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A&R Whitcoulls Group, a.k.a. the Angus & Robertson bookstore chain, is Australia’s largest bookseller, with 180 bookstores and about 20% of the retail market. A&R’s owners, an outfit called Pacific Equity Partners, are thinking of taking it public.
This may or may not have been why A&R’s commercial manager, Charlie Rimmer, sent a startlingly arrogant letter to Australia’s smaller publishers and distributors, demanding a substantial payment from each by August 17 (reportedly ranging from AU$2,500 to AU$20,000) if they want A&R to keep selling their books. Among the recipients was Michael Rakusin of Tower Books, who made the letter public. (Presently we’ll see Mr. Rakusin’s reply.) From A&R:
Dear MichaelTacky. When you’re sending a formal blackmail request, you should always use the recipient’s full name.
I am writing to inform you of some changes in the way we manage our business.Malarkey. If you’re a bookstore chain, doing business with a publisher doesn’t mean that you automatically carry a standard number of all the titles they publish. You order the books you want, in the quantities you judge appropriate. Whatever doesn’t sell gets returned to the publishers at their own expense. If A&R hasn’t been making a suitable profit off these publishers, it’s not the publishers’ fault. Booksellers make money by recognizing the books their customers will want to buy, ordering them in appropriate quantities, and selling them well.We have recently completed a piece of work to rank our suppliers in terms of the net profit they generate for our business.
Later we will read how A&R has been determinedly paring down, de-rationalizing, and generally muddling their own purchasing operation so badly that their bookbuyers no longer see any of the books they’re ordering.
We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers,Malarkey again. Rimmer is inappropriately borrowing language from other industries, as though A&R were a construction firm and he’d noticed they were buying their bricks from too many different brickyards. Bricks are interchangeable. Books aren’t. A house built with bricks from one or two brickyards will be just fine. A bookstore that only carries stock from a few publishers will have a thin, poor selection to offer its customers.
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 over 40% of our supplier agreements fall below our requirements in terms of profit earned.He doesn’t say they’ve been losing money on them. He doesn’t say what the requirements are, or how long they’ve been in force. He just says A&R now wants more profit from business it’s already transacted.
At a time when the cost of doing business continues to rise, I’m sure you can understand that this is an unpalatable set of circumstances for us, and as such we have no option but to act quickly to remedy the situation.A&R’s been cutting its operating expenses (ineptly), so if its net profits are down, that’s because its sales are down; and if so, that’s A&R’s fault. But are its profits down? If so, it’s an odd moment for its owners to be taking it public.
In any event, “we have no option but to act quickly” is a barefaced lie. Rimmer’s been describing a slowly developing situation. The only need for speed I can see is that A&R wants to gouge a lot of money quickly out of the small distributors and publishers it does business with, and it wants them to pay up before they have time to compare notes and organize a general response.
Accordingly, we will be rationalizing our supplier numbers and setting a minimum earnings ratio of income to trade purchases that we expect to achieve from our suppliers.“Earnings ratio of income to trade purchases” has nothing to do with A&R’s cost of doing business. What he’s talking about there is the discount rate publishers give bookstores. He’s saying he wants them to give him a higher discount rate; i.e., give the booksellers a greater proportion of the sales revenues, and give the publishers less. (I’m not saying this situation is unique to Australia. Bookstore chains in the US and Canada are always pushing for bigger discounts.)
What I find interesting here is that A&R is specifically putting the thumbscrews on the smaller distributors and publishers. If A&R’s been ordering haphazardly and selling badly, their sales should be down for all the publishers they stock. The only difference is that the little guys don’t have as much clout and can’t hold out as long as the bigger publishers.
If A&R gets a bigger discount, the other booksellers will want one too.
I am writing to you because TOWER BOOKS falls into this category of unacceptable profitability.Raise your hand if you think A&R didn’t know at the time how much it was making on those transactions. No? Me neither.As a consequence we would invite you to pay the attached invoice by Aug 17th 2007. The payment represents the gap for your business, and moves it from an unacceptable level of profitability, to above our minimum threshold.
