link to: 10:01 [GMT-6]

All-Natural Sausages

 

There are parts of the internet that do not get used to make internet link sausages. You won't find any of them here; this post includes only all-natural ingredients (for some value of "natural").

• Maybe swarming locusts just need some Prozac to keep from interfering with humanity's attempt to swarm the whole damned planet. Some whacko somewhere is going to write a book on insect psychology and earn a guest shot on some talk show explaining how insects aren't bad — they're just emotionally disabled and need our understanding...
• Not everyone is suffering from the current economy. Exxon's record profits indicate that somebody was doing well last year! For those of you wondering why automobile makers never tried to develop better hybrids and electric vehicles before now, look beyond the short-term commodity pricing issues — after all, the theory of "peak oil" has been around for a couple of decades now — and figure out who owned the critical enabling/blocking patents on battery technology from the mid-1970s until about 2002.
• Just for amusement, here's a primer on book design. Of course, I have about six caveats for this beyond the "you can break any of these rules if you really need to" closing of the piece. The most important of which, in this week or so before the next Kindle will probably be announced, is this: These principles apply only to printed materials. They do not apply to on-screen text, whether you're talking about a blog or an e-book. Anyone who tries to establish such rigid left-right/up-down rules is going to deserve the screams from those whose devices, or methods of work, do not conform to the screen size preferred by the designer!
• Without much further comment (aside from my always-present disdain for WFH), there's more Marvel legal nonsense afoot. It appears to me that Daredevil must have been in charge of acquiring visual rights at some point... not just because he's blind, but because he's an attorney working outside his specialty (there's that prohibited "s" word again).
• Here's a new dimension to the "war on drugs" about which I can't say much more, if only because I haven't seen the actual orders and mission statements in question. On the face of things, it appears that the in-theatre commanders are right; it is also possible, however, that things are being misinterpreted. Like that never happens to military orders.
• I come here not to praise John Updike, but to bury his literary legacy — preferably at a crossroads stuffed with garlic and its head chopped off. It's been my sad experience that most of the praise for Updike comes not from those who have read and carefully considered his works, but from those who have aspired to his position in the pantheon of cold war American belles lettres. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is far less satisfactory a portrait of a salesman than, say, Willy Loman; the less said about much of the rest of Updike's oeuvre, the better. If one really wants to read about Southern New England suburban ennui, one is much better off with Frank Wheeler or Harold Roux.

  The real problem with Updike was his subtle antiintellectualism. He wrote primarily about (and for) the incurious and those whose only conception of an intellectual life might have been reading the novels of John Updike. He dismissed virtually anything that was adopted primarily by people who did not inhabit his novels, even when he tried desperately to adopt their tropes (and almost uniformly failed). His inability to create credible characters whose primary motivation was not sexual gratification, or some variation of that, reflects problems that... well, read The Hair of Harold Roux instead.

• Of course, sausages do have components other than meat. Although I believe that PETA should stand for "People Eating Tasty Animals" (I'm a vegetable-rights activist, myself), it takes much more time than I have to peel this onion of the layers of hypocrisy surrounding NBC's rejection of PETA's proposed Super Bowl ad for being "too sexisty" (sorry, Nigel). NBC???? The home of Grey's Anatomy (etc.) complaining about sex being used to "sell" something during a sports broadcast? And that's just the beginning.

  <SARCASM> Of course, it's perfectly ok to object that sex is unwholesome during a game designed around barely controlled mayhem. I'll just flip the channel to the news from Southwest Asia and watch a few heads getting blown off instead.</SARCASM> Besides, I think the eggplant enjoyed itself... which is more than I can say for anyone else.

Labels: arts, copyright, culture, intellectual property, mass media, military, miscellany, politics, publishing, science

link to: 17:00 [GMT-6]

Congratulations, Governor Quinn

 

Rod Blagojevich — not to mention that alien creature lying on top of his head — no longer occupies the Governor's Mansion in Springfield, Illinois. On a 59–0 vote, the Illinois Senate convicted him on the articles of impeachment, despite Blagojevich's impassioned plea in self-defense this morning.

Blago's plea was, basically, that he hadn't been convicted of any criminal offense, and therefore hadn't done anything wrong. Hint:

The standard for holding elective office is not merely "I haven't been convicted yet."

What's really saddest is that Blagojevich simply could not find it in himself to accept that what he was doing was criminal, or even wrong. Admittedly, what he has been accused of doing is not that much (if any) more culpable than what passes for normal conduct in Illinois politics — in Chicago or downstate, Republican or Democrat — so one might argue that he's really been convicted of getting caught. So be it: If he's stupid enough to get caught, given the lax enforcement standards (in this state and elsewhere), he's too stupid to hold office. And I say that even though I largely agree with his policy choices... at least in comparison to those of his various opponents, including both the maroons the state Republicans put up against him in the two gubernatorial elections he won and the feudal overlords who have controlled the state's legislative caucuses (some of whom, by the way, are not members of those legislatures).

