“Publishing: The Revolutionary Future - nybooks.com” plus 3 more |
- Publishing: The Revolutionary Future - nybooks.com
- Are liberals and atheists smarter? - Toronto Star
- Dominic Carman to fight Nick Griffin in Barking, East London, at ... - Times Online
- With so many incarnations, Brown not easily pinned down - Inside Bay Area
| Publishing: The Revolutionary Future - nybooks.com Posted: 01 Mar 2010 03:40 AM PST  Volume 57, Number 4 · March 11, 2010Publishing: The Revolutionary FutureBy Jason EpsteinThe transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago. Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes. Gutenberg's technology was the sine qua non for the rebirth of the West, as if literacy, scientific method, and constitutional government had been implicit all along, awaiting only Gutenberg to throw the switch. Within fifty years presses were operating from one end of Europe to the other, halting only at the borders of Islam, which shunned the press. Perhaps from the same fear of disruptive literacy that alarmed Islam, China ignored a phonetic transcription of its ideographs, attributed to a Korean emperor, that might have permitted the use of movable type. The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them, one in which much of their traditional infrastructure and perhaps they too will be redundant. Karl Marx wrote of the revolutions of 1848 in his Communist Manifesto that all that is solid melts into air. His vision of a workers' paradise was of course wrong by 180 degrees, the triumph of wish over experience. What melted soon solidified as industrial capitalism, a paradise for some at the expense of the many. But Marx's potent image fits the publishing industry today as its capital-intensive infrastructure—presses, warehouses stacked with fully returnable physical inventory, its retail market constrained by costly real estate—faces dissolution within a vast cloud in which all the world's books will eventually reside as digital files to be downloaded instantly title by title wherever on earth connectivity exists, and printed and bound on demand at point of sale one copy at a time by the Espresso Book Machine[1] as library-quality paperbacks, or transmitted to electronic reading devices including Kindles, Sony Readers, and their multiuse successors, among them most recently Apple's iPad. The unprecedented ability of this technology to offer a vast new multilingual marketplace a practically limitless choice of titles will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives. Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats's nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary's haikus. That the contents of the world's libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age. Amid the literary chaos of the digital future, readers will be guided by the imprints of reputable publishers, distinguishable within a worldwide, multilingual directory, a function that Google seems poised to dominate—one hopes with the cooperation of great national and university libraries and their skilled bibliographers, under revised world copyright standards in keeping with the reach of the World Wide Web. Titles will also be posted on authors' and publishers' own Web sites and on reliable Web sites of special interest where biographies of Napoleon or manuals of dog training will be evaluated by competent critics and downloaded directly from author or publisher to end user while software distributes the purchase price appropriately, bypassing traditional formulas. With inventory expense, shipping, and returns eliminated, readers will pay less, authors will earn more, and book publishers, rid of their otiose infrastructure, will survive and may prosper. This future is a predictable inference from digitization in its current stage of development in the United States, its details widely discussed in the blogosphere by partisans of various outcomes, including the utopian fantasy that in the digital future content will be free of charge and authors will not have to eat. Digitization will encourage an unprecedented diversity of new specialized content in many languages. The more adaptable of today's general publishers will survive the redundancy of their traditional infrastructure but digitization has already begun to spawn specialized publishers occupying a variety of niches staffed by small groups of like-minded editors, perhaps not in the same office or even the same country, much as software firms themselves are decentralized with staff in California collaborating online with colleagues in Bangalore and Barcelona. The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer's work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years. In preliterate cultures, the great sagas and epics were necessarily communal creations committed to tribal memory and chanted under priestly supervision over generations. With the invention of the alphabet, authors no longer depended on communal memory but stored their work on stone, papyrus, or paper. In modern times, communal projects are limited mainly to complex reference works, of which Wikipedia is an example. Though social networking will not produce another Dickens or Melville, the Web is already a powerful resource for writers, providing conveniently online a great variety of updated reference materials, dictionaries, journals, and so on instantly and everywhere, available by subscription or, like Google search and Wikipedia, free. Most time-sensitive reference materials need never again be printed and bound. Informed critical writing of high quality on general subjects will be as rare and as