone. And by "contemporary" you clearly mean "published in the last 6 to 12 months", because after that time buyers will almost certainly be able to buy a mass market paperback of the same book at about 1/3 the price.

he minimum range people find credible in a Borders or Barnes and Noble would be around 100,000 titles (compared to maybe 25,000 items in an average supermarket).

Please cite a source for that 100,000 figure; it seems very large to me. A quick estimate based on Borders near me is that they have at most 40,000 different volumes, and I would believe half of that.

As for the supermarket figure, I believe that's incorrect; I've worked in the business of consulting on supermarket supply chains and personnel scheduling; IIRC an average supermarket has between 35,000 and 50,000 items on its shelves.

As a general rule, it is not a good idea to behave in such as uncivil manner as that letter from A&R shows. In business, as in most things in life, that which is down may go up, and it's never a good idea to create more enemies with grudges to avenge who might, years from now, be in a position to avenge them.

We reject such silly notions.

A quick survey: There are 12 new fiction books, all paperbacks, on the front page of the Penguin Australia site (Random House makes it harder to find them). Five are priced at $24.95 (including a Penguin Modern Classic reprint and the current Booker Prize winner); five are $32.95 (including the new William Gibson), one is $29.95, the last $39.95.
I'm not expecting to see most of them reduced by much over the next year or two at least – perhaps reduced by 1/3rd or less in specials. A few, including the Gibson & perhaps the reprint, might be popular enough to get deals at the discount stores like K-Mart, but that's more for 'best-sellers' and popular genres like thrillers, horror, etc., or ones several years old where they're trying to move the remaining stock.

(Tangentially, one of my hobby horses is the frequent difference between our Region 4 and Region 1 or 2 DVDs of the same film or TV show. Quite often the "commentary tracks and all sorts of add ons" are not on our version. Gladiator, I've heard, and The West Wing box sets certainly, are examples.)

though I believe Aussies buy quite a few more books each per year.

Good on you. One of the reasons I live in Portland is that, at least within the city, which contains a little over a third the total metropolitan region population, something like 40% of all eligible inhabitants of the city have a library card. This is unusual in the US. It helps that we also have one of the largest single book stores in the world (Powell's Books).

Is there any good justification for the existence of DVD region codes, other than to make the distributors more money?

Distributors can actually make more money in countries where it is legal to defeat region encoding, simply by releasing different extras in different countries. For example, someone in Australia might order the original bare-bones R1 release of Serenity, and then the R4 version with all the juicy extras[1], and then the R1 special edition, and so on.

The R1 and R4 releases of The Phantom of the Opera also have extras unique to their respective regions.

[1] and I'm not mentioning the specially packaged versions put out by EzyDVD and JBL HiFi -- oops.

I believe that's partly a side-effect of Hong Kong (Region 3) returning to Chinese (Region 5) sovereignty in 1997. (Imagine if New York City or San Francisco belonged to one DVD region and the rest of the US to another.) Chinese manufacturers rather sensibly started making multi-region players for the local market.

Jakob: Books bought as gifts for other people (rather than as personal purchases) are incredibly fungible within a range. If they weren't - if a high proportion of people had a completely inflexible notion of what it was they wanted and if people truly had massively diverse tastes and didn't respond to clever merchandising - bookselling would be even more of a nightmare than it already is, because there are more than a million English language books in print and a small independent bookshop in Australia might stock less than 4,000. In Australia, as elsewhere, something between 70 and 80 per cent of books are bought in the three months before Christmas. They are mostly bought for other people and as economic rationalists know, the desired outcome (rare always and exceptionally rare in more remote relationships) in gift giving is that the recipient values it at more than you paid for it. This, and the convenience aspect, and the ready ability to return items, favours large discount shops. The books that aren't so highly fungible are books like the Harry Potter series and The Da Vinci Code, but these are exactly the books discounters slash to cost price or below - robbing specialty bookshops such as Angus and Robertson of an opportunity to make margin on the few titles they might hope were sure things.

Bruce Cohen: It's not apples and oranges. By contemporary novels I really meant anything still protected by copyright. Catch 22, for instance, sells for $23 as a book, and probably for about $3 as a dvd. Both are entertainment and educational experiences. I'd agree that books are different to films and provide, sometimes and only in some respects, a richer experience.
100,000 is indeed a higher figure than I should have written. The biggest Borders, Barnes and Nobles and Waterstone's shops have between 80,000 and 250,000 titles in stock.
The supermarket figures are often repeated here in Australia, but for reference look at The Australian (www.theaustralian.com.au) 13 September, page 22:
"In addition to the expansion of the store portfolio, Aldi Australia managing director Michael Kloeters said yesterday that the company had increased the number of products it sold by 50 per cent over the past 12 months.
Aldi previously stocked about 600 different product lines, compared with the 25,000-plus offered in the full-range supermarkets run by Coles and Woolworths.
The bulk of the groceries it offers carry Aldi's own proprietary brands, which Mr Kloeters is careful to differentiate from the ``home brand'' products offered by his bigger competitors, saying Aldi sells ``brand quality'' without the price tag associated with brand marketing.
By cutting out brand duplication, the product range and store size are drastically reduced -- as are prices, with a recent Choice survey finding a basket of selected groceries from Aldi cost around half as much as those bought from the major retailers.
This has made Aldi a hit with budget-conscious shoppers, and the introduction of 300 new lines may broaden its appeal and enable it to accelerate the growth of its market share, currently running at 6.5 per cent for packaged groceries on the eastern seaboard."

Bruce @ #216 Is there any reason for region codes? Presumably it's to stop distributors in one country - especially one with a lower cost base or better economies of scale - undermining the value of the intellectual property they've bought by selling into their territories. If there were no barriers to trade whoever sold to the Chinese market, where piracy is rife, costs are low, and people are poor, could sell into first world countries, destroying local competitors, killing off local video libraries, undermining the local film industry by reducing its dvd revenues etc. It would also damage the book trade as the price difference between books and other sources of entertainment and education became greater.

Sorry about misspelling your name Patrick Nielsen Hayden. I meant no slight. It was a straight forward mis-keying, something so common that there's a quick keys command (control + insert) to remedy it. I hadn't figured your double barrelled name meant you'd taken on your partner's surname - it's not something I've seen done by adults in Australia or Britain (kids have double barrels all the time, especially if the parents aren't married) but it sounds like a fine idea.

And look, now he's backpedaling on the entire name issue, and claiming a typo. Isn't that cute?

I also admit to puzzlement about the insistance that the book Catch 22 costs $20 more than the movie. That's fine, but what if one doesn't want the movie? When you're talking about picking a book in a bookstore, the price of DVDs is utterly irrelevant. (Similarly, when you're looking for something to watch on movie night, it doesn't matter how cheap a book is.) Books and films don't provide the same experience; it might all be "entertainment", but it's not all the same kind of entertainment.

