The Trouble with Amazon

The Nation has an in-depth look at Amazon.com's business practices. You've been warned.

From the piece...

Dennis Loy Johnson, co-publisher of the Brooklyn-based independent Melville House, is one of the few publishers who have dared to speak openly about Amazon's bullying. His story is far from atypical. In 2004 a representative of the retailer contacted Melville's distributor demanding an additional discount. Such payments are illegal under antitrust law, which precludes selling at different prices to different customers. Large retailers circumvent this restriction by disguising the extra discount under the rubric of "co-op," money paid to the bookseller for promotional services, often notional. In this case the distributor did not bother with such niceties, describing what Amazon was after as "kickback."

Johnson resisted Amazon's pressure and complained to Publishers Weekly about what he saw as the retailer's capo-like tactics. What happened next evidently still rankles. "I was at the Book Expo in New York and two guys from Amazon came to see me. They said that the company was watching what we were doing and that they strongly advised us to get in line. I was shocked at how blatant the pressure was." Within a couple of days Johnson noticed that the buy buttons for his books had been taken off Amazon's site, making Melville's titles unavailable.

In the end Johnson, faced with an offer it was nigh impossible to refuse, agreed to the co-op. His books' buy buttons were reinstated. Today Amazon is Melville House's biggest customer, and though Johnson still regularly flays the company on his popular publishing blog Moby Lives, he also concedes that it is highly effective at bookselling: "They make buying so easy. It's impossible to resist."

Another man who recently lost his Amazon buy buttons is John Sargent, head of Macmillan, the US arm of German book giant Holtzbrinck, home to many authors familiar to Nation readers, including Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Barbara Ehrenreich. In January Sargent confronted Amazon over its insistence on setting the prices of e-books it sold on its site, generally at under $10. This was a concern throughout an industry worried that low prices of electronic versions would undermine profits from printed books and generally lower the perceived value of the product. Sargent informed Amazon that he wanted to move Macmillan to an "agency agreement," meaning that he, as the publisher, could price books at whatever level he chose, paying Amazon a fixed discount.

Amazon reacted with characteristic distemper: bye-bye Macmillan's buy buttons. A face-off ensued. Amazon was vehement that its stand was on behalf of customers looking for bargains. A gallery of cynics openly suspected it had more to do with securing the future of its proprietary e-book reader, the Kindle, in the face of Apple's imminent launch of the competing iPad.

Something had to give, and a few days later it did: Amazon gave in with a statement revealing contempt toward the very idea of a publisher.

Mad Men: Your Definitive Reading List

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Talking about "Mad Men," the New Yorker does, particularly how its made waves in publishing circles.

From the piece in which Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America, is interviewed.

You obviously did quite a lot of research for the book. Can you talk about this process? Any exciting discoveries?

I started with a list of a hundred and twenty-six topics I was going to write about, inspired by things from the show. My plan was to write a mini-essay on each of them, and then it became eighty-six mini-essays. It’s very difficult for me to take on a writing project without feeling like I can walk around in the universe that I’m writing about. One of the things about blogging is that it’s pretty ephemeral—you want to get something up on Sunday night. Because it’s an instant medium, the challenge becomes “Find the coolest shit as fast as you can!” I’m really good at finding cool shit fast, and I already have a reservoir of this historical information in my head, so that helped. But with the book, I decided to treat it like a real book, not a blog-to-book. I spent a lot of time at the Cal Arts archive. I did a tremendous amount of historical photo research. All of the big ad heavies—Draper Daniels, George Lewis—they all wrote autobiographies and they’re all a delight to read; they’re all quippy and tell the same story over and over again, along the lines of “They said I could never make it, but I took them by the cojones and the boss said ‘I like your cojones.’ ” Over and over again, the same story.

What do you make of the show’s bookishness? And what do you think the characters will be reading this season?

I think it’s awesome in the sense that no medium is inherently better at storytelling than another; I like that nod. I think of the show as a visual novel. I don’t know what will happen this season, and I’m not sure entirely what they’re going to be reading. But look at the Cheever, Updike, and Philip Roth books that come out at that time. Well, I’m just going to tell you that little Gene Draper doesn’t have a chance: in all those books, a baby dies. I do think that in terms of the literature, if there is one strain that will cross over to the show, it will be the idea that these people have repressed their feelings, and there eventually will be a terrible consequence—say, like what you have in “Revolutionary Road.” I think it’s going to get really dark. Baby Gene is definitely marked in some way; I think we have an “Omen” on our hands.