Wouldn’t life be interesting if we could just tell our trading partners that we’ve decided to raise our “minimum threshold of profitability” on past transactions, and they owe us?
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, A&R “invoiced” Tower Books for AU$20,000.
If we fail to receive your payment by this time we will have no option but to remove you from our list of authorised suppliers, and you will be unable to complete any further transactions with us until such time as the payment is made.For some small publishers and distributors, that’s a death threat. They can’t afford to pay the mordida now, they can’t afford to give A&R a bigger discount, and they can’t afford to lose that large a percentage of their retail sales.
I’m wondering whether it’s also an implicit threat to return all their Tower Books inventory and/or hold on to any monies currently owed to Tower.
I have also attached a proforma for you to complete and return to me, with your proposed terms of trade for our financial year commencing Sept 1st 2007. We have the following expectations:It’s a new contract. Tower is expected to write out the terms of their own servitude and submit them to A&R. Other publishers will be sending in their own offers of terms. Effectively, they’re being ordered to bid down their own market.
I’m not familiar with the “standard rebate/growth rebate” terminology. My guess is that that’s a bigger standard discount, an even-bigger-than-that discount, and a commitment to formalize and regularize tribute paid for co-op advertising.All agreements contain a standard rebate, a growth rebate and a minimum co-op commitment to enable participation in our marketing activity
I believe that means that if A&R sells $1 more of Tower’s books than it sold the previous year, Tower has to pay an even higher discount rate—which is going to amount to a lot more than a dollar.Growth rebates activate as soon as our purchases with you increase by $1 on the previous year
There’s no way the publishers can calculate that in time. The only way to avoid that piratical interest charge is to overpay, then try to get a refund on the overpayment. And you can bet your booties that A&R doesn’t pay publishers anywhere near that quickly.All rebates are paid quarterly for the previous quarter’s performance, you must ensure that your remittance, with calculations, is received by us by the 7th of the month following the preceding quarter. Any remittances not received by this date will attract a daily 5% interest charge.
That’s that non-elective co-op advertising.I am also including a copy of our ratecard, and our marketing calendar, to enable you to begin planning your promotional participation now.
If you would like to discuss this with me in more detail, I am delighted to confirm an appointment with you at 1:00pm on Friday 17th August for 10 minutes at my offices at 379 Collins St, Melbourne.It’s not just the non-negotiable timeslot or the insulting ten-minute limit. Tower Books is in Frenches Forest, NSW. Rakusin would have to fly to Melbourne for his ten-minute meeting with Rimmer.
Best Regards,I have a theory about what A&R is up to. Traditionally, when a publishing house is acquired by some big conglomerate, the bean counters take a look at the accounts, turn pale, and have a talk with the publisher. It has come to their attention, they say, that many books lose money, and most of the others make a small profit at most. Almost all the publisher’s profits come from a small number of bestselling titles. “True,” says the publisher. In that case, the beancounters reply, would it not make more sense to only publish the bestsellers?Charlie Rimmer A&W Group Commercial Manager
I’m wondering whether A&R thinks they’d do better business if they only stocked the bestsellers. (If you look at the sixty-odd reader comments on the news story in question, you can see the actual reaction the book-buying public has when they find a poor selection on offer in a bookstore.)
Alternately, it’s possible that A&R’s management stands to personally profit if the company goes public and the initial stock offering does well, so they’re running a quick slash-and-burn raid on their more vulnerable suppliers in order to temporarily make their company look more profitable. Or maybe it’s something else. It’s tacky and stupid and self-defeating, whatever it is.
Onward to Michael Rakusin’s reply:
Dear Mr RimmerThat’s a buying department that’s being serially meddled with by people who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t like the inherent particularity of books. You can’t engineer the complexity out of the book business.We are in receipt of your letter of 30 July 2007 terminating our further supply to Angus & Robertson. As you have requested, we will cancel all Angus & Robertson Company orders on 17 August and will desist from any further supply to your stores.