"Books bought as gifts for other people (rather than as personal purchases) are incredibly fungible within a range." etc.

Over the years, I've received a few "Ah. Er, just the thing I need, how nice" book gifts. But people who buy books for other people are, I think, usually about as choosy when they do so as when they buy books for themselves.

Also, even people who've known the Unhyphenated for decades occasionally misspell their name. And that particular letter combination is pernicious; I've written "Tolkein" on more than one occasion.

I think Chris Oliver deliberately snarked on Patrick's two-part name, misspelled it by accident, and was completely innocent of the accusation of sexism, because he didn't know Patrick had taken Teresa's name (and she his).

If he did know, and misspelled it deliberately too (personally I find that last hard to imagine), who cares? Let's accept his retreat from those things and go on talking about the topic.

Lowering the level of discourse isn't pleasant for anyone except the people doing so (and random popcorn watchers, but there aren't many here). If he wants to apologize and adopt a more civil tone, why are YOU still trying to goad him? At this point it's starting to make you look bad.

As for talking about the topic, that's what the final paragraph there is for. I truly don't get what relevance DVD prices has to book selection, since there are times when the DVD won't do.

They serve to make books look unattractively overpriced by comparison, I think. If I can get Catcher in the Rye in DVD format for one-fifth the price of the book version, it may incline me to think that the booksellers are being unreasonably extortionate. Which is not to say that there aren't very good reasons for the price discrepancy, but they're not transparent to Me The Consumer.

There's some research indicating that people don't like to feel that they're getting a bad deal on something, or being "taken advantage of", to the extent that they'll work against their own apparent self-interest in order to avoid an "unfair" bargain. In this case, since I really want Catcher in the Rye, I'll buy it anyway; but in future I won't go to the bookstore as often because I perceive their books to be overpriced. So the low DVD prices are bad for the book industry in general.

On a less theoretical note, as an American visiting Australia, I genuinely was rather taken aback by the high book prices. Geographical isolation doesn't seem sufficient to explain it.

For the record, Dr Seuss books sell for 5 pounds in the UK, and $8.95 list price here. Discounting is rife (though it is in the UK, now, it didn't used to be) so The Guinness book of Records UK RRP 25 pounds, is discounted in Australia to between $19.95 and $30. The exchange rate now has the Australian dollar worth 42p. The prices have to include a risk premium to take account of many more elements of cost and fluctuating exchange rates. A proper comparison would be to check out the UK and US prices of Australian published books - generally higher than their Australian domestic prices.

Sure...but if you don't want the DVD, what good is it? I mean, I get that the book and the DVD both provide entertainment, but they aren't, as I said earlier, the same kind of entertainment. If I want the kind of entertainment I get out of a book, a DVD just isn't going to cut it. Personally I don't generally compare the prices of different media; it's a fool's game to do it precisely because they're different media.

Yep.

I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here. Are you suggesting that all books should attract VAT, or that some books should attract VAT based on whether they are "rubbish" or not? In the latter case, who gets to decide, and how?

That you keep asserting that books are essentially fungible commodities, which doesn't match my own experience, nor that of pretty much everyone else who's posted on the subject around here, including our hosts, who damn well ought to know.

My point was more that a lot of people will probably think to themselves "If they can make a DVD for three dollars, why can't they make an old-fashioned low-tech book for less than twenty?" They will feel ripped off, they will think less of the bookstores, and they may very well buy fewer books because of it. This is only a theory I have, mind you, but I don't think it's implausible. I have certainly seen people making exactly that argument with respect to CDs ("why are CDs so expensive? I can get a DVD for ten dollars that has way more stuff on it.")

I would wager that the readers of Making Light are extremely devoted to books and also reasonably savvy as to the reasons behind the price differences, and so the phenomenon won't affect their book-buying habits all that much. However, there are many people for whom this is not true. Would that it were; I imagine the bookselling industry would simply combust with joy if their entire market consisted of such ardent bibliophiles...

Oh! OK, I get it. Dunno why it took me so long.

Not that those prices match my experience, mind you; I've never seen a new DVD for less than $5US, and that's the scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel* bin at Wal-Mart. But the principle holds. I don't know what the response to it is, except that I feel very strongly that there is one.

* Cheap action flicks, cheap horror flicks, gross-out comedies, bare-bones versions of stuff that later came out with a director's cut, that sort of thing, along with the occasional "This was a huge hit but we bought twice as many copies of it as we needed".

Cue unsourced anecdotes about Scholastic losing it's shirt on HP6, Wal-Mart equivalents undercutting real bookstores, etc.

*I especially liked this bit of vitriol:
For $34.95, I'd bloody well better be getting a fully Smyth-sewn binding with a full cloth cover on low-acid, high-opacity paper. The irony that this pipe dream concerns the packaging, and not the contents, is purely intentional.

Also, you seem very keen to defend Charlie Rimmer because of the tough conditions that he has to operate in. However hard Mr. Rimmer's job may be, it doesn't excuse acting like a clueless arse - the main reason, I suspect, that people have jumped on him so hard.

I guess my point is - do non-book people really buy books as gifts? Book people will buy non-fungible books for themselves more often than fungible gift books. Non-book people would (I would think) be more likely to buy non-book gifts if DVDs are cheaper. Also, it is easier to know someone's taste in movies than their taste in books. I don't see the idea that gift books are fungible as being a significant issue when discussing the problem of a bookstore limiting its stock by eliminating some publishers, because I think the number of people who buy fungible gift books is small and, as you say, probably getting smaller. I would expect the market to be in people who buy books for themselves.

Jakob #257: I absolutely prophesy the death of the book industry. No-one seriously believes MP3s deliver the same sound quality as cds, but people are getting rid of clutter (probably just to make room for more). In Australia one of the first recommendations of real estate agents is for vendors to get rid of their books because books look like clutter to most property buyers. When Steve Jobs or HP invent a portable flat screen storage device onto which whole libraries can be downloaded, and when HP or Canon invent a plausible print and bind/docutech machine, bookshops will die. Jason Epstein predicts the bookshops and libraries of the future will be incorporated within electrical stores and office suppliers, offering print on demand for the last remaining environmental vandals who like the feel of oil-based inks on dead trees. The only remaining challenge is how to make a financial return from book downloads, and how (as with most internet commerce) to stop all the spoils going to a tiny number of people and companies at the top.
Another aside: My first publishing job was with Cambridge University Press, who used to publish incredibly obscure musicology books with global print runs of 150 copies, and correspondingly high prices. Such books always fell down production schedules since, even at such extortionate prices as, in one case something like (at current values) $US250 for an 50-page book on Music of the Tang Court, there was no money or glory in it. All that sort of slightly cynical we've-got-the-libraries-over-a-barrel publishing, most scholarly monograph publishing, has gone online, as has most journal and almost all loose-leaf legal publishing. Books may be a reasonably effective medium for fiction, but surely not for non-fiction.
Nothing will stop the death of the book business as it currently is. It might always make some slight sense to buy childrens picture books in ink-on-paper form because reading them develops fine motor skills, but everything else can (and I think will) go electronic. I'd stake every cent I own that by 2030 books will be as redundant as vinyl records or 8-track cassettes. What do you reckon?