Labels: culture, politics

link to: 10:37 [GMT-6]

Abridged Sausages

 

Just a short, highly edited link sausage platter this morning.

• In the good news department, Neil Gaiman won the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book. Thus far, no confirmation from disinterested observers on whether he echoed the opening of his acceptance speech for a Hugo a few years back...
• In publishing-industry news, the EIC of PW has been laid off and there has been a staff bloodletting at Variety shortly after mutual parent Reed Business Information was withdrawn from sale because the offers weren't good enough. Compare this piece in Salon on book industry economics, which just might benefit from some actual knowledge of economics... such as understanding how distribution monopolies distort results, and might also benefit from at least considering these seven publishing myths of varying accuracy.
• Last for this morning, news of a colossal art "forgery" has some interesting implications for both the arts in general and droits d'auteur in particular. The first, and perhaps most obvious, question is whether this is actually a forgery... or mistaken identity? One of the real problems in the art world is determining the actual provenance of works, particularly from those artists who had students (or, in contemporary usage, staff assistants) producing works during the artist's lifetime. So, then, was the Collosus ever passed off as a Goya by Goya? By someone authorized by Goya to do so? Or, as it much more likely, by a gallery owner or other dealer trying to sell something in his stock for more money?

  This also, however, opens up an interesting inquiry into the practice of undisclosed ghostwriting. For example, everyone knows now — and the public record is so full of references that it's hard to believe that none of it will survive for a couple of centuries — that both of Wayne Rooney's autobiographies were ghostwritten. Shocking, I know: An uneducated athlete in his late teens/early twenties hires a wordsmith. Things get much darker, and more interesting (especially when it comes time to write a final exam question... hint, hint), more deeply into the bowels of publishing industry practices. For example, it's so well known that it's not even an "open secret" that James L. Patterson does little more than dictate outlines. Does that make the latest Patterson novel a "forgery" in the same way as the Goya? How about [name deleted to avoid an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit], another bestselling "author" who does the same... only his/her outlines are about six pages long for a blockbuster-length book? Just what does this extended metacritical musing have to do with the previous bullet point on the publishing industry's economic woes?

  And the less said about "A Film by..." the better.

Labels: arts, copyright, intellectual property, mass media, miscellany, publishing

link to: 09:28 [GMT-6]

Saturday Sausage Platter

 

It's been a relatively quiet couple of days, aside from bloviation over various award nominations (mostly from cretins who refuse to accept context as significant) and working on a couple of behind-the-scenes filings to help out a colleague. But that does not mean there is no amusement to be had...

• Especially if one has a really, really sick sense of humor. Consider this "book review" of two insufficiently orthodox anticreationist books, and Professor Myers' continued riff. The real problem is that they're all missing the point: Science and religion are not universal answers; in fact, no method of reasoning is a universal answer, not even formal mathematics (consider non-Euclidean geometry and imaginary numbers as just starting points). I come down on science's side most of the time — particularly in this debate, if only on Occam's Razor grounds (a system involving internal evolution from an arbitrary starting point is a lot less complex than a system imagining a "creation" that necessarily denies both time and thermodynamics) — but not every judgment is, or can be, scientific, if only because many judgments must be made on the basis of insufficient/unknowable information.

  Now juxtapose that with Judge Gettleman's quite proper trashing of a "minute of silence" law (passed by wingnuts from Northwest Redneckistan).

• The Grauniad has been running a series on 1000 novels "everyone must read before they die", with quite a few interesting selections... and, of course, quite a few omissions. I'll freely admit to some sense of literary snobbery. OK, I'll freely admit to quite a bit of literary snobbery. And, thus, I find the list about one-third satisfactory. Admittedly, that's about 300 novels more than W has read, but still...
• And then there's the sadly amusing. Including the all-too-accurate depiction of Your Republican Party's Post-Election Activities below. As Orwell said, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Which, of course, links right back into the first item above.
  
  <SARCASM> I, however, am not a member of either the Inner or the Outer Party, so what would I know about how that works? </SARCASM>

Labels: arts, culture, miscellany, politics, science

link to: 09:52 [GMT-6]

Sausage Visuals

 

More sausage links today... this time with pictures. Those of you who are squeamish about what the internet makes have been warned!

• The second half of Professor Baker's essay on what ails journalism (or is that Ailes? but that's an argument for another time) has appeared at Balkinization. I think he is profoundly wrong in his prescription — a government subsidy for the press. It reminds me of my own experiences in the military, which were echoed in Colin Powell's autobiography.