5 Children's Books That Hollywood Should Tackle Next

The list, care of Moviefone.

Friday's Poem

Louise Gluck's "The Wild Iris":

Do Typefaces Really Matter?

Yes! No! Maybe so!

From a piece on BBC News...

When Avatar, the biggest grossing movie of all time was released, one section of the audience was immediately outraged.

Graphic designers hated it. Why? They didn't like the font that director James Cameron had chosen for the subtitles.

"I hated it on the posters and then threw up a little in my mouth when I realised I would have to read that ugly font throughout the film in the subtitles," one blogger commented.

"After the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on CG effects, did he just run out of money for a decent graphic designer?"

And yet fonts are not just for geeks. Otherwise why would organisations around the world spend so much time and money changing their typeface?

Who Are the Best Publishers on Facebook?

Media Bistro lists them for ya'.

From the introduction to said list...

Facebook counted 500 million users today, prompting us to finally create a GalleyCat Facebook page. Stop by and say hello--we will use the new site for event listings, literary contests, and publishing debate.

Discovering the keyword "publishing" turns up 17,000 pages, we realized that we can't navigate this sea of content alone. So we've decided to build a reader-curated directory of the best publisher pages on Facebook--to help us build our Facebook network and help our readers find the best Facebook content.

We've started the list below--a directory that barely scratches the surface of the publishing scene on Facebook.

Sebastian Junger on War

What draws him to conflict? What makes him want to write about war. He answers these questions, and more, on the Daily Beast.

From the piece...

The horrors of Latin America were the product of Cold War paranoia, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall others took their place. In 1995, Bosnian Serb forces rounded up 8,000 men and boys from the city of Srebrenica and machine-gunned them into pits, then used bulldozers to bury them. It was the last straw in a war that had claimed a quarter million civilian lives, and it helped trigger a three-week NATO bombing campaign that quickly shut down the war. Back home, the right wing was upset because we were risking our soldiers’ lives—though not one died during the intervention—and many on the left were upset simply because the U.S. Air Force was once again dropping bombs on people. Neither side seemed much concerned with the Bosnians themselves.

More and more, the focus of my journalism was to document and broadcast the suffering of civilians in war. Everyone agrees that war is bad, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, and the world’s most powerful nations are unavoidably left wondering whether they should intervene when it does. After Kosovo, I went to Sierra Leone, where tens of thousands of civilians had been killed or maimed by the Revolutionary United Front in what was essentially a war for diamonds. After three years of carnage, a single unit of British paratroopers stopped the war in its tracks. Only one British soldier was killed. A couple of years later, I found myself in Liberia during a rebel offensive that managed to drop mortars into a crowd of refugees in a U.S. Embassy annex in Monrovia. An American warship waited offshore, doing nothing, and in protest the locals piled the bodies of dead civilians in front of the embassy gate. I had never seen a pile of bodies before, and the only thing I could think to do was count them. There were 27, as I recall, though I think several children were hidden under the bodies of adults. I was the only foreigner in a mob of angry and traumatized locals, and I finally left when people began demanding why the U.S. wasn’t sending troops to stop the slaughter. A few weeks later, the Marines came ashore and ended the war not only without a single casualty but without firing a single shot.

Alphabet Books

The Private Library shows you the ABCs in alphabet book collecting.

Bret Easton Ellis on Big Think

Jim Steranko: Comic Book Hero

For The Guardian, Jonathan Ross discusses the comic book work of Jim Steranko.

From the story...

Jim Steranko. Many of you will not have heard his name before, a dreadful truth that troubles me every day. If he were French they'd have his statue in parks, Italian he'd be on their stamps, Japanese and he'd be doing commercials for videogames and fermented soya bean soda. But in the English-speaking world, we still woefully undervalue these master storytellers who choose panels and word balloons to work with.