necessary as ever and will survive as it always has in print and online for discriminating readers. Works of genius will emerge from parts of the world where books have barely penetrated before, as such works after Gutenberg emerged unbidden from the dark and silent corners of Europe. Gutenberg's press, however, did not give Europe, with its tight cultural boundaries, a common tongue. Digitization may produce a somewhat different outcome by giving worldwide exposure to essential scientific and literary texts in major languages: Rome redux, while translators will still find plenty of work. The cost of entry for future publishers will be minimal, requiring only the upkeep of the editorial group and its immediate support services but without the expense of traditional distribution facilities and multilayered management. Small publishers already rely as needed upon such external services as business management, legal, accounting, design, copyediting, publicity, and so on, while the Internet will supply viral publicity opportunities of which YouTube and Facebook are forerunners. Funding for authors' advances may be provided by external investors hoping for a profit, as is done for films and plays. The devolution from complex, centralized management to semi-autonomous editorial units is already evident within the conglomerates (for example, Nan A. Talese at Random House and Jonathan Karp at Hachette), a tendency that will strengthen as the parent companies fade. As conglomerates resist the exorbitant demands of best-selling authors whose books predictably dominate best-seller lists, these authors, with the help of agents and business managers, will become their own publishers, retaining all net proceeds from digital as well as traditional sales. With the Espresso Book Machine, enterprising retail booksellers may become publishers themselves, like their eighteenth-century forebears. Traditional territorial rights will become superfluous and a worldwide, uniform copyright convention will be essential. Protecting content from unauthorized file sharers will remain a vexing problem that raises serious questions about the viability of authorship, for without protection authors will starve and civilization will decline, a prospect recognized by the United States Constitution, which calls for copyright to sustain writers not primarily as a matter of equity but for the greater good of public enlightenment. Some musicians make up for lost royalties by giving concerts, selling T-shirts, or accompanying commercials. For authors there is no equivalent solution. Refinements of today's digital rights management software, designed to block file sharing, will be an ongoing contest with file sharers who evade payment for themselves and their friends, often in the perverse belief that "content wants to be free"—much as antiviral software is engaged in a continuing contest with hackers. Unauthorized file sharing will be a problem but not in my opinion a serious one, perhaps at the level that libraries and individual readers have always shared books with others. These and other solutions will emerge opportunistically in response to need, as such solutions usually have. It is futile at this early stage, however, to anticipate the new publishing landscape in detail or to specify the rate of evolution, which will be sporadic and complex, or the future role of traditional publishers as digitization advances along a ragged and diverse front, while publishers, writers, and readers adapt accordingly. Timing will be apparent only in retrospect. So far I have attempted to foresee the digital future in instrumental terms. There is also a moral dimension, for we are a troublesome species with a long history of self-destruction. The industry that Gutenberg launched eventually made possible wide distribution of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, to say nothing of Babar the Elephant and The Cat in the Hat. But his technology also gave us The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the nonsense that turned Pol Pot in Paris from a mere fool into a mass murderer. Digitization will amplify our better nature but also its diabolic opposite. Censorship is not the answer to these evils. Digital content is fragile. The secure retention, therefore, of physical books safe from electronic meddlers, predators, and the hazards of electronic storage is essential. Amazon's recent arbitrary deletion of Orwell's 1984 at its publisher's request from Kindle users who had downloaded it suggests the ease with which files can be deleted without warning or permission, an inescapable hazard of electronic distribution.[2] In Denmark music downloaded by subscription self-destructs when the subscription expires. So does my annual subscription to the online Oxford English Dictionary unless I renew it. Much other reference material that is usually time-sensitive and for that reason need never be printed and bound is already sold by renewable subscription. If I were a publisher today I would consider a renewable rental model for all e-book downloads—the "lending library" technique of the Depression era—that more accurately reflects the conditional relationship, enforced by digital rights management software, between content provider and end user. I would like to add a few words about the evolution of my own interest in digitization. From the beginning of my career I have been obsessed with the preservation and distribution of backlist—the previously published books, still in print, that are the indispensable component of a publisher's stability and in the aggregate the repository of civilizations. In