  Powell had a problem with in-service rates for helicopters in Germany, and eventually traced it down to differing standards: The maintenance technical orders required a 70% in-service rate, but the Pentagon's force readiness system required a 75% in-service rate. Powell's solution — which is the wrong one, but that's another issue entirely — was to tell the maintenance people to ignore their technical orders, which were based on years of experience with the hardware and a realistic technical appraisal of the possible (not to mention indirect effects such as metal fatigue from overfrequent removing and replacing of panels), and meet the Pentagon standard. Not incidentally, that also meant that nobody had to buy more helicopters and pay more maintenance personnel to ensure that the right number of helicopters was available to meet mission requirements. That, however, is exactly what is at issue here: Should the post hoc financial statistics for journalism, or publishing in general, or for the entertainment industry, be measured against comparable enterprises... or against the universe of all investment possibilities?

  Thus far, the market has chosen Powell's "solution": Just measure against the universe for the present, and to hell with the unintended/unanticipated long-term consequences (such as insufficient replacement airframes to replace battle damage... which can't exactly be blamed on lazy mechanics). Professor Baker's "solution" is, essentially, to fudge the numbers by subsidizing the readiness rate with a 5% bonus. I question the basis for the numbers in the first place.

• Also at Balkinization, Professor Balkin himself (tongue firmly planted through about six cheeks) facetiously claims that Obama still isn't President, even though (as the photograph on the right documents) he retook the oath... correctly... on Wednesday. "Correctly" in another sense: There's no visible religious tome getting in the way of an oath concerning the State.
• Meanwhile, in a victory for substance over dynasty, Caroline Kennedy withdrew her name to replace Hilary Clinton in the Senate, citing the always-illuminating "personal reasons." N.B. I have little argument with Caroline Kennedy's policy proposals and/or politics, primarily because they simply aren't visible; her books on public issues that I've read are rather carefully bland and nonprovocative. My distress is not that she is a member of a "political family," but that her membership in that family seems to be her only publicly stated qualification for office.
• Oh, yeah. The Oscar nominations were announced this morning, including several leading candidates that shouldn't even be eligible. Thanks to the stupidity of the rules and the industry, a majority of the best picture nominees, and a substantial proportion of other nominees, weren't available to most of the nation during the eligibility period. Instead, they were in limited release in NY and LA only, which satisfies the eligibility rules.

  When I did a lot of book reviews, I had a strict policy that no review would be published until the work was actually available in stores here on the Silicon Prairie, in the middle of flyover country... and that any review I did based on an ARC would be confirmed by skimming an as-published copy. I wish that the Academy would adopt the same policy, so as to avoid awarding unfinished works (it is not unheard of for films to be partly reedited between those limited releases and the wide release). Frankly, I don't relish choosing between two films only for Best Picture (moving or otherwise).

• Last for the moment, but far from least (considering that snide-yet-serious remark at the end of the second item), I leave you with this thought from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by way of Pharyngula.

Labels: culture, jurisprudence, mass media, miscellany, publishing

link to: 10:35 [GMT-6]

Cocktail Weenies

 

Just a few small selected link sausages from the post-Inauguration pupu platter.

• Feeling lost in the publishing world? Find your station on this subway map of publishing. For some reason, though, you can't get here from there... perhaps because I'm obstinately not in New York, and therefore outside the reach of the subway.
• I'm not the only one who disliked the Williams "quartet" at the inauguration: WaPo, LAT. The real problem with Williams as a composer is his bombast. It's hard to say that a set of variations on a Shaker melody is "bombastic," but this was... in common with virtually all of Williams's compositions. Obama should have gone straight to "Appalachian Spring," or to Barber, or to Gershwin, instead of "commissioning" an occasional piece, as that is exactly the problem with the Bush-era worldview: That America can "commision" the soundtrack for any occasion, instead of acknowledging the soundtrack(s) that already exist. And it's not like there's a paucity of quasiclassical American works that wouldn't have worked better; even variations on the theme from The Magnificent Seven or the march from The Great Escape would have been a better choice!

  Perhaps, though, this did serve a purpose: Providing another piece for a creative Colorado judge to use in punishing today's youth (I particularly like that the judge himself chooses to listen to both Simon & Garfunkel and Pink Floyd).

• Who owns the film library of Ingmar Bergman? It's not even as simple as this article makes it sound... but then, principles of international choice of law and enforcement of judgment are not simple to anybody, and applying those principles to the particular facts of a matter gets even more complex when there's substantial forum-shopping involved.
• The effective copyright terms, they are a changin'. Whether one agrees with this decision normatively or not, it at least makes the term of protection for sound recordings more predictable. In Europe. Maybe.
• Last on the platter, read this essay on the decline of newspapers and apply the memes in it to the book-publishing industry.