I have to say that my initial response on reading your letter as to how you propose to “manage” your business in the future was one of voluble hilarity, I literally burst out laughing aloud. My second response was to note the unmitigated arrogance of your communication, I could not actually believe I was reading an official letter from Angus & Robertson on an Angus & Robertson letterhead.
My reply to you will perforce be a lengthy one. I hope you will take the trouble to read it, you may learn something. Then again, when I look at the level of real response we have had from Angus & Robertson over the past six or so years, I somehow doubt it.
The first thing I would say to you is that arrogance of the kind penned by you in your letter of 30 July is an unenviable trait in any officer of any company, no matter how important that individual thinks himself or his company, no matter how dominant that company may be in its market sector. Business has a strange habit of moving in cycles: today’s villain may be tomorrow’s hero. It is quite possible to part from a business relationship in a pleasant way leaving the door open for future engagement. Sadly, in this case, you have slammed and bolted it.
More to the point, however, we have watched our business with Angus & Robertson dwindle year upon year since 2000. We had to wear the cost of sub-economic ordering from you through ownership changes, SAP installation, new management, and stock overhang. In summary our business with you has dropped from over $1.2 million at the end of 2000 to less than $600,000 in 2007.
You would be quite correct to question whether our offering to the market had changed in any way. The answer can be derived from the fact that during the same period our business with Dymocks, Book City, QBD and Borders continued to grow in double digits, our business with your own franchise stores has grown healthily, and our overall business during the same period has grown by more than 50%.
Six years ago we were allowed to send reps to your company stores and do stock checks. Then these were “uninvited” and we had to rely on monthly rep calls to your Buying Office. Subsequently even that was too much trouble; your Buying Office was too busy to see us, so we were asked to make new title submissions electronically. Every few months the new submission template became more and more complex. This year, we have been allowed quarterly visits to your Buying Office at which we were to be given the opportunity to sell to all your Category Managers. At the first, we did indeed see all of the Category Managers - but they didn’t buy any of the titles offered. At the second, one Category manager was available, and again no purchases resulted. At the last (only last week), two Category managers attended. Through all of this, your overworked and under resourced Buying Department never got to see, let alone read, an actual book. While one may be forgiven for believing that Angus & Robertson is actually a company purveying “Sale” signs, I do believe you are still in the book business?
That Angus & Robertson is struggling for margin does not surprise me. It amazes me that the message has not become clear to your “management”: there are only so many costs you can cut, there is only so much destiny you can put in the hands of a computer system, there are only so many sweetheart deals you can do with large suppliers. After that, in order to prosper one actually has to know one’s product and have an appropriately staffed buying department. Most importantly, one has to train sales people of competence. You will never beat the DDSs at their cost cutting game, you will only prosper by putting “books” back into Angus & Robertson. And it would seem to me paramount to stop blaming suppliers for your misfortunes, trying ever harder to squeeze them to death, and actually focus on your core incompetencies in order to redress them.Tower Books distributes Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria, winner of the 2007 Miles Franklin prize, which is a major Australian literary award.How a business that calls itself a book business is going to do without titles such as the Miles Franklin Prize winning book or titles like Rich Dad Poor Dad (according to this week’s Sydney Morning Herald it is still the fifth best selling business title in Australia nine years after publication) is beyond me. And how in good conscience Australia’s self-purported largest chain of book shops proposes to exclude emerging Australian writers who are represented by the smaller distributors, is an equal mystery.
We too have expectations Mr Rimmer. We have had the same expectations for many years, none of which Angus & Robertson have been willing to deliver:Translation: “Don’t blame us. If you were doing your job, we’d all be making more money.”That we are treated with equal respect to the larger publishers within the obvious parameters of commercial reality;Had you made any effort to meet these expectations you would have found the niche we should have occupied in your business, as have all other book shops, and you would have found our contribution to the profitability of your business would have been dramatically different.That your Buying Department is able and willing to assess our books with equal seriousness to those of the big publishers and buy them appropriately;
That you recognise the fundamental differences between the smaller distributors and the larger publishers and stop demanding of us terms that we are unable to deliver;
That you would support and help develop Australian literature.