R.M. Koske: I think you're right to question whether the (increasing proportion of) non-book people buy books as gifts. I-Tunes cards seem very popular and sensible. In Australia, at least, people are concerned about the environment and about the values that underpin the annual Christmas orgy of consumption without which the book trade would immediately collapse. The Australian population is secular (hence no religious commitment to Christmas), getting older, wanting to de-clutter, and is falling in love the the internet, iPods and flat screen tellies. It's also becoming ever more interested in building social capital and engaging with others (cafes are booming) rather than finding quiet corners in which to read Wittgenstein or Marcuse.

Xopher: Uniqueness isn't necessarily the same as non-fungible. Nor is uniqueness remotely rare. A grain of rice is unique (or inherently particular as you would have it), but for most people it's entirely fungible: different but interchangeable with another grain of rice. This point about fungibility has dragged on a bit but all I'm saying is that a substantial proportion of gift purchases are made by people drifting through shopping centres, hoping for inspiration, not wanting to offend people by buying them size 18 clothes when they're size 12. They drift into and out of shop after shop before succumbing to a half-way decent vase in a homewares shop or a splashily colourful cookbook by a celebrity cook they've never actually watched but have read about in some celebrity magazine.

"It's the literary club no author wants to belong to, but boasts the likes of Salman Rushdie, Bill Clinton, Paulo Coelho and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A survey out today of the books Britons own but do not finish shows a surprising lack of appetite for many of the nation's most popular titles.

"The bestselling book that topped the poll, DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, has been lauded the world over - ironically, for its explosive denouement. But 35% of respondents who bought or borrowed the Man Booker-winning satire about a Texan schoolboy in a death row reality TV show failed to get to the end.

"And while few can dispute the crazed popularity of JK Rowling's books amid the under 16s, the survey of 4,000 adults found 32% were not particularly fussed about the fourth in the series. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire beat James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses - running to more than 1,000 notoriously laborious pages - into second place.

"Other surprise "winners" in the online survey include Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the Louis De Bernières novel that has sold more than 2 million since 1994, and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist.

"Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey, commissioned by Teletext, said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them. Rachel Cugnoni, from the publisher Vintage, said the apparent unpopularity of tough literary texts like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment - all voted in the top 10 - suggests readers are purchasing "intellectual credibility for the bookshelf" rather than books they actually want to read.

"Far too often people are buying books because they think they will be good for them, rather than because they think they'll enjoy them," she said. "There are certain books that everyone buys because the whole world has read them." That is not to say, however, that the literary industry cares. "The important thing from a bookseller's point of view," said a spokesman for Waterstone's, "is that people buy the books in the first place." Half of the top 10 non-fiction books people buy but don't read are autobiographies. My Life, by Bill Clinton, and My Side, by David Beckham, made the top three."

I understand the distinction between uniqueness and fungibility. You have not explained why you think books are fungible across different titles, under any circumstances. I think that's a fairly odd claim, and I really want to hear why you think it's true, and under what circumstances.

I'd take that bet, and I'd take every cent you own.

Here's why: By the time a printed book has rolled off the press every watt required to use it fully has already been expended. No additional energy needs. That isn't true of any other system, now available or yet to be invented, of electronic paper, flat screens, or what-may-have-you.

I'll let you know where to send it.

(Oh -- the reason I "haven't mentioned" those other costs you speak of is because they're irrelevant.)

FWIW, there's a guy on the "OLPCnews" group blog (not affiliated with the OLPC project itself --- they don't really like it much) who's playing with the notion of extremely low-power ebook readers, with no power-drinking wireless, and a CPU that has barely enough heft to find the next page and put it on the screen (after which it stops consuming power as well). He's speculating (no firm power budget yet) that the thing could conceivably be powered by a built-in solar cell using current technology. And by 2030, it's reasonable to assume that solar cells and displays will both have improved somewhat (which would also help with the other problem with ebook readers --- that screen fonts are just uglier than paper ones). Details here; I'm not sure about all of his ideas (the case for a proprietary, specialized format is really weak), but it's fun to consider.

The culture that would grow up around the care and feeding of such devices in a post-apocalyptic society which had lost the capacity to duplicate them, or even understand their operation, is left as an exercise for the interested writer.

I was thinking about the book-people vs. non-book people thing* and Chris Oliver's assertion that bookstores are essentially doomed. Two thoughts occurred to me:
1. I'm not sure a bookstore needs to sell printed volumes of paper to be a bookstore. But it does need to sell reading material that I can browse before I buy. An audiobook, while often enjoyable and much more in my reach than it used to be, is not at all the same thing.** If we do go to all electronic texts, I'm not sure the bookstore even needs to be a realspace store.***

2.I'm wondering if there is an existing non-fungible business model that bookstores might look to as an example if Chris is right and society stops generating significant numbers of new book people. Wine is non-fungible to aficiandos, but it is also a consumable, not an enduring item. Comic book shops, maybe?

*This is of course not a true opposition - you aren't one or the other, you're somewhere on a spectrum. I find it hard to imagine real non-book people, but that's because I'm a book person from a family of book people. The family members who don't read novels are still voracious consumers of non-fiction, particularly how-to and do-it-yourself literature.

**It may be just me, but I cannot just sit and listen to an audiobook. I must have something to do at the same time. Cooking, cleaning, knitting, et cetera. If I don't have something to do, I'll get distracted and realize I've stopped listening. Audio books for me are to occupy my mind while I'm doing something else, not a way to "read." The lack of the right kind of things to do often leads me to have trouble finishing audiobooks.

***If/when ebooks become a commercially viable source of reading material, I think there will be some people who want the experience of going out to companionably browse books with other readers, regardless of book format. They may turn out to be also the diehards who love dead trees best, but only time will tell.

Also, I am not very worried about losing a paperback, or even a hardcover. However, I would worry about losing or breaking an electronic device.

Don't get me wrong, I think ebooks are a cool idea, and have many advantages, but to me, a book is a physical object and the words and ideas it contains.

I happen to think, on balance, that books will continue to be made and sold. The codex is a very practical format for many things. But I don't feel passionately about it; it's something about which I wouldn't be overwhelmingly surprised to find myself wrong.