Labels: arts, copyright, culture, intellectual property, mass media, miscellany, politics, publishing

link to: 11:06 [GMT-6]

Free at Last

 

The oath has been taken. The "Inaugural Address" is merely a time-wasting coda.

Aside from the protocol screwups (salutes to the President-elect under cover by uniformed military personnel; Dianne Feinstein's failure to welcome the Chief Justice and Justice Stevens); the offensive, sectarian "invocation" by the reprehensible Rick Warren; Aretha Franklin's substandard performance (at least in part "weather-aided"); and the awful John Williams bombast masquerading as a performance piece, this wasn't a badly run ceremony. My objections to swearing to uphold the law on a religious text obviously aren't going to get anywhere.

Now we'll get a chance to see if the rule of law — a fundamentally liberal concept — really means anything.

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

U.S. Constitution, Article II, § 1. It's interesting to note the reversal of a couple of words as the oath was actually taken...

Labels: copyright, life, politics

link to: 14:56 [GMT-6]

His Grandmother's Hawaiian

 

The predictable reaction to tomorrow's noon (EST) festivities in DC from friendly small-town people like Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter (none of whom, by the way, lives in a small town) looks something like this:

While I'm at it, maybe I'll move to Jesse Jackson's favorite city and join the Model-T Rainbow Coalition (you can be any color you want, as long as it's...). Basically, I'm just tired of all of the focus on the color of one's skin, and not the content of one's character. But that's a concern for today only; by noon tomorrow, it will be quite forgotten.

Labels: culture, politics

link to: 18:25 [GMT-6]

Seised of the Post

 

Well, the Illinois House voted again to impeach Blagojevich. The previous vote was at the end of the previous term; now that new representatives have taken office, they had to vote again. Once again, there was a single vote out of 116 against impeachment... by Blagojevich's sister-in-law. With a little bit of thought, this helps expose what has really been going on in the Roland Burris saga.

Illinois politics is now, and has been for at least a century, built on an amazing set of family dynasties. It's not just the Daleys, folks. Staying in Chicago, for a moment, we've got the Strogers; son Todd inherited his father John's chairmanship of the Cook County Board after his father had a stroke while in office and was incapacitated for a year in office. Beyond Chicago (partly, anyway), that Blagojevich's sister-in-law even managed to get elected to the state House of Representatives is sadly amusing enough. But then there's the Madigan family... including state Attorney General Lisa and her father Michael, the Speaker of the state House of Representatives. And that's where this little bit of sinecure and dynasticism becomes even more dysfunctional... because Blagojevich and Michael Madigan hate each other and can't work together. Madigan has long had control over the state party mechanisms.

Personally, I think appointing Roland Burris was an intentional kick in the nuts to Madigan, both on the family basis (Lisa Madigan was one of several candidates bruited about for Obama's seat in the US Senate, despite her minimal qualifications... but then minimal qualifications seem par for the course around here) and to the party leadership for pushing the impeachment process instead of showing party loyalty. "I'll appoint a black guy who can't possibly get reelected to the seat in 2010! That'll teach those bastards a lesson!"

It's all about spite, ego, self-aggrandizement, and tactics typically found at second-grade recess. It's been that way in the US Senate, too, but of different varieties; at least there hasn't been as much pouting and I'll-take-my-ball-and-go-home there, so maybe they're fifth-graders.

Labels: mass media, politics

link to: 13:41 [GMT-6]

A Publishing Squeeze (5)

 

[continued from 09 Jan 2009]
Like a tube of toothpaste, this publishing squeeze is going to require a little bit of creative smooshing to get all of the product out. And that overextended metaphor may prove more accurate than anyone really wants to think about.

Looking at the four common factors I've described previously, what should the entertainment/publishing industry do to ensure its health — or, maybe, just a minimum of cavities — in both the long and short term? I do not have a crystal ball. However, I can say pretty definitively that some proposals for "strengthening" the entertainment/publishing industry must be ruled out. It's really too bad (but all too predictable) that those worthless proposals actually perpetuate those four common factors. Put as bluntly as I can:

• The publishing/entertainment industry must let acquirers acquire, editors edit, and S&M dorks engage in S&M.¹⁰ That's not to say that acquirers should never talk to editors and/or S&M dorks to get some input or knowledge; it is only to say that ultimately, one must sell steak, because repeat customers get awfully hungry and go elsewhere if they're only offered sizzle. Even, or maybe especially, the vegetarians. This change would have four necessary (but not sufficient) components:
  1. Publishers and other licensors/distributors must drop "agented submissions only" and similar policies. Leaving aside the dubious taste of the people involved, that is allowing the acquisition process to be guided by salescreatures. No matter how much I respect a few individual agents (literary and otherwise), I have to recognize that their role is that of salescreatures. They can be helpful; but they cannot be allowed to be sole gatekeepers.
  2. Continued consolidation must stop. That way lies the dinosaurs — when the dominant population consists of oversized monsters, it only takes one tiny little asteroid or comet to cause a mass extinction. This means that antitrust regulators must look at the full spectrum of markets — not just the market to consumers, but the market for content providers — and recognize that niche markets are just as subject to antitrust problems as the whole "entertainment/publishing industry" is. And this includes aspects other than just the content imprints (film studios, publishers, record labels) — it must include the full spectrum from content creator through agency through content imprint through distributor through retail outlet. As a side effect, this will help with the overall separation-of-roles problems by enabling editors and acquirers to have a better chance to climb the corporate ladder to policymaking positions.
  3. The industry must grow up and start using contemporary economic, financial, and legal measures and concepts in its everyday operation. That means recognizing that with very rare exceptions, a publishing contract is a license, not a sale; that a returnable book in a bookstore is on consignment, not sold; that "net profit" does not require forty-seven pages of small type to define; that ipso facto clauses have been explicitly barred by the Bankruptcy Code for thirty years; that "book" does not include "electronic display" in contracts signed before the early to mid 1990s; and so on.
  4. The industry must recognize and respect content providers as partners, not galley slaves. More so than any other segment of the economy (or, indeed, culture), there is an incredible degree of crossfertilization and synergy among specific pieces of the entertainment/publishing puzzle. For example, just how many ghostwritten autobiographies by athletes could be sold absent public exposure to their success? Conversely, would any Harry Potter films have been even considered without the prior financial success of the novels? Could Star Wars have been made — let alone distributed — without the post-cancellation Trekkie phenomenon? Can I create an endless series of rhetorical questions at the drop of a hat?

  That's just a start, of course.

• The corporate masters — given the risk profile of the entertainment/publishing industry, we're stuck with corporate and analogous forms for the forseeable future — must adopt success measures appropriate to both the temporal and entropic profiles of entertainment and publishing. Quarterly reports are all well and good; even year-over-year reports are all well and good; but entertainment and publishing are not about commodities and have vastly varying appropriate time scales and synergistic content profiles than do widgets. As exemplars for which there is relatively verifiable public data available, consider The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Donnie Darko. Now compare them to Gigli. (Now throw up.)

  There's an important corrolary here, too: That the success/failure of an individual product in the entertainment/publishing industry cannot be allowed to dominate all considerations. One can't only publish bestsellers, and trying to do so will mean missing out on quite a few. Who would have predicted that a YA book set in a school for wizards, or a YA teen romance with vampires, would have made their authors and publishers rich — especially when there were literarily superior competitors already in the market?

• Self-publishing (and the equivalent) cannot be allowed to have more than a minor role. During the course of this series of posts, I've gotten half-a-dozen e-mails from misguided proponents of various forms of self-publishing (not just for textual works, either) who continue to spout the party line on self-publishing. Don't kid yourselves: There is indeed a party line on self-publishing. There is a place for self-publishing... but reacting to misintermediation by advocating complete disintermediation is an awful lot like what got us into the current housing crisis. Actually, it's exactly like it. Further, self-publishing is inherently a blurring of roles I believe that the industry as a whole needs to separate.

  Remember, Sturgeon was an optimist.¹¹ That current "regulatory measures" have failed does not mean that no "regulatory measure" would be an improvement over unfiltered slush. I've been in charge of slush piles. I've seen slush. And as bad as a lot of the crap that gets published might be, there is much worse out there that is perfectly capable of making Grisham's Law of Publishing ("Bad fiction drives good fiction out of bookstores") not just probable, but inevitable.

---

1. "Sales and marketing," you filthy-minded preverts. Well, given what actually happens at sales conferences, maybe not... and no, I won't name names, but I've still got the negatives.
2. "Ninety percent of published science fiction is crap. Of course, ninety percent of everything is crap." (exact canonical wording may be slightly different)

Labels: arts, culture, intellectual property, mass media, publishing, science

link to: 11:53 [GMT-6]

Today's Selection

 

An unusually diverse smorgasbørd of internet link sausages.