In summary, we reject out of hand this notion that somehow, even giving you 45% discount on a Sale or Return basis, with free freight to each of your individual stores, where we make less than half of that on the same book, puts us in the “category of unacceptable profitability”. We have seen Angus & Robertson try this tactic before - about 12 years ago Angus & Robertson decided that unless we gave them a 50% discount, they would not buy from us any longer. We refused. Angus & Robertson desisted from buying from us for seven months. We survived, Angus & Robertson came back cap in hand.As I said, this is a recurring fight between publishers and booksellers.
We have seen Myer effectively eliminate smaller suppliers. We survived and prospered but look at the Myer Book Departments today.He’s right. Readers don’t like being offered a curtailed selection. If you don’t have the books they want, they’ll take their business elsewhere—or spend their money on something else entirely.We have seen David Jones decide that it had too many publishers to deal with and to exclude the smaller suppliers. We survived and prospered but look at the David Jones Book Departments today.
David Jones and Myer sell other goods; Angus & Robertson does not.Bravo, Michael Rakusin. May his company flourish while publishing excellent books.That the contents of your letter of 30 July are both immoral and unethical, I have no doubt. That they probably contravene the Trade Practices Act, I shall leave to the ACCC to determine. (Five percent interest PER DAY !!!)
If you wish to discuss any of the contents hereof you may call my secretary for an appointment at my office in Frenchs Forest. I shall be marginally more generous than you and at least allow you to pick a convenient time.
Michael Rakusin
Director
Tower Books Pty Ltd
Carpentaria, Alexis Wright : Winner of 50th Anniversary Miles Franklin Literary Prize, 2007Copy: Graeme Samuel, Chairman, ACCC
Rod Walker, Chairman, ARW Group
Ian Draper, ARW Group Managing Director
Rickard Gardell, Managing Director, Pacific Equity Partners
Simon Pillar, Managing Director, Pacific Equity Partners
Barbara Cullen, CEO, ABA
Maree McCaskill, CEO, APA
And a final note: if you’re interested in the realities of bookselling, do read the comment thread in the Sydney Morning Herald.
(Thank to reader Marina Chong, who sent me the link and asked whether this kind of thing happens a lot in the industry.)
I see someone's beaten me to sending you the link.
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...
Patrick and I both had goldfish-faces while we were reading the story. My only regret is that Rimmer's letter is so badly chopped up by my explanations that you don't get its full impact.
Wow. Who does that Rimmer guy think he is -- Dick Cheney?
Much praise to Michael Rakusin for his letter and for making both communications public.
When I wrote about this in my LiveJournal, I noted that people don't get many opportunities to write a letter like the one Michael Rakusin has here. It's a rare delight to lay out this level of smackdown.
"Cap in hand." Heh.
I caught this over on Smart Bitches and wondered about your take on it.
I know that Australia had a large initial population of theives and criminals, but I didn't believe highway robbery was still in vogue.
Wheee! In the thread early. Do I really get to be the first person to say it?
This Rimmer fellow, I think he might be a smeghead.
The pattern resembles stuff happening here in the UK, with the supermarket companies putting a lot of pressure on their suppliers. As you point out, books ain't bricks, or breadloaves. In one instance I know of, a farmer producing strawberries switched from supplying the supermarkets to supplying the local wholesalers. He had found that he could sell at the same price, and make more money.
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.
the beancounters reply, would it not make more sense to only publish the bestsellers?
(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.
It’s tacky and stupid and self-defeating....
"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.
Gulp. What a horrible way to run a chain store.
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.
I hope that Mr. Rakusin had the foresight to keep a copy of his reply, printed on archival-quality paper. It would look very nice placed next to Mr. Rimmer's original letter in a frame.
I really don't understand the bookselling business. Publishers create the content. Book stores are the middle men. There are plenty of middle men, and these days publishers can connect directly to their consumers. Book stores need publishers, not the other way around. How do they manage to dictate terms to their suppliers like that?