What I do for a living is develop and promote literary works. If I were to be vouchsafed a vision of the future in which I found that in 2030 I'll be doing it all in pixels and photons, supported by some revenue model that is as hard to imagine now as Google Adsense would have been in 1984, that knowledge would not rock my world or strike at the core of my self-image.

I did no such thing.

Try reading what I said rather than what you wish I'd said.

And keep in touch. 2030 is right around the corner.

What part of "I did no such thing" was beyond your power to parse?

It's energy expenditure to operate. After manufacture it requires zero additional energy to operate a paper book. I suppose you could nit-pick by saying that you have to turn on your room lights to read one after sunset, but that's the best you'll be able to do.

Every single other device you mentioned requires additional energy input. Every ... single ... one.

There, that simple enough for you?

Whenver, wherever, I choose to use a book, it works, and it costs me nothing extra to make it work.

I feel no need to explain further. I've given you all the information you need. Extrapolate for yourself.

Or, rather than extrapolating, just spend your time figuring out your net worth. You'll be sending it to me on 01JAN30. Afterward perhaps you'll be able to look back and see where your argument went wrong.

I've already told you the answer.

Lee is alluding to the old maxim, "When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging". I am not sure whether s/he (sorry, Lee, I don't know your gender) is referring to your arguments or your method of presenting them, however.

I'll try to reply this weekend. Life's a little crazy here.

Those wax cylinders are quite fragile. They're starting to scan them in 3-D, so the recordings can be transferred to less fragile media.

Please do try to find out how current technology works before you make any more bizarre predictions. Learning something about economics wouldn't hurt you either, chum.

I've put you in my mental box labeled "Doesn't understand the problem," and in the smaller box inside it labeled "Not worth trying to teach."

You've made a bet. I will collect.

Chris, on previous posts you've made the following points about private equity and their ownership of A&R: 1) margins are extremely tight in the book business, 2) private equity firms take a 2 per cent or greater management fee for their funds, 3) private equity operates on a very high debt to equity ratio of, according to Chris, 30/70, 4) costs of borrowing are rising in the short term though in the long term they'll settle (in your view), 4) synergies and good governance were exploited and instituted by A&R's previous owners, WH Smith, 5) all unnecessary costs have been stripped from the business 6)there doesn't seem to be a trade purchaser waiting in the wings to snap up A&R, 7) the A&R business probably hasn't been making enough money to pay the interest and pay down the value of the loans, 8) A&R's capital upgrades on refits etc haven't worked, 9) digital threats. Given these points, all of which I agree with, how are Pacific Equity ever going to make a capital gain for their investors as well as a management fee for themselves? It can't be done, can it?

Reasonable conversation in this blog seems almost to have stalled - sabotaged by the likes of James D and Carrie S. Maybe those of us who want to discuss important topics for the book trade and intellectual life can move to another site or email one another direct? Chris Oliver's email is shown above - hope you don't mind - (oliverandmaxwell@yahoo.com.au) and mine is ahdblair@yahoo.com.au. For the issue-avoiding conspiracy theorists out there, I don't know Mr Oliver or any other contributor to this blog, nor do I work for Angus and Robertson, nor, according to my inquiries, does Mr Oliver.

That was't a lesson on etiquette, Mr. Oliver, it was a lesson on how to stop looking like a git.

I've obviously offended you and several of your tight clique of economically semi-literate Luddites.

*sigh*

Yes, yes you have. But not by having opinions that differ from ours. You have done so by calling us things like "economically semi-literate Luddites" and then claiming you never said anything offensive.

Carrie S...have you SEEN [her] website and Wiki page (presumably self-penned!)

Um...I don't have a Wikipedia page--I'm not notable. As for my "website", yes, I do write my own blog.

By the way, does the phrase "ad hominem attack" mean anything to you?

By all means use my email address. Like too many blogging sites, this one's (I think) long on stridently-expressed undisciplined opinion-mongering but woefully short of substance. Unlike a few other sites it has a spitefulness about it - especially towards those who disagree with the monstering of Charlie Rimmer. For me it's a sado-masochistic exercise I can't be arsed continuing with. Plus, I have a feeling the topic and all possible side issues is completely exhausted, isn't it? I look forward to Nancy Mittens's next post, but that's about all. Given that the link was forwarded to me by a friend at Penguin Books, I'm surprised and disappointed there hasn't been more informed comment from mainstream publishers and booksellers rather than (without wanting to be too mean) vanity authors and nerdish self-publishers.

Can't blog at www.theaustralian.com.au or write letters to The Australian newspaper any more because I work there.

On the other hand, we don't generally insult our hosts and our fellow visitors, and continue doing so after being informed that it's been noticed and is unwanted. Come to think of it, why are you still sitting here on Miss teresa's vine-decked terrace?

Really?

You have heard of TOR, right? Being as terribly familiar with the industry as you are, and all, I mean.

Peruse the names on some of the other posts on this blog - many of them are professional authors or editors, our Hosts in particular.

Of course, in your lofty circles, mere best-selling genre and academic publishing may not count. Go and google Teresa and Patrick - go on, we'll wait.

Run along, dear. Or keep digging - you already look like a bit of a dill; you can't do your rep here any more harm by continuing.

Also, if anyone's keeping track, can I claim flamer bingo for For me it's a sado-masochistic exercise I can't be arsed continuing with.?

As long as you're here, Chris ("Amanda," you can try to answer too), here's your next assignment:

Write a 500-word essay on how crystal radio receivers work.

If you cite Wikipedia as a source you'll get an automatic "F."

Surely not - surely the protocol is that you announce you are flouncing off, and then you flounce back to try and get the last word?

(In the style of Mr Oliver, I'm not using "flounce" in a mean, nasty way - I'm just describing the manner of his posting. You know, the way he uses "luddite" and "undisciplined opinion-mongering" )

I've seen a few commenters apologize for double-posting for just that reason in a number of older threads.

I'm a little reluctant to test that theory for myself, though.

Same question to you: Describe how crystal radio sets work.

More recently, we've had Chris Oliver complaining about everyone else's bad manners while displaying same.

As for you, O history-less one, I think you're a sock. Not only do you repeat Oliver's "dull and tedious" phrase, but you also try to redirect the conversation just as he does.

And yes, the conversation has also been about books.

(Er, Jim: I also post from SE Oz.)

Dr Mchl

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f y wld lk t dscss ths wth m n mr dtl, m dlghtd t cnfrm n ppntmnt wth y t 1:00pm n Frdy 17th gst fr 10 mnts t my ffcs t 379 Cllns St, Mlbrn.