• Only ten days until Obama's Crackberry addiction moves to the White House. Will the wingnuts have to call it the Half-Black House?
• Russian justice still sounds like something written by Kafka (although maybe — just maybe — it's because the victim this time is a lawyer).
• Speaking of Kafkaesque legal proceedings, the producer's "open letter" on Watchmen was rejected by the judge as improper. In this instance, the judge was correct; he could only consider input from one of the parties, and the producer was not himself a party. This is an unintended result of WFH doctrine — the court won't get relevant information for its decision. Although if any copyright case ever called for application of laches, this one is probably it.
• Global warming's first visible effects will concern agriculture rather than coastlines, leading to more opportunities for Solomon to split the tuna.
• If you're an inmate in an Alabama jail, you don't have to wait for global warming to go hungry while feeding the fat sheriff's bank account. If that happened in some third-world dictatorship, don't you think we'd be condemning it at the UN? Oh. Alabama. Never mind.
• "Amateurs" are leaving fine-art auction market, resulting in price drops. Considering that the artists (often because they're long dead) don't participate in the profits anyway — leaving the European "sharing" system aside, as it doesn't benefit seventeenth-century woodcarvers — I'm not too distressed by this.
• New Scientist has a thoughtful essay on "immoral" research . Keep in mind, though, that the research per se is (and logically cannot be) "immoral" — it is the application of knowledge, or the particular research method (e.g., the Milgram experiment) that might be "immoral."
• Carrie Vaughn deconstructs so-called "urban fantasy" (although she's ultimately much to nice about it) — part 1, 2, 3, 4. Her innate niceness makes her presentation less condemnatory of the commercial pressures and metooism involved... but then, I'm definitely not nice.
• One of the responses to publishing problems is renewed, louder advocacy of self- and vanity publishing as a "solution." I've criticized the semicanonical list of purported success stories as mere autobibliophilia before. There's a new one out there, though; sadly, it's no more valid than any of the other myths. And the self-/vanity publishing end of the "industry" isn't immune to consolidation and its problems, either.

Labels: arts, copyright, culture, jurisprudence, mass media, miscellany, politics, publishing

link to: 13:01 [GMT-6]

A Publishing Squeeze (4)

 

[continued from 06 Jan 2009]
The fourth common factor in the entertainment/publishing industry's problems is, in a way, a consequence of the third one. It is not a logically necessary consequence... but, in terms of human behavior, it is probably an inevitable one. The fourth common factor is the complete absence of the fourth physical dimension in considerations of entertainment/publishing profitability and money flows: That is, time is always treated as irrelevant in the modern system.

An example from basic, classical thermodynamics casts a lot of light (not to mention some heat and maybe even some sound) on this kind of failure.⁷ Hopefully, this explanation will show more of the light than the shadows. The three laws of thermodynamics state, in a nonmathematical sense, that:

For any reaction in a closed system at equilibrium:
1. One cannot increase the net energy of the system,
2. One can only avoid loss of net energy of the system if the system is at absolute zero, and
3. One cannot bring a system to absolute zero, nor maintain it there.⁸

Which of these elements is the most important — particularly when analogizing to economic and financial areas? Well, it clearly isn't the third one; it's certainly possible to destroy an economic system entirely, such that any successor system has little or no basis in preexisting systems. Consider, for example, Shostakovich! The second one seems self-evident as soon as one acknowledges that no economic or financial system ever reinvests 100% of all revenues forever; eventually, employees have to be paid, investors want return on investment, etc. The first one, then, by process of elimination, must be the most important. That inference, though, is incorrect; the zeroth statement — that is, the underlying definition of preconditions — is the most important, for two reasons.

• No economic system — and darned few thermodynamic systems — are truly "closed." Consider, for example, a relevant ecosystem. It is always obtaining some energy inputs — sunlight, even ₄₀K decay heat — and a sufficiently large subset to constitute an ecosystem is also both receiving and losing matter through rainfall and other fluid flows, erosion and its complement chelation, and so on. Even in the laboratory, we cannot create a perfect insulator. It may be a good enough insulator so that we can't measure energy loss/gain with current instruments, but it is not nonzero, and therefore not truly closed. The economic analogue of this within entertainment might be, say, the constant crossfertilization of entertainment media by both each other and by events occurring outside of the industry resulting in new entertainment products and altering the "ecological" value of existing entertainment products.
• Neither is any system predictably at equilibrium at arbitrary time t, such as the moment one chooses to measure a thermometer, or the end date of a royalty period or financial reporting period. One need not go to the extremes of the strong statement of Heisenberg's principle⁹ to find counterexamples in the physical world; just noting the undeniable existence of MRSA is enough. The returns system, all by itself, demonstrates that publishing is not at equilibrium... at any time t.

See? I managed to express that without resorting to mathematical symbology!

What this really means is this: That no calculation of risks, rewards, returns, or anything else in publishing can properly be compared to any such calculation from outside of publishing — not even from within closely-related systems like popular music, and quite probably not even across any of the niche boundaries within publishing. And this is not becaused publishing (or its niches) are closed, and therefore in different energy (financial) considerations; it is because they are not.

All of this consideration that bounces around the outside of mathematical representations of the universe has two other critical implications for the entertainment/publishing industry. The first — and it is one that I must largely dismiss for purposes of this series of entries, because it is even more difficult to express than any of the underlying math for "simple" particle systems — is the scalar measurability assumption built into contemporary definitions of "profit." Put another way, the need to express "profit" at any time t implies both precision and accuracy in the ability to measure profit... and when one is dealing with culture and the arts, that ain't too possible. The second, though, is much more relevant, while being much more ignored by the industry: The cognitive dissonance of the simultaneous existence and chaos of the long-tail phenomenon, especially as the nature of "selling" changes. Again, I must largely dismiss detailed discussion in this series of posts, but that is largely because the very nature of the long-tail phenomenon denies predictability.

