Where Everybody Knows You're Numb

Psych Lit · Guru

RE: the next missing thing

BoxDog · Guru

Psych Lit wrote:

BoxDog wrote:

I get the idea here. But really, what's next? Charging a rental fee, copyright convenience dues or a cover charge at the local library? This I ask because my once book buying freak parents have decided that it's easier, less daunting and more civilized to order up their picks online and have them ready at the library. They each walk out with 10 or so books at a time and return them when told to. Seems like a loophole. New paper back $7.95, new hardcover $24.95 library card...well you know. :)

lol, hey i am both and offender and a defender here. for years i have told people to not put their work online even if they want the feedback or the kick of seeing something "published" in some form and ive said that because the arts have always been under valued and few writers or artists are adequately compensated for their very valuable work. having said that ive offended by picking thru the clearance aisles at half price books and buying scads of used books from amazon or textbooksrus or any number of other used outlets (even scoring kicked to the curb boxes of them from craigslist) and despite having access to one of the worlds best libraries i rarely get more than whats required for work. id do more if i didnt have to lug them for 10 blocks to the parking lot. so heres the question for the future. what is the value of any form of art in a post capitalist world? weve seen the music industry grapple with this with limited success, there are still pirate places galore out there and from what i am told you can also "get" any new release movie from these sites too and so we are seeing the demise of movie theaters, the demise of new published authors and i would imagine sometime in the future someone will come up with paint by numbers masterpieces that one can download a pattern for and that will be the end of the art world.
cities thrive when the arts are present and they die when all becomes franchised, the arts engage our imaginations and stretch our ways of seeing and a world without them is unimaginable for me.

footnote, I did pick up a couple of books, in excellent shape, once in an alley. Someone must have just dropped a box off a hood or decided to leave them. Anyway, it was the only was in hell I was ever going to entertain Rudy Guilianis book. I have to say, I miss him now. Really.
hell be back! wait a few years. hes like one of those carnival pop and bop things:)

-- Edited by BoxDog at 23:52, 2008-12-30

The whack-a-mole! I love that game. I think every high pressure p.o.b. should have one for their staff! I guess we'd have to rename it whack-a-wop. It's okay, My dna is riddled with a sufficient amount of Italian, I'm taking the creative license to use that otherwise deragatory swipe and embrace it as, simple playful banter. I'm not always p.c. at nearly 3 a.m. You gawt dat?

As to the meat of the topic, the loss of art, for compensation,

Portraits here's the paint by number kit. Unless we each live long enough to see the next renaissance, I think the answer to your hypo question is really, the arts are already dead. Period. Maybe not in our hearts. But certainly on canvas, paper, Broadway, 16 mm movies. They've made way for the Kindle and Netflix-Gen.

Psych Lit · Guru

BoxDog wrote:

I get the idea here. But really, what's next? Charging a rental fee, copyright convenience dues or a cover charge at the local library? This I ask because my once book buying freak parents have decided that it's easier, less daunting and more civilized to order up their picks online and have them ready at the library. They each walk out with 10 or so books at a time and return them when told to. Seems like a loophole. New paper back $7.95, new hardcover $24.95 library card...well you know. :)

lol, hey i am both and offender and a defender here. for years i have told people to not put their work online even if they want the feedback or the kick of seeing something "published" in some form and ive said that because the arts have always been under valued and few writers or artists are adequately compensated for their very valuable work. having said that ive offended by picking thru the clearance aisles at half price books and buying scads of used books from amazon or textbooksrus or any number of other used outlets (even scoring kicked to the curb boxes of them from craigslist) and despite having access to one of the worlds best libraries i rarely get more than whats required for work. id do more if i didnt have to lug them for 10 blocks to the parking lot. so heres the question for the future. what is the value of any form of art in a post capitalist world? weve seen the music industry grapple with this with limited success, there are still pirate places galore out there and from what i am told you can also "get" any new release movie from these sites too and so we are seeing the demise of movie theaters, the demise of new published authors and i would imagine sometime in the future someone will come up with paint by numbers masterpieces that one can download a pattern for and that will be the end of the art world.
cities thrive when the arts are present and they die when all becomes franchised, the arts engage our imaginations and stretch our ways of seeing and a world without them is unimaginable for me.