Bst Rgrds,
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I'm getting a distinct whiff of dleif-eht-fo-ylil here. "De spin(n)a", indeed.

Back to the sock drawer!

I agree with Teresa's analysis of the situation, so I won't rehash all that except to point out one particularly amusing bit: Rimmer expects Michael Rakusin to fly from Sydney to Melbourne for a 10-minute meeting in which, I presume, Rimmer will tell Rakusin to get rooted. How on earth are they to discuss the situation "in more detail" in ten minutes, anyway?

Is your hat comfortable, Despina? Wouldn't you like to swap it for Chris Oliver's instead? He, too, believes there is nothing wrong with the Rimmer letter.

I thought the same from Oliver's first or second post, until he gave us that potted bio in #243 and then claimed to work for The Australian in #301.

But perhaps I am being too gullible.

I may be one of the few people in the State who persists in the belief that he is a bit of a duffer, who isn't even very good at puppetry, because, really, how hard is it to fake a server address? But then, I'm one of those luddite people. Apparently.

(Also, Despina - what part of "give us an amount of money we have arbitrarily decided we want, or we won't play with you any more" is good business practice? Also, see mcz above on how not to summon someone so that you can tell them to get rooted.)

So, if it was a kiss-off, why bother with the invoice? Was it mere blame shifting? ("Oh well, we were willing to keep buying these fine Australian books, but Tower wouldn't meet our demands, er, um, I mean, consider our requests")

Why not simply say "We've revised our business model. It is with regret that we inform you that we must suspend arrangements with smaller publishers for the foreseeable future. Thank you for your past association with A&R, and we wish you all the best for the future."

Unless of course, it wasn't a kiss-off but an attempt to extort money by threats, or make it look like Tower were choosing not to be a supplier.

This isn't an attempt to work out a new deal: it's a blatant demand for money. It's precisely the sort of demand that an author gets from a vanity publisher.

And 5% per day interest on late payment, that rate would make loan-sharks envious.

Despina, if you think that's a sound approach to business, you know sweet Fanny Adams about business. And books are not breadloaves.

Well, apart from the "give me money or else" bit.

So, no. Not really, I'm afraid.

I mean, can you imagine a publisher or editor saying "well, give me a bunch of money and *then* I'll read your manuscript." Actually, you don't have to imagine it - it's a recognised scam, which we're constantly having to warn student writers about down my way.

Publishing (or not) is an editorial choice, which is a combination of art and marketing and commerce and whatall. Asking money to enter into or continue a business relationship ... not so much.

But what would I know? I don't even think books are fungible.

I suppose we'd better give them time to reply, but the cat is already looking nervous.

And I didn't know you could miaow "superheterodyne".

It certainly puts the onus back on Tower and the smaller publishers to take the first step. But that puts A&R in a position of negotiating strength - they can be ever so receptive to counter suggestions and offers, and can work with the smaller players to come to mutually beneficial solutions. Publicity gold, if you know what you are doing, and pretty good business in that you never know what solutions might be available, and ex cathedra demands are not a great way to find out.

The letter was, at best, a shortsighted tactical blunder. Whether it was more than that is part of the debate here.

here's Rimmer's letter without interpolated comments. I can't see what's wrong with it. If you had a private business wouldn't you want to be able to determine what you stocked and from whom?

Speaking as the owner of a private business, of course I do. However, that is most emphatically not the point here. The point is that the letter itself is obnoxious, unprofessional, and potentially even illegal.

If, as a business owner, I felt a supplier wasn't providing me with a good enough deal for me to profit from their goods, I would approach them individually, and suggest they renegotiate their discount with me so that in the future we could both make a profit. If we found that no mutually profitable arrangement was possible, I would cease buying from that supplier. Recuperating my past losses would not be part of what I considered, future profitability would be the only concern.

The letter in question doesn't do that. It says, effectively, "Your books aren't profitable. These are our new terms. Here's the bill for our past expenses in marketing them."

The letter also specifies an usurious interest rate for late payments: 5% daily. That's a whopping 5,400 _million_ percent APR (calculate it yourself: ((5/100 + 1)^365 - 1)*100). If you owed me $100 and I charged you that interest, and for some reason your cheque turned up 4 days late, that would be an extra $21.55 you owed me for the privelege. If, for reasons of cashflow, you had to defer payment for a month (it happens), you'd then owe me $392. Does this seem like a fair and equitable deal between supplier and retailer to you, or somebody with a dominant market position abusing it to make a quick buck?

Then we get down to the dirty tactic of sending an invoice without a prior agreement to pay. It's well known that many businesses will often pay any invoice they receive from a known trading partner without considering whether or not it is correct. It is therefore illegal in many jurisdictions to send an invoice in the belief that it does not reflect an amount which is actually owed. It is certainly immoral.

In my limited experience, that sort of thing is usually built into ARC grants, and the major academic institutions also often have funds and practices which offset it (or agreements with major publishing houses, which see such things waived - at least that's how it is with History texts); it's expected, it's SOP, it doesn't come in an arrogant form letter and what I may personally think doesn't really matter.

No one is suggesting that A&R should lose money and go out of business subsidising small presses. But their idea of a solution, in this case, excaserbated the problem and forestalled discussion about what the small presses could do about it. They'll reap a long harvest of hostility, they are unlikely to improve their bottom line if they only deal with major publishers (because they'll be competing with much bigger fish) and the industry as a whole will be the poorer for it.

This, from dictionary.com, will do:

(esp. of goods) being of such nature or kind as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind.

Note that exchangable/interchangable does not mean identical.

Now, books in Italian, French, Archaic and Modern English and Latin are books I can read. By definition, _Beowulf_ by Seamus Heany is not interchangable with _Beowulf_ by C Wrenn.

But just because I can't read, say, Mandarin, that does not mean that to me all books written in Mandarin are interchangable. Nor is a Mandarin book interchangable with a Russian one, or a Spanish one, or one written in binary. Because the book buying public does not begin and end with me. If I wanted to buy my father-in-law a book in Mandarin, I wouldn't just pick out something with a pretty cover and hope for the best. (Hell, I might end up with chick-lit, and he'd beat me senseless with it.)

Books are not fungible, whether I can read them or not, and whether I can make anything of what I read or not. They are as non-fungible as paintings, lectures or husbands. One is not exchangable for any other, even the ones I would not allow in my house. Perhaps especially them.

That says more about your vision than it says about the letter.

I think that's an older buying pattern. These days, people will buy a voucher rather than a book (OK, I buy my mum the new Bryce Courtney every year, but I wouldn't substitute that with, say, Tim Winton). The reason vouchers are so popular, or one of them anyhow, isn't that people are lazy; it's that these days, people value being able to get exactly what they like. So no, the gift-buying public isn't infintely picky, but it won't just pick up any old generic thing (caveat on Bryce Courtney) these days either.