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.
The next time I get a condescending letter which needs a response I am going to be sure to include the phrase "voluble hilarity."
Bravo, Mr. Rakusin.
IANABIINDIPOOTV (I am not a book industry insider, nor do I play one on TV) but this seems an awful lot like someone taking over a hardware store and saying "Lots of stores sell nails, competition is high, profit margins are low, let's stop selling nails and replace it with something we can make more money on."
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).
Eric (10), that was our reaction: whatever Leonard Riggio's up to this time, he's not trying to artificially reduce the range and variety of books B&N carries.
mjfgates (11), I just hope Rakusin autographed Rimmer's ass before he handed it to him.
Remus (12), believe me, publishers need bookstores.
Linkmeister @ 13... I am going to be sure to include the phrase "voluble hilarity."
Don't forget to use the word 'malarkey'.
Teresa @ 15... autographed Rimmer's ass
This is starting to sound like an episode of Red Dwarf.
Remus Shepherd (#12): Don't forget to boycott Borders, then; it's all part of the same company. (Also Brentano's, if there are any of those left.)
I fired my accountant for that. In the process of dispensing with his services I used the word shakedown several times. I think it's applicable in this case too....
It belatedly occurs to me that I did just get a letter which merits the phrase. Talking Points Memo has a copy as well.
I'm really trying not to laugh out loud at the shitheaded audacity of Rimmer's letter, and the way Rakusin completely dismantled him in his response. (Were I not at work, I'd just let loose with the guffaws...) I particularly like the three examples of "Here are other companies that tried to pull this crap with us. You're one of them. It didn't work last time, either."
Bravo, Mr. Rakusin.
I've only gotten a few lines in, but:
"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.
Rakusin is politely refraining from mentioning that Tower Books is the publisher of Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria, the 2007 winner of a major Australian literary award.
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?
According to an edit made on a comment in that SMH thread:
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.
A while ago I finished a contract, and my co-workers very nicely had a whip-around and sent me off with a book voucher as a going away present. It was for Angus and Robersons, a place I hadn't been to for years.
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.
Pricelesser and pricelesser: A&R responds to concerned readers
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...
The company's COO has responded, in order to 'set the record straight'. Yup. It includes paragraphs like:
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.
Apparently Rupert Murdoch is a typical Aussie businessman.........
Well, as an Aussie who'd been slowly losing interest in what A&R had to offer for some time now (mainly because they *really* don't give a fig for science fiction and fantasy as genres - for an idea of the contrast, the (fairly large) A&R near us in Canbrrra had about two and a half shelving blocks of SFF stuff, total, in their store. A much smaller bookshop (about 1/3 the size) in the same shopping centre managed to stock the same actual shelf space, which wound up as a larger percentage of actual books. Plus they had a wider variety of authors in that shelfspace than A&R did.
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.
Fragano Ledgister at #29 writes:
> Apparently Rupert Murdoch is a typical Aussie businessman.........
Now now - I try not to judge you lot on your countrymen's worst excesses...
Another follow-up letter, but this one is from Chris Burgess, the general manager of Leading Edge Books (Australia's largest buying group of independent booksellers, with more than 180 members).
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.
Jinx! Buy me a Coke!
Is this regional? Where I grew up, the jinxed person can't speak until someone says their name.
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...
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.
We are trying to operate a successful bookstore chain and if we cannot strike a balance that allows us to maintain our retail operations, the impacts on the industry will be far greater if we are forced to close stores or drastically cut down titles.
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.
That they probably contravene the Trade Practices Act, I shall leave to the ACCC to determine.
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.
Steve Taylor #31: I must point out that I'm a Pom....
Rakusin's reply is delightful, but his (successful) effort to do a complete demolition job on Rimmer made his reply very long.
I do wonder how much of it Rimmer read, and whether Rakusin's reply wouldn't have been more effective if he'd stopped after the fourth paragraph.