this sense, it is fair to say that book publishing is more than a business. Without the contents of our libraries—our collective backlist, our cultural memory—our civilization would collapse. By the mid-Eighties I had become aware of the serious erosion of publishers' backlists as shoals of slow-moving but still viable titles were dropped every month. There were two reasons for this: a change in the tax law that no longer permitted existing unsold inventory to be written off as an expense; but more important, the disappearance as Americans left the cities for the suburbs of hundreds of well-stocked, independent, city-based bookstores, and their replacement by chain outlets in suburban malls that were paying the same rent as the shoe store next door for the same minimal space and requiring the same rapid turnover. This demographic shift turned the book business upside down as retailers, unable to stock deep backlist, now demanded high turnover, often of ephemeral titles. Best-selling authors whose loyalty to their publishers had previously been the norm were now chips in a high-stakes casino: a boon for authors and agents with their nonrecoverable overguarantees and a nightmare for publishers who bear all the risk and are lucky if they break even. Meanwhile, backlist continued to decline. The smaller houses, unable to take these risks, merged with the larger ones, and the larger ones eventually fell into the arms of today's conglomerates. To offset the decline of backlist I launched in the mid-Eighties the Reader's Catalog, an independent bookstore in catalog form from which readers could order 40,000 backlist titles by telephone. The Internet existed but had not yet been commercialized. The Reader's Catalog was an instant success, confirming my belief in a strong worldwide market for backlist titles. But I had underestimated the cost of handling individual orders and concluded, with my backers, that if we continued our losses would become intolerable. The Internet was now available commercially. Amazon bravely took advantage of it and in the beginning suffered the losses that I feared. But by this time I had begun to hear of digitization and its buzzword, disintermediation, which meant that publishers could now look forward to marketing a practically limitless backlist without physical inventory, shipping expense, or unsold copies returned for credit. Customers would pay in advance for their purchases. This meant that even Amazon's automated shipping facilities would eventually be bypassed by electronic inventory. This was twenty-five years ago. Today digitization is replacing physical publishing much as I had imagined it would. Relatively inexpensive multipurpose devices fitted with reading applications will widen the market for e-books and may encourage new literary forms, such as Japan's cell-phone novels. Newborn revolutions often encourage utopian fantasies until the exigencies of human nature reassert themselves. Though bloggers anticipate a diversity of communal projects and new kinds of expression, literary form has been remarkably conservative throughout its long history while the act of reading abhors distraction, such as the Web-based enhancements—musical accompaniment, animation, critical commentary, and other metadata—that some prophets of the digital age foresee as profitable sidelines for content providers. The most radical of these fantasies posits that the contents of the digital cloud will merge or be merged—will "mash up"—to form a single, communal, autonomous intelligence, an all-encompassing, single book or collective brain that reproduces electronically on a universal scale the synergies that occur spontaneously within individual minds. To scorn a bold new hypothesis—the roundness of the earth, its rotation around the sun—is always a risk but here the risk is minimal. The nihilism—the casual contempt for texts—implicit in this ugly fantasy is nevertheless disturbing as evidence of cultural impoverishment,[3] more offensive than but not unrelated to the assumption of e-book maximalists that authors who spend months and years at their desks will not demand physical copies as evidence of their labors and hope for posterity. The huge, worldwide market for digital content, however, is not a fantasy. It will be very large, very diverse, and very surprising: its cultural impact cannot be imagined. E-books will be a significant factor in this uncertain future, but actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom. I must declare my bias. My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all—readers and nonreaders—depend. Notes[1]A project that I helped found. [2]See also Amazon's more recent attempt to block sales of books by a major publisher because of a pricing dispute. [3]For a critical account of this view, see Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), pp. 26, 46. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Are liberals and atheists smarter? - Toronto Star Posted: 01 Mar 2010 02:36 AM PST In new research bound to irk conservative geniuses, people with high IQs are deemed more likely to be liberal, monogamous non-believers than those who are less intelligent. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics and Political Science, says it makes sense biologically. In an article for Social Psychology Quarterly, Kanazawa lays out facts based on U.S. data to support his theory. According to that research, young adults who identify as "not at all religious" had an average IQ of 103 as teens, while those who identified as "very religious" had an average IQ of 97. Similarly, young adults who called themselves "very liberal" had an average IQ of 106 during adolescence, while those who identified themselves as "very conservative" had average IQs of 95. Kanazawa believes there are evolutionary reasons behind this. Ten thousand years ago, when humans were hunter-gatherers, we mated, tended to our kin and fled when danger was in the air – activities that did not require much intelligence. Kanazawa says humans were thus biologically designed to be conservative and put a high value on family. "What is conservative in the U.S. – caring about your family and your friends and your kin – is sort of evolutionarily familiar," Kanazawa says. "We are designed to care only about people we associate with." Among our ancestors, men – though not women – were polygynous, having more than one sexual partner. And the U.S. data show a relationship between male adolescent intelligence and how much, as adults, they came to value sexual exclusivity. The more intelligent the male respondents were, the more they believed in monogamy. It was also natural for hunter-gatherers to seek intentions behind natural phenomena, leading to religious belief, Kanazawa says. The ability to think and reason, he says, evolved to deal with occasional but serious problems such as fires caused by lightning strikes, flash floods or severe droughts that threatened starvation. He terms these phenomena as evolutionarily novel. As time passed, more of the elements of our lives fell into the "evolutionarily novel" category, Kanazawa says. People who are more intelligent, he argues, are better able to consider these novel elements and decide, for example, that liberalism, atheism or monogamy are things they want to subscribe to. "Liberalism, caring about millions of total strangers and giving up money to make sure that those strangers will do well, is evolutionarily novel," Kanazawa says. In other words, the ability to respond to any element that is evolutionarily novel, whether it's caring about earthquake victims in Haiti or accepting the theories of Darwin, is tied to intelligence. Does this model help in understanding Canada's liberal-conservative divide? John English, editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, says that in the last decade or so, university-educated people have tended to be politically liberal. But as far as religion goes, our experience differs. "In the States, you have to be religious to be a politician, but the founding fathers weren't all that religious and certainly you can find many in the '50s and '60s who weren't that religious," he says. "But now it's expected....Those are the formalities." Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a Liberal, was agnostic but never said so, English says. "He would regularly say, 'I'm Roman Catholic....' He was not a believer but he realized he couldn't say that publicly." Neither, English says, could Lester B. Pearson, a brilliant (and notably monogamous) Liberal who did not practise religion. Maryanne Fisher, a professor in the department of psychology at St. Mary's University in Halifax, says Kanazawa's new theory is provocative, but she has her doubts. "I could see how smart people might be more apt to wanting to push boundaries but, at the same time," she says, "I can easily think of many intelligent people I've met who would be exceptions to this rule." Kanazawa says future research will explore whether intelligent people are more likely to buy into other evolutionarily novel values, like vegetarianism, feminism, pacifism and environmentalism. Meanwhile, he expects the average intelligence of all western populations to decline slightly in the 21st century, because more intelligent people tend to have fewer offspring. Interestingly, Kanazawa describes himself as a married atheist libertarian with a strong distaste for liberals. But, as a scientist, he says he is bound to report the facts. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Dominic Carman to fight Nick Griffin in Barking, East London, at ... - Times Online Posted: 01 Mar 2010 02:14 AM PST Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| With so many incarnations, Brown not easily pinned down - Inside Bay Area Posted: 01 Mar 2010 12:12 AM PST SACRAMENTO — If past is prologue, Jerry Brown would be a far different governor than he was in his first go-round. Beyond the question of what age and experience have done for his growth as a politician, Brown — a master at the art of reinvention — remarkably could be seen as an unknown quantity as he prepares to enter California's gubernatorial race. As one of the most enigmatic political figures in modern American history, political observers said, he will by definition be a changed man. "The question is what is his persona at this point?" said Bill Whalen, a fellow at the Hoover Institute and former speechwriter for ex-Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. "He went from forward-looking governor to flame-throwing populist, and then to tough-as-nails mayor. I challenge you to find a politician who's had more evolutions over the last 40 years." After fending off the urge to declare his all-but assured candidacy throughout the fall and most of the winter, Brown, 71, is expected to make it official soon. He's got his campaign headquarters up and running in Oakland's Jack London Square, he's putting together his campaign team, and he recently got the reassurance he needed that U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat, had no plans to enter the race. If he recaptures the governorship in November, he'd be twice as old as he was when he first entered office in 1975 at age 36. It