And while I think it'd be splendid to be able to walk into a bookstore which contained all books past and present, simply for my browsing and buying pleasure, I don't think there's any way in the seven hells to make a viable business out of such a thing.[1] I just think that one of the cannier ways for a bookshop to compete with a department store is to offer a diversity which a department store doesn't. Niche marketing, the long tail and all that.

If you can't compete with McDonalds, sell better food to people who will pay for it.

[1] Outside of Science Fiction ...

So now I don't know what to think. Or, rather, I do know what to think but I don't want to think it because I try to maintain a high opinion of my fellow humans.

Crystal radios don't always require a power source...

Bzzzt! Sorry, wrong, but thanks for playing anyway!

That was Chris's example, of course, the crystal radio. He was trying to show that FM radio has supplanted crystal radio despite one requiring power while the other doesn't, but, just as I suspected, he doesn't understand how either work.

Internet retailing was the first studied instance of the long tail phenom, but it's since been observed in traditional marketing as well. The growth of specialist community groups on the web means WOM (well, WOFingers, in the case of blogs and the like) is more powerful than ever, and where marketing used to concentrate on new products, now it is finding great success in older niche products whose markets have expanded due to new potential audiences, usually specialist and often global.

Not so, and that's a cheap shot. I defy you to look at any discussion on this forum and back that up. Polite correspondents who don't gratuitously insult people get treated better than people who turn up and call people luddites and and suchlike. Your female avatars gave you a chance to leave the name calling behind, for which all of us were, I suspect, grateful.

Am I male or female, by the way?

Indeed you can, which is what fooled poor Chris into thinking that crystal radios don't require power.

I could get into quite a bit more detail on how radios work, but this isn't the time or place. In general, you don't need a power source to pick up the signal; all you need is a tuned circuit. What you need the power source for is the amplifier that makes it possible to hear the signal without an earphone.

Tell me: on the day the transmitter doesn't get any power (power that can in many cases be measured in kilowatts) how many of those crystal radios will get a signal? Answer: none of them. For crystal radios to work power is required. It's just that the power is on the transmitter side, not on the receiver side.

"Indeed you can, which is what fooled poor Chris into thinking that crystal radios don't require power. CHRIS WASN'T FOOLED.

I could get into quite a bit more detail on how radios work, but this isn't the time or place. In general, you don't need a power source to pick up the signal; all you need is a tuned circuit. What you need the power source for is the amplifier that makes it possible to hear the signal without an earphone. BUT DID CHRIS SAY ANYTHING ABOUT LISTENING WITHOUT AN EARPHONE? NO

"For crystal radios to work power is required. It's just that the power is on the transmitter side, not on the receiver side."

Is the same not true of books? Readers can consume them without an independent power source, but chopping trees, pulping them, making them into paper, etc etc all require power. Come the apocalypse won't the authorities use radios rather than hand-delivered printed leaflets to communicate with us?

Oh, thanks. You just gave a digital hardware engineer flashbacks to one of his analog courses. I had to build an FM modulator/demodulator out of discrete circuits. Good lord that thing was sensitive. Definitely like the 1's and 0's of the binary world.

Anyway, not sure if I'm telling you something you already know, but diodes act like voltage controlled capacitors when you reverse bias them.

That's the secret of FM.

A reversed biased diode acts as a capacitor. The P and N junction behaves like the parallel plates in a capacitor. As the voltage across the reversed biased diode changes, the surface area of the charge changes. As the surface area of the charge changes, the capacitance changes. As the capacitance changes, the center frequency of the LC circuit changes.

To modulate an audio signal, you AC couple it into the diode, which is in a tank circuit. The audio signal changes the capacitance fo the diode, and therefore the center frequency of the tank circuit, which gives you a different frequency. And vee-oh-lah. Frequency modulation.

I can't seem to recall exactly how to demodulate, but it's a reverse process, obviously. That crystal radio schematic has a reversed biased diode, so I'm assuming they're using it as a voltage controlled capacitor somehow.

Actually, this whole explanation should be footnoted with a huge disclaimer not to try any of this at home. I haven't biased a transistor or done much analog work for many, many years. And I could be completely foobarred here.

;)

Chevy Chase: [interrupting] Miss Litella?

Emily Litella: Yes?

Chevy Chase: I'm sorry. The op/ed piece from the Making Light News Service was about whether or not books were fungible, not that people should grow fungi on them. Fungible, not fungi bowl.

Emily Litella: Oh. I'm sorry. Never mind.

Sherman Young's The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book.

Sherman Young is an e-book enthusiast. It's clear that he doesn't understand the data.

No, I don't care to explain it to you. See above, "Not Worth Trying to Teach."

Weird.

Yeah, give me an A/D converter, a microcontroller, or a decent sized FPGA, and I could whip something up for you.

Poor Chris. You were fooled, and are an idiot, whether you choose to call yourself "Chris" or "Despina" or "Amanda." You have no clue how radio works. I expect you don't have a clue how more recent technologies work either. Crystal radios require power each and every time they're used, which is why they are not a counter-example.

Digital downloads require power each and every time they're used. That is why by the year 2030 books will not be "as redundant as vinyl records or 8-track cassettes." That is also why the forests of Tasmania are irrelevant to the discussion.

You asked what I reckoned. I told you. Politely at first. Now go figure out your net worth: You staked every penny you own on a prediction that won't come true. I'll tell you where to send those pennies come 01 January, 2030.

======

P.S. I haven't shifted ground on crystal radios. The problem is that you still don't understand how they work even after it's been explained.

You owe me a 500 word essay on the subject. Get cracking.

You need a really steep high (low?) pass filter, with a cut off frequency above the band you're listening to. This puts the FM signal on the slope of the filter. As the signal modulates to high frequencies, you get higher amplitude. As the signal modulates to lower frequencies, the filter attenuates it to lower amplitude.

You then have an FM signal that also happens to be amplitude modulated. I think I used some kind of peak detector to demodulate the AM signal and ignore any frequency shifting, and get back the original audio signal that was sent.

Something like that.

Are there any backers for my view on this? In terms of the environment isn't it the total energy budget, and the total environmental impact of the device (book or ebook) which matters? What does anyone make of Sherman Young's illustration of the disutility of the codex - it taking an average of 70 minutes for the British Library staff to retrieve a book stored onsite at Euston Road (for those lucky enough to qualify for a reader's ticket) and much longer for much of the expensively stored 150 million works in their collection? If literary fiction makes up under 2 per cent of books sold, what are the chances of keeping hard copies of slow-movers like Patrick White in stock as bound volumes at comparatively inexpensive prices once ebooks have properly arrived?
These are genuine questions asked in a friendly manner, so please not too much snarking.