To my fellow enthusiasts he is a Genius, a Wizard, a Master, a God. A one-of-a-kind, self-promoting hipster/huckster with the finest hair I've ever seen on a man of his age. He is also one of the handful of pioneers who can be said to have genuinely revolutionised the art of graphic storytelling. Glimpse his work and, before you even know exactly how he's doing it, you instinctively know it is different – better – than the norm. You'll also be hopelessly hooked. For life. Non-comic addicts might think I exaggerate – but step away from my hyperbole, and allow yourself a little time with the examples we have printed here. The work should speak for itself.

The story of Steranko's early years – the son of first-generation immigrants who came to America and worked, worked, worked for their family and future, while young Jim studied the funny pages in the Sunday newspapers for escape – is not unusual in the world of first-generation comic-book professionals. But unlike his contemporaries, who headed straight into an art course or an apprenticeship with the older guys in the industry, Steranko went off and learned stage magic, fire eating, the jazzmaster guitar, escapology. He briefly plied a trade in all those fields, before his exceptional eye for design and a desire to tell stories and create whole worlds took over. He gravitated towards comics, and found himself at the self-styled "House of Ideas": Stan Lee's Marvel Comics in its pop-art, counter-cultural heyday.

The Collision of Classic Literature and Video Games

Flavorwire takes note of a couple literary-minded video games and suggests some of their own.

From the piece...

4. The Crucible
Yes, this play is morally appalling, what with the witch hunting and squashing people to death with giant rocks. But what if it were an RPG game à la World of Warcraft where the accused and the townspeople are different warring factions? It could be pretty satisfying.

And talking about video games, they matter. Recently Omnivoracious interviewed Tom Bissell, author of the new book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

73 Ways to Become a Better Writer

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

From the piece...

27. Start your writing ahead of time - not hours before a deadline.

28. Listen to podcasts on writing tips.

29. Use simple, declarative sentences.

30. Avoid passive voice.

31. Limit your use of adjectives and adverbs.

32. When in doubt, cut it out.

33. Kill clunky sentences.

34. Be inspired by other art forms - music, dance, sculpture, painting.

35. Read your old stuff and acknowledge how far you've come - and how far you have to go.

36. Write for publication, even if it's only for the local newsletter or a small blog.

37. Make writing your priority in the morning.

38. Keep squeezing words out even if you feel uninspired.

39. Tell everyone: "I'm a writer."

40. Recognize your fear and overcome it.

Feminist Children's Literature

The Amelia Bloomer Project offers up some reading possibilities for kids, birth to 18, that have a feminist bent.

Libraries are the New Cupcakes

This, according to NPR.

From the piece...

Libraries are green and local.

This is where there's a lot of potential appeal for the same people who like organic produce and reusable grocery bags. You can pretty easily position a library as environmentally friendly (your accumulation of books and magazines you are not reading is fewer trees for the rest of us, you know), not to mention economical (obvious) and part of your local culture. This is the part of the potential appeal that's anti-chain-store, anti-sprawl, anti-anonymity, and so forth.

Libraries will give you things for free.

Hi, have you noticed how much hardcover books cost? Not a Netflix person? They will hand you things for free. That's not an especially hard concept to sell.

But I Want a REAL Princess: A Reading List

Shelftalk offers up some book suggestions for the youngsters interested in princesses.

My daughter was interested in real princesses for quite away. A brief snapshot of our conversations...

"Are there REAL princesses?"
"Of course."
"Like who?"
"Princess Diana was one. She was from England."
"How did she die?"
"She got into a car accident."
"Oh...Any others?"
"There was Princess Grace of Monaco!"
"How did she die?"
"Ah...well, uh, she got into a car accident and her car pretty much went off a cliff."
"Oh...hmmm... Do you know any others?"
"There was...well, Anastasia of Russia."
"How did she die?"
"She got shot."

The Digital Revolution in Children's Publishing

It's coming, notes Publishers Weekly. In fact, it's here.

From the story...

The challenge for publishers, according to Hirschhorn, is to enhance books and keep the content fresh, original, and high quality. Devices let publishers blend animation and text, so readers can use books that repeat back to them or let them follow the bouncing ball. "It opens itself up beyond formal reading," says Hirschhorn.