would be full circle — possibly an unprecedented political journey in American history, in which a former governor returns to the same office 27 years after he'd left it."If you think about all the changes in California and the world, in politics, the economy and technology over the last 35 years, they've been extraordinary," said Ethan Rarick, director of the Robert T. Matsui Center for Politics and Public Service at UC Berkeley, and author of "California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown." "And most people change between the ages of 35 and 70, so I'd expect a very different Governor Brown than the first time around." Well-known brand Brown won't have the kind of personal wealth with which to lather his campaign that the two Republican candidates — Meg Whitman, the billionaire ex-eBay CEO, or Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a multimillionaire — will leverage to create their own on-air brands. Whitman, far ahead of Poizner in the polls, has promised to spend $150 million to capture the governor's office. But Brown, in the political arena for 40 years — on top of the 24 years his father, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, served in politics — won't need that kind of money to create a brand. He has one of the most recognizable names in California politics. With travels to Japan to study Zen for six months at a Buddhist monastery, India to tend to the poor with Mother Teresa, and Oakland to revive a city — and even once joining the Black Hole crew at a Raiders game — Brown can claim to have one of the most fascinating biographies in the annals of American politics. Knowing the man behind the name as he is now, however, is a complicated endeavor. A man of constant reanimation, Brown is not easily pinned down by ideology, or even by political preference, having once left and then returned to the Democratic Party. He scorns consistency as if it stifles creativity. He switches gears and rides with the tide to the point of befuddlement. It's that inconsistency, along with an archive of inscrutable comments and policy bungles — remember Medfly, Proposition 13 and Rose Bird? — that opponents will feast on, said Jack Pitney, government professor at Claremont McKenna College. "Jerry Brown is a target-rich environment," Pitney said. "The sheer volume of his record has the potential to be pretty damaging. They will try to label him as 'that '70s guy' and tie him not to specifics like Rose Bird, but to the whole idea that the '70s was a time of stagnation and that his philosophy of limits to growth led to California's decline." Whitman's campaign has already taken to calling Brown a career politician, to which Brown has responded that he is an outsider. The truth is he is both. Suffused in politics Dating back to his childhood, from the day his father became district attorney of San Francisco in 1943, Brown's entire life has been suffused in politics. But a 16-year stint — from 1983 to 1999 — out of public office gave him an outsider's perspective. And even while in office, he's been described as a solitary figure, maverick, political oddball, loner, quixotic, reformer. After his two terms as governor from 1975-1983 — during which he also ran for president twice and earned the appellation of Governor Moonbeam — his political career appeared over after losing in 1982 to Republican Pete Wilson in the race for the U.S. Senate. He vanished from the political scene, spending the next six years abroad. He returned to California in 1988, however, to take over as chairman of the Democratic Party, only to fall under heavy criticism after Democrats lost a spate of statewide races in 1990 — including Dianne Feinstein's failed gubernatorial bid against Wilson. And in a series of 90-degree turns, Brown resigned as party chairman in 1991, announced a bid for the U.S. Senate, then pivoted to his third failed run for the presidency. New reformist That's where the new reformist Brown emerged. He railed against the political system, calling for congressional term limits, campaign finance reform and a national flat tax, while taking maximum contributions of $100 and pushing his ahead-of-its-time 1-800 phone number for grass-roots support. He vowed to "take back America from the confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting in Washington." His presidential ambitions finally snuffed out when Bill Clinton won the 1992 Democratic nomination, Brown turned to the local community. He moved to Oakland, bought a warehouse loft, became host of his own radio show, "We The People," on listener-supported KPFA, and eventually ran for mayor of Oakland in 1998. After serving two terms, he set his sights back on the capital, winning the attorney general's race in 2006. Former Gov. Gray Davis, who served as Brown's chief of staff from 1975-1981, believes Brown is the right man for the times, someone who will tell hard truths and demand lean fiscal solutions. "He's at a point in his life where he's willing to call a spade a spade and if a special interest is not acting in a way he thinks is in the public interest, he'll say so," Davis said. "By nature, he's not a big spender. Personally, he's not and he doesn't like to spend taxpayers' money unless he's convinced it's a very important cause. "For a very challenging time, it takes a more sober, thoughtful, circumspect approach to the budget and I think he fits all those descriptions." And many more. Contact Steven Harmon at 916-441-2101. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Biographies - Bing News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 comments:
Post a Comment