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7. Not only does using an analogy help explain these issues without getting into the endowment effect's distortions, but it also avoids the problems inherited from the third common factor: Nobody can really trust any of the numbers. Admittedly, this reservation is itself a bit circular, because some of that culture of secrecy is reflected in/reflects the endowment effect by itself.

   There's an old saying that "It's easier to get forgiveness than get permission." The endowment effect in general calls that into question... and perhaps nowhere more obviously than when personal creations are at issue, particularly including (but not limited to) the entertainment/publishing industry. When dealing with creative products, it's easier to get permission than to get forgiveness. The core of copyright law and patent law recognize this very simply, by explicitly allowing an injunction against continued use without a license (permission). Not surprisingly, most legal causes of action regarding property do not inherently include injunctive relief as not just a possible, but a relatively routine, part of the remedy.

8. Admittedly, this semiquantized representation does not reflect some of the nuances that one can infer by going deeper and deeper into the math itself, and what the particular mathematical operations and constructs — such as, for example, calculated entropy and enthalpy, Gibbs energy, and so on — tell one about the complexity of even the simplest closed systems. As shall become clear shortly, though, the point is the field condition... not excrutiating accuracy of these three statements.
9. One might argue that considering Heisenberg's principle is irrelevant, because it arises from a simultaneity problem with measuring two different aspects of a single particle (location and vector). A little thought, though, will show that there's a similar simultaneity paradox in financial terms... that I can't represent accurately in standard HTML, so I'm not going to try.

Labels: arts, culture, intellectual property, mass media, publishing, science

link to: 10:25 [GMT-6]

A Publishing Squeeze (3)

 

[continued from 03 Jan 09]
The third common factor in the entertainment/publishing industry's problems is its underlying culture of secrecy, which is only exacerbated by accounting more dubious than Bernie Madoff's. A few recent web-available items help illuminate this particular problem. For example, McGraw Hill has laid off 375 employees, without the excuse of substantial exposure to either returns or marketing problems... because best estimates indicate that the majority of McGraw Hill's income comes from direct sales and sales to educational and professional markets that simply do not have the problems of trade publishing. (This is another example of the "thirteen niches" issue.) At the same time, "austerity" in publishing seems to concern the occasional expense-account lunch, rather than, say, the difference for a print run of 50,000 books between shoddily-applied foil embossing on the cover and spending an extra two workdays on accurately describing the book in the catalog.

This culture of secrecy — perhaps the best example of which is trying to find out how many copies it takes to be a "best seller" — is reflected in outsiders' perceptions of what "fixing" the "problems" will take. For example, one Harvard business professor claims publishing shouldn't change⁶ and WSJ describes the situation, but industry insiders object that she doesn't know what she's talking about. Of course, the main reason that she doesn't know what she's talking about is that nobody does: There simply is no data. Consider, for example, the foil embossing that I referred to at the end of the last paragraph. Nobody has ever done a controlled, double-blind study that correlates foil embossing on the cover of a trade book with any measure of publishing success: not actual sales to consumers, not even copies placed in retail outlets (or, for that matter, returned from retail outlets) so that they're available to consumers. And even if such a study existed, its continued relevance in a world of increasing online sales would be questionable. Instead, there's a longstanding assumption that because shiny packaging "worked" in increasing sales of toys to children in the 1960s, it inherently works for this type of product with this type of consumer.

I'll be merciful this time; the fourth common factor — with math — will wait for the next entry. Hint: Get out your calendars and a basic text on thermodynamics; or maybe just read this article on entropy in nature (no math required!) and ponder whether "increasing disorder" is something that applies to the entertainment/publishing industry.

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6. Her comments just expose the intellectual bankruptcy of business education today... because they are not about business. As should be pretty clear, I have very little respect for arguments over how many marketing dollars can be accounted for (under GAAP standards) on the head of a pin — particularly since we can't even agree on what kind of pin we're using.

Labels: arts, culture, intellectual property, mass media, publishing, science

link to: 11:39 [GMT-6]

A Publishing Squeeze (2)

 

[continued from 29 Dec 2008]
The real question presented by the entertainment/publishing industry's problems is not "what?" so much as "why?". That the industry⁴ has significant financial (and other) challenges to look forward to should surprise nobody. That some — and perhaps most — of the industry's problems resemble the rest of the economy, despite my imprecation at the end of part 1 that "I do have a problem with trying to force [the entertainment/publishing industry] to look like every other business, and then whingeing when it won't act that way," shouldn't surprise anyone either. There are common factors, and they are important; they just are not as dominant as the "general purpose business education" would have one believe.