Children can now "literally participate" in a book, says Sharon Streger, owner of Sequel Creative/Sequel Digital, which develops interactive, sing-and-record kids' apps. "Why do a pan-and-scan version when you can actually put the child into the book for a complete experience?" she asks. "The iPad and other color devices like it will continue to evolve and form a new standard for publishing children's product that is a mixture of reading and activity." Callaway's Miss Spider's Tea Party app lets kids do everything from play matching games to color images on screen as in a coloring book, while Oceanhouse Media's Dr. Seuss apps, which include The Lorax and new releases Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, and Gertrude McFuzz allow them to touch a picture and see the word pop out.

Still, some apps are basically scans of the pages, Streger says. Publishers are figuring out how to use apps to give novelty books, such as expensive lift-the-flaps, a new lease on life. So far it's not possible to make lift-the-flap, pop-up, or touch-and-feel titles, such as Pat the Bunny. But no one doubts that they're coming. "We have to figure that out!" says Umesh Shukla, chief creative officer for Auryn Inc., a Los Angeles developer of animated titles for the iPad and other app-based devices.

"We fundamentally focus on trying to make the content come to life," says Josh Koppel, co-founder and chief creative officer of ScrollMotion, which works with Sesame Workshop and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, among others. "We're trying to bolster what is fantastic and what we love about children's content, but only supporting it with technology, not creating something that is in any way foreign."

The Secret Trove of Kafka Papers

They've been forcibly opened, notes Mobylives. It might make for a good Kafka story, the wrangling of his papers, if it weren't so nighmarish.

The Surreal World of Salvador Dali

Abe Books highlights the Spanish painter, by showcasing books by and about Dali.

Some of his work can be seen here:

The Duran Duran Book Club

First off, the book club is real (singer Simon Le Bon is a bit of a bibliophile).

Secondly, you can hear Simon read a couple passages of a new book - Rob Sheffield's Talking to Girls About Duran Duran.

Thirdly, here's a video of "Save a Prayer":



Fourthly, here's some Duran Duran fan fiction!

Fifthly, here's a piece I wrote about Duran Duran for McSweeney's.

Sixthly, my neighbor growing up, Andy Golub, is now known as Durandy.

Seventhly, here's Duran Duran signing "Rio":

Look at Me! A Writer's Search for Journalism in an Age of Branding

There's an interest essay in the Columbia Journalism Review about a recent college grad finding their way in the world of journalism.

From the piece...

By this point, I had begun to develop a theory, partly by virtue of having experienced that one meaningful failure and one meaningless success, about generally what was wrong with the world and increasingly with the industry—journalism—that was attempting to convey it. I just didn’t know yet what I knew, and so this story stretches on for another nine years.

What I sensed was that while the laws of supply and demand governed everything on earth, the easy money was in demand—manufacturing it, manipulating it, sending it forth to multiply, etc. As a rule of thumb (and with some notable exceptions), the profit margins you could achieve selling a good or service were directly correlated to the total idiocy and/or moral bankruptcy of the demand you drummed up for it.

This was easier to grasp if you were in the business of peddling heroin, Internet stocks, or celebrity gossip; journalists, on the other hand, were at a conspicuous disadvantage when it came to understanding their role in this equation. In the past, newspapers had made respectable margins selling a non-inane product largely because people had little choice but to herald their sublets and white sales alongside the journalists’ tales of human suffering/corporate corruption/government ineptitude. The times were prosperous enough that much of the print media even chose to abstain from taking a share of the demand-creation campaigns of liquor and tobacco brands in the seventies and eighties. Indeed, journalism, it went without saying, was about delivering important information about the world—information people (and democracy!) needed, whether they knew it or not. That journalism’s ability to deliver that information—to fill that need—ultimately depended, to an unsettling degree, on the ability to create artificial demand for a lot of stuff that people didn’t actually need—luxury condos, ergonomically correct airplane seats, the latest celebrity-endorsed scent—was an afterthought at best, at least in the newsroom.

Journalists, by and large, had so little appreciation for their dependence on the larger engine of artificial demand that they were mostly blindsided when the Internet happened and they lost the benefits of that engine. A lot of them seemed to take it personally. They got insecure. Some started writing “trend” stories and giving over their column inches to celebrity newswires and sincerely talking about bylines (and politicians and everything else) as “brands.” They sold Time Warner to an absurdly overinflated dot-com. It’s not fair, of course, to blame only the journalists; there were mostly avowed capitalists in the corner offices of these places, and it is the fiduciary responsibility of capitalists to be as cowardly and uncreative as possible in times of fear and change.