Okay, next assignment: a 500-word essay on "The Bicycle." Any citation of Wikipedia in your response will result in an automatic failing grade.

Let me get you started. This is from Australia (your home turf):

The Historic Trend
Bicycle sales in Australia averaged 795,000 per year for the four years 1998 - 2001. In the four years since they have averaged 1,133,000 per year and been over one million in each of those four years. By comparison car sales have never reached one million in a year. From the ABS import figures for bikes it can be shown that the market share for adult bikes has grown from around half of the market in 1998 to about two thirds in 2005.

Source: Bicycle Industries Australia Ltd.

(And, again, for the third flipping time, I am not making an environmental argument. The environmental cost is irrelevant.)

HTH

Never forget, keyboards are disgusting.

Now get to work on those two essays.

But...but...no you didn't! Chris Oliver did, at #261. Now I'm all confused.

(Here's a hint, though: Young is engaged in special pleading. I know, though apparently you don't, where he got his numbers.)

Chris Oliver and Despina are, weirdly enough, posting from the same IP address. What a coincidence!

I still can't see why or how a situation can persist wherein

Are you saying that a multi-billion USD/year market is too small to survive?

As far as crystal radios and bicycles are concerned, I think they're something of a red herring. It's not going to be the cost of making a physical book that will be the problem. It's the time it sits on the shelf.

Modern retailing depends on goods being sold quickly, often taking advantage of the customary grace-period on payment to the supplier. Walk into the shop, and they have your money within, at most, a few days as the bank processes the digital payment. They have that money for a couple of weeks (on average) before they pay the supplier.

Even without that, small profits, quick returns.

Books often don't fit that model. Some types of books do come close, and they're arguably a little more fungible as well. There are differences between Harlequin romances, readers do care about who the author is, but there's a much stronger sense of a standard formula.

Downloads aren't going to change any of that. What they can change is the amount of money tied up in slow-moving stock, though replacing some of that cost with server infrastructure.

There's other advantages.

But none of this means that the book will die. Photography hasn't killed the portrait painter, and there are some things you can do with film which hit fundamental problems with digital media (not insurmountable, but there is, for instance, no way to change your sensor: with film, you can as easily load Kodachrome as Tri-X).

And what photography did was create new markets for pictures. Including, notoriously, new markets for pornography (cue screams of "Think of the children!").

Those markets depended on being able to produce large numbers of copies of the product, at a price that people could afford. Right now, that's blocked by the cost of the reader, and I'm not sure that cost is going to drop, without a radical change in computer-based tech markets. It's as much process cost as parts cost that sets the price.

And if you read as few books as most people seem to, what's the point of buying an ebook reader? It would almost have to become fashion. The iPod is only a small step from the Walkman, and the had a clear advantage over the living-room hi-fi. But an eBook reader?

Yep, we might, but we're freaks. We're not typical.

It's a sensible question to ask you - why do you think printed books will persist, other than in the residual fashion of, for example, vinyl albums?

I'm going to type this very slowly so you can understand it:

Because by the time a printed book has rolled off the press every watt required to use it fully has already been expended.

Here's another data point: Chris and Despina habitually make sequential posts to answer comments from different individuals. It's a quirk I don't see often on Making Light.

Bicycles: If you're around the city centre of Sydney, there are quite a few bicycle couriers still. They have their own particular gathering places too. Commuting as I currently do by bus &/or on foot from the inner eastern to the inner western suburbs, I generally see a few bicyclists also commuting. There are probably rather more around, off the main roads. There are a couple at my work too. But there's not any large percentage at all. Bad infrastructure and support, and hilly, water-dissected terrain don't help.

BTW, all this talk about crystal radios is taking me back to memories of my father, who as a child in the late 1920s/early 1930s would build them, and 40 or 50 years later talked to me as a child of his experiences. I think he only made ones that had an earphone, so you didn't need to amplify the signal very much, if at all. I've seen a picture of a flapper with one tucked into her stocking, holding the earphone up near her fashionably-bobbed hairdo to listen, perhaps to some hot jazz. It was so like some of the ads for Walkmen, or the newer MP3 players.

Thanks to y'all for a lot of good information about a few different subjects, even if there is some unpleasantness in among it. (Fungi bowl: I now know what the word "spaulted" means.)

Here in Europe, BTW, most wood pulp for paper is coming from "farmed" timber, with a fair bit of recycling in the production of low-grade products. If the pulp/paper is local, why export the printing?

[1] I suspect that many core theories about trade, going back to Adam Smith, depend on friction in the markets. There are mechanical systems, such a a vehicle suspension, which depend on there being the right amount of friction. This friction can take many forms: government regulation, communication delays, the mechanical process of recording a transaction.

Get it wrong, and the system oscillates about a new equilibrium. It can be argued that these oscillations are desired by speculators, allowing them to extract wealth from the economically productive parts of the system.

In this, they have the same effect as a government increasing taxes.

But iPhone or Blackberry type devices which play audio files, video, display (and take) photos and video, replace voice recorders, maybe include GPS, and display downloaded books?

While this is all doubtlessly technologically possible, I would question the desirability for most people. I haven't handled an iPhone yet, but the Blackberry devices I've looked at have a fairly small screen size (about 70mm x 50mm I'd guess) compared to the useful area of a page of a trade paperback book (about 100mm x 150mm). Many people complain that trying to read in such a small area is difficult. Making the screen size larger will result in a device that's not convenient to carry all the time, destroying the desirability of such a device. Independent e-book readers seem more likely to be popular in the long run.

Who's going to take a big fat perishable book on holiday as well as that?

Well, it depends. If I'm on a 5 hour flight during which time my phone is required to be switched off, sure I'm going to take a book. I might also take a book to read in locations I wouldn't be comfortable taking senstive and expensive electronics (e.g. to the poolside).

Also, I don't typically take my phone on holiday with me. I go on holiday because I don't want to be disturbed...

And if such a device takes 50 per cent of the 2% market for literary fiction,

Seems unlikely to me, not least because literary fiction will probably be the _last_ genre to adopt such technology.

how will that affect the prices of the remaining 50% of the market?

I don't see 1% of the total market shifting to e-books having much impact on the pricing of the rest, to be honest with you. I certainly don't see why there would be such an effect constrained within a single genre.

And just as MP3s (inferior sound quality to the discman)

The majority of people cannot tell the difference between a low-quality 128kb/s MP3 and a CDDA version. Increase that to 192kb/s or use an advanced coding scheme such as AAC and the number of people who can tell the difference in double blind trials is substantially smaller. 128kb/s AAC usually scores around 4.8 on the standard ITU listening test scale: a naive interpretation of this is that 80% of the listeners rank it 5 (indistinguishable from the original sample) with only 20% ranking it 4 (distinguishable from the original sample but not annoyingly so).