The first of these is the product problem: Although there supposedly are salescreatures who can sell iceboxes to Eskimos, a company that is selling stoves to Eskimos will probably do better in the long run. The key is that the company must actually listen to what its customers want and need, and adapt its products to that, instead of deciding what will be profitable and trying to make the customers buy what it can make at the highest margin. If that sounds like the US automobile industry in the 1970s and 1980s (and, for that matter, today), it should: That's exactly what I'm referring to. The ultimate point is that there is not one, single factor that should determine everything. The US automobile industry had problems in the 1970s and 1980s due to a confluence of two factors: a well-deserved reputation for poor reliability and a focus on large vehicles that cost more to run than did many imports. It's much the same today, with the overemphasis on suburban assault vehicles that chew through tires and gasoline at a horrendous rate. The entertainment/publishing industry faces a similar confluence of multiple factors: a well-deserved reputation for shoddy products and a focus on blockbusters that cost more to participate in than many alternatives.

The product problem results from a simple management flaw. Well-managed companies and industries almost always include decisionmakers who are themselves significant consumers of their products. If one looks at the entertainment/publishing industry today, though, one will find very, very few consumers of the products in decisionmaking roles. Some of this is the inevitable result of conflicting demands on time; Steven Spielberg probably doesn't have a slot open every Saturday to go see a matinee or three. Similarly, I'd be shocked to find out that Sonny Mehta had chosen to read as many as half-a-dozen current novels from imprints other than those he controls last year... except, perhaps, for anything for which he was acting as a celebrity judge (think Cannes Film Festival). And Mr Mehta is probably much more aware of what is actually out there than many others, and in particular two or three management layers immediately below his level. Most of it, though, is attitude: The attitude that the only thing that matters is present profitability.

The second of these common factors is an inefficient, oligopolistic layer of distribution between the product creators and the ultimate consumer. Again, the automobile industry provides a good example. Just try buying exactly the car you want — with no unwanted extras, such as worthless undercoating or an illusory extended warranty or a "complimentary" automobile club membership — by calling Ford or GM directly. Even better luck getting warranty repairs done! The entertainment/publishing industry's distribution layer is even worse, and even more shadowy than is Honest Joe's Lincoln/Mercury in Beautiful Suburban Rosemont.⁵ The impending collapse and/or bankruptcy of Borders is a good example.

The distribution layer problem results in part from the same management flaw as does the product problem: The "buyers" who are deciding what pieces go into the various distribution outlets are not themselves significant consumers of their products. If they were, we wouldn't have the continuing problem of cover designs and cover copy pointed at some non-mystery-reader in Ann Arbor ruining the marketability of a work that must ultimately be purchased by bespectacled would-be detectives in Malibu to be successful.

The third of these common factors... will wait for next time. Warning: mathematics ahead.

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4. I'm using "industry" as shorthand only. There is no publishing industry; there is, at most, the bastard offspring of a drunken, three-century-long orgy of thirteen distinct subniches. The entertainment "industry" requires even more divisions, because the orgy isn't even limited to a single species...
5. That is an actual dealership that I sued repeatedly for various consumer-protection violations back in the 1990s; only part of the name has been changed to protect the guilty. Let's just say that the ownership of that chain of dealerships is a good family business and leave it at that.

Labels: arts, culture, intellectual property, internet, mass media, politics, publishing

link to: 11:39 [GMT-6]

Bits of the Year That Was

 

This is mostly just a collection of links to remind you of some of the news of 2008 that did not involve elections. Or casino finance.

The world of letters and authorship lost a few leading lights. That's not all that surprising, as "leading lights" in the world of letters and authorship tend to be old, ill, crazy, or some combination thereof. In alphabetical order, Michael Crichton, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Disch, Randy Pausch, Harold Pinter, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, David Foster Wallace, and Donald Westlake. This is far from everyone of significance, but it's a relatively representative cross-section. From a particularly jaundiced point of view.

Speaking of particularly jaundiced, fake memoirs from Misha Defonseca, "Margaret Jones" (Peggy Seltzer), Herman Rosenblat, and (depending upon whom you believe) possibly Ishmael Beah were excoriated. Conversely, a perfectly worthwhile novel by Sherry Jones got cancelled... because the publisher is controlled by a lilylivered chickenshit with worse judgment than OJ Simpson. Meanwhile, plagiarism in category romance novels, and alleged plagiarism in parenting guides, were — as usual — overshadowed by events like copyright infringement in "guides" to "children's books".

And all the while, Nero picked up his electric guitar and riffed while Manhattan burned.

Labels: arts, censorship, copyright, intellectual property, miscellany, publishing