footnote, I did pick up a couple of books, in excellent shape, once in an alley. Someone must have just dropped a box off a hood or decided to leave them. Anyway, it was the only was in hell I was ever going to entertain Rudy Guilianis book. I have to say, I miss him now. Really.
hell be back! wait a few years. hes like one of those carnival pop and bop things:)

-- Edited by BoxDog at 23:52, 2008-12-30

BoxDog · Guru

Psych Lit wrote:

Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It
By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: December 27, 2008
Book publishers and booksellers are full of foreboding even more than usual for an industry thats been anticipating its demise since the advent of television. The holiday season that just ended is likely to have been one of the worst in decades. Publishers have been cutting back and laying off. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it wouldnt be acquiring any new manuscripts, a move akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat.
Skip to next paragraph

Rodrigo Corral

Bookstores, both new and secondhand, are faltering as well. Olssons, the leading independent chain in Washington, went bankrupt and shut down in September. Robins, which says it is the oldest bookstore in Philadelphia, will close next month. The once-mighty Borders chain is on the rocks. Powells, the huge store in Portland, Ore., said sales were so weak it was encouraging its staff to take unpaid sabbaticals.
Dont blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the readers time or diminished attention spans. Whats undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.
In other words, its all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them. This is not about Amazon peddling new books at discounted prices, which has been a factor in the book business for a decade, but about the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes or, if theyre lazy like me, in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds.
They get their books from friends, yard sales, recycling centers, their own shelves. castoffs (I just bought a book from a guy whose online handle was Clif Is Emptying His Closet). Some list them for as little as a penny, although most aim for at least a buck. This growing market is achieving an aggregate mass that is starting to prove problematic for publishers, new bookstores and secondhand bookstores.
For readers and collectors, these resellers, as they are called, offer a great service. Lost in the hand-wringing over the state of the book industry is the fact that this is a golden age for those in love with old-fashioned printed volumes: more books are available for less effort and less money than ever before. A book search engine like ViaLibri.net can knit together 20,000 booksellers around the world offering tens of millions of nearly new, used or rare books.
One consequence has been to change the calculations involved in buying a book. Given the price, do I really want to read this? Now its become both an economic and a moral issue? How much do I want to pay, and where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a bookstore? To the publisher? To the author?
In theory, I want to support all of these fine folks. In practice, I decide to save a buck.
Heres one example of how I casually wreak destruction. I was reading Sylvia, an account by the late short-story master Leonard Michaels of his unstable first wife. Looking for material about Mr. Michaels, I saw his friend Wendy Lesser had written a long essay about him in a book published last year by Pantheon. I could buy a new paperback edition of that book, Room for Doubt, for $13.95 plus tax in a bookstore. But there were dozens of copies from resellers available online for as little as one cent, plus shipping.
A penny felt a little chintzy, even for me, so I bought a hardcover copy for 25 cents from someone who called herself Heather Blue, plus a few bucks for shipping. Neither my local bookstore nor Pantheon whose parent, Random House, announced this month it would cut costs by reducing five divisions to three nor the author got a share. The book looked good as new.
Ms. Lesser is the publisher of The Threepenny Review, a literary journal. She lives in Berkeley, Calif., where, as it happens, there is no longer a large general interest bookstore. Codys, in its prime one of the countrys great stores, closed its last outlet in June. The Barnes & Noble store there also recently closed.
Andy Ross, the former owner of Codys, told me that buying books online was not morally dubious, but it is tragic. It has a lot of unintended consequences for communities.
Mr. Ross said he realized that Codys was doomed when he noticed that in the last year he hadnt sold a single copy of that old-reliable for undergraduates, Kants Critique of Pure Reason. Students presumably were buying it online. Sales of classics and other backlist titles used to be the financial engine of publishers and bookstores as well, allowing them to take chances on new authors. Clearly that model is breaking. Simon & Schuster, which laid off staffers this month, cited backlist sales as a particularly troubled area.
Michael Barnard, who owns Rakestraw Books in Danville, Calif., not far from Berkeley, was more critical of me. He said that I was taking Ms. Lessers work while depriving her of an income, and that I would regret my selfish actions when all the physical stores were gone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/weekinreview/28streitfeld.html?_r=1&em

I get the idea here. But really, what's next? Charging a rental fee, copyright convenience dues or a cover charge at the local library? This I ask because my once book buying freak parents have decided that it's easier, less daunting and more civilized to order up their picks online and have them ready at the library. They each walk out with 10 or so books at a time and return them when told to. Seems like a loophole. New paper back $7.95, new hardcover $24.95 library card...well you know. :)

footnote, I did pick up a couple of books, in excellent shape, once in an alley. Someone must have just dropped a box off a hood or decided to leave them. Anyway, it was the only was in hell I was ever going to entertain Rudy Guilianis book. I have to say, I miss him now. Really.