The percentage finding it indistinguishable is probably, in fact, higher than this, as some will have found the differences annoying (scoring it as 3 or lower), and it is worth noting that the subjects in both tests I am relying on were experienced listeners (either audio engineers or musicians).

... and were listening using high quality equipment, which is usually held to show the flaws better (although some tests have found the opposite in the past).

No, I don't want it to move to the internet completely. I, and most of the people I know, love to browse through shelves of books; it's a search mode that works very poorly on the net, because the search mechanisms are very different from those possible to a search engine, involving several senses, and search algorithms that change over short spans of time in reaction to the search results.

In any case, I doubt that the publishers lose very much money on the long tail, if their marketing is good. The ones who constantly look for block buster best sellers do, because they've stuck themselves with the Hollywood business model: make your costs as large as possible while guaranteeing that at least 4 out of 5 releases lose money bigtime; then get it all back in one glorious adrenaline rush on that fifth one.* If you had a choice of business models, would you use this one? I wouldn't; it's way too easy to lose your shirt and your backteeth too.

A similar argument could be made for paperbacks completely replacing hardbacks, since they're so much cheaper to make and can spread fixed costs over more units. Hasn't happened yet, and may not, because the two serve difference markets. I think you'll ses the same thing happen with ebooks and hardcopy in general.

* No wonder there are so many gambling and substance addicts in the film business.

What a weirdo!

The ban on mobile phone use doesn't affect plane safety and won't last, I'm sure.

Oh, yes it will. It's a passenger safety issue: the safety of the passenger who might be making a call in a loud, penetrating voice and be ripped apart by an angry mob of other passengers who don't need to add yet one more irritating factor to what is surely the most irritating means of travel known.

Short-run paperbacks (most new literature) are not much cheaper to make than hardbacks, and won't sustain anything like the same price. The cost of hardbacks is the cost of two boards, a loose jacket, and some binding. But hardback new release fiction barely exists in Australia, which has gone for a so-called trade paperback format, same size as a hardback but in soft covers - more profitable than boards, and it looks reassuringly similar to the next and final smaller format paperback incarnation (so readers don't defer purchase).

Sherman Young quotes the costs of his own book. 3000 copies printed. RRP $29.95. Print costs and fixed production, editing and design costs $14,000. Shop discount 42.5%. Cost of sales and distribution $5.95 a copy. Author royalty $1.56 a copy. So the publisher makes a loss of $5820 if the book sells 1,000 copies, a profit of $2300 if it sells 2000, and a profit of $10,450 if it sells out entirely. The 'profit' has to cover all the publishers overheads. Even selling 2/3 of every book ever published isn't going to give the publisher much hence the desperate urge to over-publish. He gives another example, of a 30,000 print run, with a $70 profit after 10,000 copies are sold. Digital strips out almost all that upfront gamble, doesn't it?

If it's superior now, I doubt that it's beyond the wit of Steve Jobs to come up with a better electronic alternative. Or have I misunderstood you still?

Is it beyond the wit of Steve Jobs to come up with an electronic device that uses zero power?

Yes.

Have you misunderstood me?

Yes, and I suspect deliberately so.

You owe two essays now:

One on how crystal radios work.

One on how bicycles work.

Are you trying for three? I can keep handing out essay topics because the number of areas where you are screamingly ignorant seems to be very large. You would be better off if you carried out my assignments. You'd learn something about the world, perhaps. Unless you just plagiarized them from Wikipedia.

Okay, here's your next assignment: Write 500 words on electricity and its generation.

Maybe, just maybe, something will get through.

Good heavens. What's wrong with Sydney, then, that people don't use bicycles there?

I suspect that the reason Chris didn't see a bicycle in Sydney all day is that he spent the day in Melbourne.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden (374): Charlie Rimmer/Chris Oliver/Amanda Blair/Despina: Thanks! We haven't had such a first-rate buffoon here in ages.

And speaking of incivility: Your use of "predictably" there is slack. You meant it as an insult, of course; but this is the first time you've interacted with me, so you could neither have predicted my remarks, nor known whether they were a predictable response on my part. This makes it clear that your "predictably" is an automatic rhetorical tic, used without thought -- which robs it of its sting.

The only other interpretation I can see is that you find it predictable that people will call you on your false pretenses, and/or greet you as a buffoon.

Self-knowledge is a good thing.

I'm amused to see that we're being called Luddites (that all-purpose insult flung by people who've had their brilliant technological extrapolations disagreed-with) by someone who took more than a month to notice that he was being discussed here, and who thinks that deploying multiple sockpuppets from a single IP address is going to fool anyone.

Onward to questions of bookselling:

Mr. Rimmer, do I understand you to be asserting that books sell just as well via the internet, or as e-texts, as they do in bookstores?

Second question, closely related: are you asserting that when sold on the internet or as e-texts, books sell in the same way or in the same patterns that they sell in bookstores?

mcz (377): Afraid so. This is Internet 101. Say you've criticized a piece of writing. When someone you've never seen before shows up (1.) claiming to be a disinterested bystander, (2.) who interprets the critique as a personal attack on the author, and (3.) just wants to defend the author and the piece of writing on grounds of simple justice, and (4.) cannot shake loose of the argument, but must instead stick around to argue every point as long as points are being made ... that person is always the author. Award extra points if they raise up sockpuppets to assist in the defense. Double the points if they re-post the original text in its uncritiqued form.

Message #320 was the one that convinced me. If that weren't enough, the fact that he has neither denied his sockpuppetry nor objected to being referred to as "Charlie Rimmer" would have done it.

I like browsing in good bookshops and can't quite visualise how a list of books is going to look on the web - I guess something like MP3 files of albums look on allmusic.com. After reading Sherman Young, though, I feel far from glum about the future of quality text - I think when digital takes over quality text will be much more readily available and books which frustratingly miss their intended audience due to distribution failures (no bookshops, no quality review media) will find it. I think PhDs won't have to wait 5 years for their essentially unedited and increasingly out of date thesis to make it into print. I think even the most marginal poet will find an audience, somewhere. As always there are costs and benefits.

Short-run paperbacks (most new literature) are not much cheaper to make than hardbacks, and won't sustain anything like the same price. The cost of hardbacks is the cost of two boards, a loose jacket, and some binding. But hardback new release fiction barely exists in Australia, which has gone for a so-called trade paperback format, same size as a hardback but in soft covers - more profitable than boards, and it looks reassuringly similar to the next and final smaller format paperback incarnation (so readers don't defer purchase).

That and the fact that he can't keep track of which sock puppet said what! Sorry to harp on it, but I find it so very hilarious.