I would expect, given his CC list and the speed with which this hit the internet, that Mr. Rakusin was writing primarily for an audience that would give him rapt attention for as long as he cared to speak. Whether or not Rimmer read it, it was certainly effective.
Teresa is probably right about the bean counters. It happens in many businesses that bean counters wave the buzzword "80-20 rule" (or "Pareto principle", after the Italian economist who thought it up). They say "you're making 80% of your profits from 20% of your products". This is often the case, but it doesn't necessarily follow that you'll improve profitability by dropping the other 80% of your products, though lazy managements can often be fooled into doing so, with disastrous results if they haven't understood how their business works.
Delta Air Lines, for example, probably make most of their profits from the busiest 20% of routes; but it would make no sense to cut the other 80%, though apparently less profitable, if they feed passengers into the top routes. And so on.
I have been living out of Australia for just over 10 years, so saying I shall boycott A&R is probably daft :) but I shall avoid using them when I visit. Even before I left I rarely went to A&R to buy books unless I was after a particular "sale" item. I am more than happy to do business with Dymocks - especially as they are willing to post books to me in the UK (usually when it's an Aussie author who is, unfathomably, not published elsewhere).
julia #33: That's how "jinx" worked where I grew up too, damnit. The rest of you are playing wrong!
This whole thing is appalling. "Pay us a large sum or we'll take our marbles and go home" is what it sounds like to me, or maybe "our business is unprofitable, so we're going to try to rob you for it."
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.
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.
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.
Jeremy Preacher wrote @39: I would expect . . . that Mr. Rakusin was writing primarily for an audience that would give him rapt attention for as long as he cared to speak. Whether or not Rimmer read it, it was certainly effective.
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.
#25: "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"
In the States, the canonical everyone-wants-it book is "Abraham Lincoln's Doctor's Dog."
#25 & #46: I seem to recall Reuben Bolling once titled a Tom the Dancing Bug collection Everything I Need to Know I Learned from my Golf-Playing Cats.
#20: I've just taken a look at that letter. I'm not a Republican, but if I were... well, I suspect that if I got a letter like that I wouldn't be for much longer.
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.)
One gets the impression that A&R is run by people whose only knowledge of retail book sales is from 1980s airports, and that represents the model they are striving for.
Until recently I was working in the IT dept. for a Very Large American Textbook Publisher as it struggled to convert its main databases to SAP, with the 'help' of a large number of contractors whose grasp of database construction was only equalled by their lack of comprehension of a publisher's material master needs. Instead of involving, say, many of the programmers who had been intimately involved in the complex catalog of texts and variants of texts, high management listened to the inexperienced consultants who firmly believed that the data could be retrofit into the "great for bricks" SAP data model.
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.
Connie H @ 50... Instead of involving, say, many of the programmers who had been intimately involved in the complex catalog of texts and variants of texts, high management listened to the inexperienced consultants
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.
Stef, I thought it was "Abraham Lincoln's Doctor's Nazi Dog Diet"
Dave Bell (#7): Unfortunately, here in the US most supermarket chains charge wholesalers (and thus producers) "shelf fees" for access to their shelves. I don't know whether they charge such fees to sellers of produce, but it's well known that they make the sellers of packaged foods pay for being on their shelves.
So far as I know, though, this pernicious practice hasn't been adopted by other retailers.
Yeah, a bookshop that only has bestsellers I think they commonly call 'supermarket' or 'K-Mart'. Not much need for A&R under that model.
Besides the hilarious apology for the 'tone' of the first letter - sorry to have interrupted the play, Mrs Lincoln - it's interesting that in A&R's latest weaselgram the main choice of spin is to say that they would never do anything to hurt Australian authors. Because who gives a toss about publishers, right?
As An Industry Insider in the Aust publishing scene, a few comments:
- ironically, A&R spent squillions installing SAP just a few years ago
- A&R has had - I think - 6 different corporate owners in the last 10 years or so, including the UK's WHSmith. Smith's gave up and sold out to private equity (Pacific Equity Partners).