-- Edited by BoxDog at 23:52, 2008-12-30

Psych Lit · Guru

Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It

By DAVID STREITFELD

Published: December 27, 2008

Book publishers and booksellers are full of foreboding even more than usual for an industry thats been anticipating its demise since the advent of television. The holiday season that just ended is likely to have been one of the worst in decades. Publishers have been cutting back and laying off. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it wouldnt be acquiring any new manuscripts, a move akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat.

Skip to next paragraph

Rodrigo Corral

Bookstores, both new and secondhand, are faltering as well. Olssons, the leading independent chain in Washington, went bankrupt and shut down in September. Robins, which says it is the oldest bookstore in Philadelphia, will close next month. The once-mighty Borders chain is on the rocks. Powells, the huge store in Portland, Ore., said sales were so weak it was encouraging its staff to take unpaid sabbaticals.

Dont blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the readers time or diminished attention spans. Whats undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.

In other words, its all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them. This is not about Amazon peddling new books at discounted prices, which has been a factor in the book business for a decade, but about the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes or, if theyre lazy like me, in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds.

They get their books from friends, yard sales, recycling centers, their own shelves. castoffs (I just bought a book from a guy whose online handle was Clif Is Emptying His Closet). Some list them for as little as a penny, although most aim for at least a buck. This growing market is achieving an aggregate mass that is starting to prove problematic for publishers, new bookstores and secondhand bookstores.

For readers and collectors, these resellers, as they are called, offer a great service. Lost in the hand-wringing over the state of the book industry is the fact that this is a golden age for those in love with old-fashioned printed volumes: more books are available for less effort and less money than ever before. A book search engine like ViaLibri.net can knit together 20,000 booksellers around the world offering tens of millions of nearly new, used or rare books.

One consequence has been to change the calculations involved in buying a book. Given the price, do I really want to read this? Now its become both an economic and a moral issue? How much do I want to pay, and where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a bookstore? To the publisher? To the author?

In theory, I want to support all of these fine folks. In practice, I decide to save a buck.

Heres one example of how I casually wreak destruction. I was reading Sylvia, an account by the late short-story master Leonard Michaels of his unstable first wife. Looking for material about Mr. Michaels, I saw his friend Wendy Lesser had written a long essay about him in a book published last year by Pantheon. I could buy a new paperback edition of that book, Room for Doubt, for $13.95 plus tax in a bookstore. But there were dozens of copies from resellers available online for as little as one cent, plus shipping.

A penny felt a little chintzy, even for me, so I bought a hardcover copy for 25 cents from someone who called herself Heather Blue, plus a few bucks for shipping. Neither my local bookstore nor Pantheon whose parent, Random House, announced this month it would cut costs by reducing five divisions to three nor the author got a share. The book looked good as new.

Ms. Lesser is the publisher of The Threepenny Review, a literary journal. She lives in Berkeley, Calif., where, as it happens, there is no longer a large general interest bookstore. Codys, in its prime one of the countrys great stores, closed its last outlet in June. The Barnes & Noble store there also recently closed.

Andy Ross, the former owner of Codys, told me that buying books online was not morally dubious, but it is tragic. It has a lot of unintended consequences for communities.

Mr. Ross said he realized that Codys was doomed when he noticed that in the last year he hadnt sold a single copy of that old-reliable for undergraduates, Kants Critique of Pure Reason. Students presumably were buying it online. Sales of classics and other backlist titles used to be the financial engine of publishers and bookstores as well, allowing them to take chances on new authors. Clearly that model is breaking. Simon & Schuster, which laid off staffers this month, cited backlist sales as a particularly troubled area.

Michael Barnard, who owns Rakestraw Books in Danville, Calif., not far from Berkeley, was more critical of me. He said that I was taking Ms. Lessers work while depriving her of an income, and that I would regret my selfish actions when all the physical stores were gone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/weekinreview/28streitfeld.html?_r=1&em