- A&R shares ownership and 'management' with New Zealand's dominant book chain, Whitcoulls
- Borders' 24 stores in Aust & NZ are up for sale, and guess who is expected to buy them?
- once AR/W/Borders numbers over 200 stores, PEP plans to float the whole shebang on the stock market.
- as to the comments that the publishers don't need A&R, they do. A&R represents about 20% of a market that is barley profitable, esp. compared to other industries.
- however, I undertand that at least one of the *huge* publishing conglomerates (ironically, the one that used to share *ownership* with A&R, and whose MD also used to run A&R) has said it is prepared to walk away from A&R. If this happens, A&R are stuffed.
Stef, I thought it was "Abraham Lincoln's Doctor's Nazi Dog Diet"
Does the dog fight Communists in a submarine? If it does, I'll buy two copies.
Oh, and forgot to add:
- A&R's MD Mr Fe(n)lon comes from Tesco in the UK. He addressed this year's Australian Booksellers Association conference telling everyone to stop being so precious and that we should think of ourselves not as 'booksellers' and 'publishers', but as 'retailers' and 'suppliers'
- and the odious Rimmer hails from WHSmith and Borders UK, where he was 'reposnible for aligning their outcomes to responsible profit arrangements' or somesuch bollocks
As I just wrote to them (after apologising to the poor sap who has to read and reply to all their letters of complaint), I see no point in threatening a boycott; if they cut out eclectic smaller publishers, and only stock the bestsellers, they will be in competition with places like Target and Kmart, who can offer cheaper prices on a wide range of comfort-reading. And I'll still hit specialist bookstores for my proper books anyhow.
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 a certain reasonableness-gone-haywire in corporate culture that this is a prime example of.
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.)
Brilliant post, Teresa. One small correction: Tower did not publish Carpentaria, which was published by an even smaller company, Giramondo; Tower distributes it. Incidentally, I would love to hear your and/or Patrick's take on that book. It's a book that makes an editor-reader's fingers twitch, long after accepting that its eccentric syntax, frequent tautology, occasional misspelling are integral to the narrative voice. (It is fantasy of sorts.)
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.
Teresa et al: I am truly gobsmacked. I was planning on posting three lines about this. I had no idea that a minor brouhaha in this faraway and not-very-important country could engage your attention like this.
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.
Teresa, you describe the letter as a blackmail request, but I think it's pretty clearly extortion, not blackmail. </pedantry>
#20: I saw that letter and it took my breath away. I actually write letters like this as part of my job, and we would never do something half as brazen. What kills me is that this is clearly a prospecting appeal (i.e. a letter sent to people who haven't given before). The sternest we can muster is "I'm concerned that I haven't heard from you about renewing your membership" and that's to people who've already given money to us.
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.
Elsewhere and earlier, I've described myself as an "Olympic-standard Procrastinator". When I heard about this on the ABC TV news (1, 2), I immediately thought of this community, and that I should find a link and send it with a brief contextual note. (Potted A&R history, etc). Still haven't done that, and you're many hours and 60 comments in. *sigh*
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I just hope Rakusin autographed Rimmer's ass before he handed it to him
Not even with a BORROWED pen.
I don't own a business, but if I did, I think I'd send letters to my partners that said:
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*"
Yes, that letter from Rimmer is clearly an attempt at extortion. Well, why not? It worked for the US insurance industry in the 1980's. They lost a lot of money in bad investments (there was a housing bubble, just like the one that just popped), and they went to their customers and said, "You have to pay for our bad investments", and increased premiums accross the board.
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.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one who's been savaged by SAP. I spent 4 years at Nike building and maintaining web applications that were the tail on the SAP dog. In the ten years it took them to get SAP installed and customized* to the point where they could transfer the 100 or so engineers it took to do that, they spent more than $400,000,000** on that dog. And it still wouldn't hunt. Large parts of the organization exist as they do because that's the way SAP works, which sounds like a lousy return for all that money to me.
* "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.
Chris W @ #64, I'm grateful to TPM for getting a copy into electronic form for other people to see it. I was puzzling about whether to scan it or retype it.
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.
Sisuile @ 5
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.
Bruce Cohen @ 70... "You just use right off the shelf. It's got everything you need."
When 'they' tell me that the merger of two systems will be totally transparent, I grab the bottle of extra-strength Windex.
Linkmeister: I always open those.
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.
#20 et seq.: What's interesting about that lettter is that the Big Divisive Issue of the last election (gay marriage) is nowhere to be found. Does this mean it's being intentionally deëmphasized for the next round, or are they just focusing on issues that people tend to care about even without coaching?
#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.
Tina @ 60
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.
"Mafia" really is the word. These arrogant pizzles are attempting to extort "insurance premiums" from their vendors. That's gotta be illegal somewhere.
(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.
Oh, please, please, please, if A&R as a retail concern crashes and burns, can I have a Dymocks? Even a little one? I miss them from my time in Sydney. There's only A&R here (major regional centre north of Sydney), really, and those few stores are very much as Julia Jones described the chain in general (*waves to fellow Lyst person Julia*).
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*
Linkmeister @20: The thing that really boggled me about that letter from the Republican party was the bit about "Oh noes! Hillary might can has Presidency--and be sockpuppet for B1LLZORZ!!!!1!!!!"
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!
Here's an example of how logical thinking about a problem gets shattered by the assumptions, just as some of the MBA shibboleths do.
(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.
Julia @33 - re: Jinx, I'm quoting an old SNL sketch with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Mary Gross; this and many other details can, of course, be found in the Wikipedia entry.
(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.)
If Michael Rakusin was a woman I'd ask him to marry me. What a shower of s***s, really - but what a nitrate-burning, fuel-injected V8 of a response! Go fella!
Fragano Ledgister at #37 writes:I know better
> 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 :)
When 'they' tell me that the merger of two systems will be totally transparent, I grab the bottle of extra-strength Windex.
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.
re: #30 ::: Meg Thornton ::: (view all by) ::: August 10, 2007, 04:27 PM:
"They've been steadily nailing their coffin shut from the inside for ages now"
Dang, but that was a beautiful turn of phrase
David @ 84... True, I could have said 'glass-surface cleaner', but 'Windex' sound much snappier. And pretty tasty when mixed in with Sterno. (Now I have this image of us programmers looking like Andromeda Strain's town drunk who survived because he loved drinking Sterno. Not an inaccurate description when you've worked long nights on a Transparent Project from Hell.)
#47: There's a book by Colin McEnroe titled "Lose Weight Through Great Sex with Celebrities (the Elvis Way)"
We had to wear the cost of sub-economic ordering from you through [...] SAP installation [...].
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.
Steve Taylor #83: I am, in fact, a biracial male Brit in his 50s....
Wow. I'm sending this link to the American Booksellers Association, for other independent booksellers' edification. I wonder if Tower sells to or has a distributor in the US.
I particularly like the phrase "core incompetencies".
mmy @ 85 - Thanks! I suppose it almost makes up for the rather convoluted paragraph which came before it (where I changed subject midway through). Note to self: if functioning on less than 8 hours sleep and less than 3 cups of tea, check for *coherence* as well as spelling, etc.
If Charlie Rimmer ever decides to make a career change, he appears to have all qualities required of an executive in the music recording industry.
Wouldn’t life be interesting if we could just tell our trading partners that we’ve decided to raise our “minimum threshold of profitability” on past transactions, and they owe us?
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.
Mr. Rakusin's reply is lovely, but he must surely know that the entity that generated the letter to which he is responding is constitutionally unable to understand his reasoning, let alone alter its behavior. The actual audience is elsewhere (even here, for example).
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.)
Wim L (#75): Applying induction, we can see that any program can, with enough effort, be optimized down to a single instruction ... which will be incorrect.
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.)
[aside]Core incompetancies is a phrase which describes so much of modern life, especially online, especially, this last fortnight, LJ.
Comments on Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers: