The Egatz Epitaph

The Egatz Epitaph has been accused of being a Barnes & Noble-bashing platform. We call them as we see them, albeit with a healthy dose of commentary you won’t find elsewhere. Here’s a story for the unbelievers.

In Barnes & Noble’s smartest move since Len Riggio duplicated the super store concept of the original Fifth Avenue location he purchased in 1971, Barnes & Noble announced they will be taking on Apple’s iBookstore with PubIt!.

PubIt!, despite the moronic name, misspelled typemark, and exclamation point, will address iBookstore’s most exciting, virtually non-promoted, and grossly underreported feature: the ability of hacks everywhere to publish their own eBook.

With potential hordes of bad writers uploading their material as eBooks, things can shake up the publishing industry, an industry already feeling its way into the 21st Century like Helen Keller dropped off in Death Valley.

Unlike Apple’s straight grab of 30% of the cover price, Barnes & Noble has announced a different profit sharing breakdown with potential authors. They’ll take 35% of the price of eBooks under $10, and a stupefying 60% of titles priced over $10. How’s that for Riggio-math?

Despite this greedy, punitive, and impossible-to-justify policy, Barnes & Noble stands poised to launch a venture which can be highly profitable, and possibly saved their ill-conceived Nook eReader from total obscurity.

Promising the ability to turn anyone’s HTML, TXT, RTF or Word file into the .epub format, PubIt! will enable writers to get their screeds up on the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. This is exactly what Apple had promised with their iBookstore and the iBooks app, although they have completely fallen down on promotion efforts to publicize this functionality. Whomever is running this division for Apple should be swiftly removed and retrained to work as a greeter an as-yet unbuilt Apple Store in Fairbanks, Alaska.

As Cupertino continues their bizarre slumber on promoting iBooks and iBookstore, Barnes & Noble might do something correct for the first time in decades, and likely for the first time since they’ve entered the world in digital media. Kudos to Lenny and the folks responsible for PubIt!. You may have found the way to save that once-great book retailer, Barnes & Noble.

The Riggio family continues their war to remain in control of the Barnes & Noble empire built by Leonard S. Riggio after purchasing the flagship store on 18th and Fifth Avenue in 1971. Despite a brief win last Tuesday, stockholders are unhappy, employees are underpaid, and the company remains unable to execute a compelling eBook strategy in the wake of Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad.

With Len Riggio’s successful staving off of his inevitable ouster as Chairman last week, he now turns his energy to keeping the Barnes & Noble dinosaur alive while he finds someone foolish enough to buy the chain he expanded into mythic proportions.

Ronald “Wild West” Burkle and his investment machine, Yucaipa Companies, continue to be the Riggio family’s worst nightmare. Although Len Riggio was able to sway shareholders to vote for the company’s choice of three candidates for the Barnes & Noble board, he won by a slim margin. In a further victory, shareholders voted to prevent Yucaipa from gaining more than nineteen percent of the stock.

Since Americans have a long history of voting against their own best financial interest, none of this should come at a surprise. The senior management of Barnes & Noble has built an empire of retail book super stores, but although they had more than enough resources to do it, they failed first when they had the opportunity to become Amazon.com, and they failed again when they missed the eBook revolution by more than two years. How this incompetence and neglect to shareholders can be rewarded is something future historians will have to assess, along with the 2004 elections and Robert Nardelli’s $210 million reward for running Home Depot into the ground.

Wild West Burkle will not be going away soon. Even if Riggio manages to hang on until the company is sold, the face of California corporate assimilator Burkle will haunt Riggio for his remaining days and visit him, tanned and grinning, upon his deathbed. With Barnes & Noble corporate governance seemingly run by the blindfolded throwing of darts at a wall chart, the influential Institutional Shareholder Services had sided with Yucaipa the previous week in an attempt to get three Yucaipa brains on the Barnes & Noble board.

The Riggio clan’s win was close, with less than fifty percent of outstanding shares supporting them. With shareholders losing one-quarter of their value in the past year, their voting to retain Len and Steve Riggio are nothing short of baffling. If they needed any one reason to vote out the current regime, that alone would suffice. Shareholders could also factor in the fact the stock has lost almost 20% of it’s value since the dot com implosion ten years ago, and Amazon.com’s stock is up 300% during the same period, to over $150 per share. The previously mentioned eReader missed opportunity is yet another reason to try someone else at the Barnes & Noble helm.

Perhaps the most obvious reason to vote Len Riggio and clan out of the company they have controlled for 39 years is the shameful $514 million acquisition of the College Bookstore chain owned by the Riggios. It almost boggles the mind how S.E.C. regulators could allow such a deal to happen, but in a country where incompetence is rewarded, legal dream teams make bad things go away, and lobbyists write legislation, it’s hard to claim precedent hasn’t been set.

As the Riggio properties in the Hamptons are being closed up for the long New York winter, Ronald “Wild West” Burkle and his team of corporate raiders are locking and loading for another skirmish. You can bet this war is far from over. Although it’s still to early to write a book about it, the smart money knows how it’s going to end. The question is, will what’s left of Barnes & Noble carry it on their shelves?

Egatz owns no stock in either Barnes & Noble or Yucaipa Companies.

The final trains are leaving the station for the land of prosperity, or, at least, survivability. Now it’s time to see if newspapers and magazines will climb aboard. Whether they’ll be left behind remains a question of choice for these industries which have operated largely without change for most of their existence.

The exciting news over the past two weeks has been Apple’s alleged forthcoming subscription-based model for periodicals. The smart money has known for at least a decade the corner newsstand will be something art directors and production designers of the future will have to reference archival photos for when they’re told to recreate one for a period piece. Perhaps history will repeat itself with the Great and Powerful Jobs riding in on a white horse to save the newspaper industry the way he saved the music industry.

Now, before I get another wave of nasty email, here’s a history lesson. Decades of corporate inertia plus Napster equalled the death knell of the old recording industry, not the iTunes Music Store. The genie was out of the bottle once Audion and similar ripping software was released. When consumers realized they could copy music off compact discs easily on their computers, there was no turning back, and Tower Records, Sam Goody, HMV, and Virgin MegaStores were counting calendar pages until they’d be closed forever. Even with the death of Napster, thanks largely to the elfin and angry Lars Ulrich, music file swappers moved on to other technologies, such as peer to peer file sharing applications.

In 1900 there were at least twenty daily newspapers in New York City. By 1940 there were eight. Today, there are essentially four major players, two of which are rightwing tabloids with laughable journalism. Thanks to television, the general rule in America since the mid-1950s has been the younger the individual, the less he/she reads. The audience still picking up a newspaper is marching off the cliff of extinction. Their disappearance is, if nothing else, a mathematical certainty.

Newspapers are yesterday’s news today, and they’re unsearchable, unlinkable, and static. The magazine industry has its own similar but different woes. Paper-based magazines are getting thinner in both advertisements and feature articles. Most are well over five bucks and heading for the ten dollar mark. Even though Apple is looking for their 30% cut, Jobs and company appear the best hope imaginable for newspapers and magazines at this point. No other cavalry is in sight to charge down the hill and save the day, that’s clear. Remember, we’re talking about two industries which boast the blow-in subscription card as their last major technological push for a larger readership.

Apple has the chance to make newspapers and magazines happy again, not to mention profitable. With a set of consistent user interface guidelines and a proven software developers’ toolkit, there’s no reason periodicals can’t quickly disseminate their content into an iBookstore-friendly format. The rumor mill is ripe, and there are arguments for three viable approaches.

1. Subscriptions will be distributed through the iBookstore application.
2. Subscriptions will be distributed through a publication-centric stand-alone application, such as Wired’s monthly offering.
3. Subscriptions will be distributed through Apple’s own subscription-only application similar to iBookstore.

Bloomberg claims Apple’s going through a digital newsstand storefront (option 3 above). The Wall Street Journal also believes this approach is the way Cupertino will go.

The real sticking points in the negotiations are not just revenue, but data. Periodicals are desperate for the demographic information they suck from their customers in order to target sales efforts at them. Apple has a reasonable responsibility to protect the information they suck from their customers. You can bet a lot of lawyers are billing a lot of hours as the negotiations drag on to determine how much Apple is willing to sellout their customers’ stats.

Reports in The Wall Street Journal and other sources claim Apple is using a full-court press to get newspapers to sign on the dotted line. As those of us who are self-aware know, the hardest thing in the world is to give up control, but when your business model hasn’t changed in hundreds of years and you’ve failed to innovate yourself, the time has come to partner with someone who can keep the ship afloat. Condé Nast, Hearst, TIME, and others have been approached to join Apple’s subscription model. The content providers haven’t been able to see the future, nor to see the present, and it’s time they play ball. The cliff is getting closer, and countless newspaper-reading seniors march over the edge every day.

The transition will not be as smooth as wet glass. Sports Illustrated’s application-based approach only supports landscape, or horizontal viewing in it’s most recent issue. Previously, other issues rotated between both portrait and landscape mode. They went horizontal-only to save both money and file size. AppleInsider reports this was primarily done because “Apple does not allow iPad subscriptions at ‘a reasonable price.'” A reasonable price is always debatable, but when you cut paper costs, physical distribution via trucking fleets, postage, regional advertising breakdowns, etc., into the equation, 30% for Apple doesn’t seem unreasonable. The New Yorker gets it, and has just announced their own iPad app.

If periodicals had any doubt Apple is around for the long haul, yet another American Customer Satisfaction Index report once again has Macs trouncing Windows-based personal computers in consumer satisfaction. Further, iPad is the highest-ever scoring product ACSI has measured to date. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson announced there’s over half a million G3 iPad users on his network. Even Google, which as of late seems bent on moving into Apple’s sandboxes in any way possible, is making Google Docs accessible to iPad users. The projected numbers of future sales of iPad are off the charts. Apple has realized the perfect vehicle for consumers who don’t want to worry about font management, software drivers, or anything else under the hood.

In 1984 Apple released “the computer for the rest of us,” with the 128k Macintosh. The command line interface was forever banished to computer programmers, engineers, and anyone who wanted to get under the hood for whatever reason. Real world users—mere mortals—flocked to the Mac to get things done. With the iPad in particular, they’ve done it again. Every day users are realizing that for reading, Web surfing, moderate email, the iPad can replace the laptop most casual computer users have. Even the Huffington Post has run a story pointing to five “gadgets” the iPad kills, including Amazon’s Kindle.

Microsoft’s stock is down below $25 per share. Apple’s market cap has grown to $240 billion. MarketWatch is calling Apple “a Death Star,” and likens it to gobbling up whatever comes into its orbit. With the Street—which has historically underestimated Apple for the last 25 years at least—finally getting behind the company which did no less than the way we live, it seems there’s now the hope our declining national news media and associated publications will embrace curing some of their problems with Apple distribution via the iPad, as opposed to watching their own symptoms get worse. Fatality is inevitable if they don’t. Ask my friends who worked at Gourmet magazine, or other Condé Nast publications which have become a memory in the past two years.

The incredible cut paper artist, photographer, and social media smart guy Matt Hill has interviewed me for his site, MattHillArt. Check out his entire penetrating series I was fortunate enough to be part of, OnCreativity.

www.matthillart.com

This interview features two poems read from Beneath Stars Long Extinct, “Chart into Midlife Straits,” and “Human Papilloma Virus.” Other content includes rants on television, public education, my ethos of lucid poetry, and G.I. Joes. As the sign in his graphic says, “CAUTION.”

With Apple’s stock at an all-time high, and Adobe employees bumming change on the corners of San Jose when not revising their resumes, it looks like the greatly-hyped clash over Flash has largely subsided. Chalk up another non-event for the computer technology history books.

As AppleInsider reported, “Apple’s decision to allow intermediary tools to port software from formats like Flash” to Apple’s iOS devices didn’t do much to stop the free fall of Adobe’s stock price.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, is quoted as grudgingly saying, “In the short run, I would say the impact was muted.” Narayen then left Tuesday’s quarterly earnings call to commence whipping software engineers with a razor strop in hopes of speeding the development cycle for Creative Suite 6 up to next week, which won’t happen no matter how many quality assurance tests the company skips.

As a wee lad, I authored CD-ROMs in Director. Shockwave Flash was a pretty cool thing, and in the mid-1990s I wrote on the old Egatz Epitaph how Flash would change the Web. It did, and made many things much easier than they were then in authoring environments such as JavaScript, for instance.

Unfortunately for Adobe, time has marched on, and the Internet with it. Hit a Web site built with Flash, as opposed to HTML, for instance, and the misery starts instantly. Flash has become painfully bloated, and the first thing you notice is you now have time to get up, go to the kitchen, and start the kettle on the stove because this sucker is going to load. Then it’s going to load some more, even with broadband. Hello, Adobe? The rest of the Web loads fairly instantaneously with a broadband connection. No progress bar, wheel, or fancy animation is fascinating enough to watch while a massive Flash file loads at the start of your visit to a new site.

The next thing you notice is every Flash creation has a user interface entirely all its own. Having to relearn a navigation system with every new site is nothing short of maddening, and turns users off instantly. There’s few things worse than flailing around with your mouse, clicking like an epileptic while trying to find out how to advance to the next page, image, embedded movie, or whatever.

I often write about photographers. The largest turnoff you can imagine when visiting a photographer’s site built in Flash is the dreaded scrolling thumbnail navigation of their images. This method of user interface was invented by a sadist, and is nearly impossible to figure out. Thirteen-year-old video game enthusiasts have been known to go to photographers’ sites with Flash-based scrolling thumbnails in order to test their reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and stamina by trying to select thumbnails as they roll by at varying speeds, often with zero logic or mouse-nuance. When I encounter this type of madness, I typically quickly leave the site, and find someone else to write about.

Video is painful to watch in Flash. The compression is ugly. It’s slow, and takes too long to load. The video playback controls are often nonexistent, and when they’re present, they rarely work well. To say they can’t touch an embedded QuickTime movie’s controls is an understatement. Since a video is typically part of the entire Flash file it resides in, this is more data which needs to load before you can do anything.

On average, site creators are not well-trained in interface design, information architecture, or content usability. With all the navigational and interface permutations Flash can allow, this isn’t a good thing. People hit your site for information, not an education in how you think a site should flow. They’re not going to stick around when they see how difficult it is to navigate.

The Web is largely silent, unlike CD-ROMs, which were a fully-imersive experience. This isn’t a bad thing. Some Web pages have embedded video, which present their own soundtrack, so they have no need for another audio file playing without readers asking it to play. Web pages are largely for reading. Music typically only distracts from that task. Are you going to gamble and include your favorite songs? Fine, but remember you’re probably driving away a lot of people who don’t like the same kind of music. Oh, and those little controls hidden in your Flash user interface which enable you to mute or stop the music? They’re an extra click or two, and they take time, if they can be found. All they do is annoy the reader, who is already annoyed because the music made the Flash file take a lot longer to download. Music embedded in Flash is a bad choice for Web pages. Stop it. Because I can ride on a roof rack doesn’t make it the smart choice.

There’s valid performance reasons why Apple’s kept Flash off their iPhone and iPad, despite the latest announcement of porting software from other formats. Do you really want to completely ignore this huge segment of readers who use iOS? Do you want these viewers to be unable to access what you’ve taken the time to create on your site? If so, use Flash to limit your traffic.

Flash is an SEO nightmare. Most search engine spiders can’t parse the content of Flash files. If you want to limit search engine rankings for your site, Flash is the way to go.

Lastly, Flash crashes. A good way to alienate users is to make their browser crash. Think they’ll come back a second or third time after you’ve choked their Web browser? Nope. There’s plenty of other content out there more accessible than your Flash-based site.

Flash was an impressive way to render and deliver vector-based animation over the Internet a long time ago. It’s become more bloated than the average American has in the past thirty years, and neither of these are a healthy situation. Fight the urge and ditch this aging technology for an open standard most users feel little pain using. In the end, it’s all about creating a pleasant user experience. That and compelling content drive readers to your site. Don’t knowingly alienate your audience with bad technology. You don’t see a lot of DJs in clubs running 8-Tracks. No amount of fancy animation is worth the drawbacks you’re imposing on your site by using Adobe Flash.

The publishing world continues to be as shaken as the Pope on his recent trip to England. The difference between that situation and the publishing world is that in the United Kingdom, citizens are avoiding the pews, and they don’t look likely to return to their former numbers in our lifetimes.

With publishing, illicit sex is kept to a minimum in the workplace, and it’s among consenting adults. Unlike the Pope’s dwindling minions, people are fighting for a front row seat in the publishing industry. Everyone smells the opportunity to reach a wider and enthused reading audience at a cost lower than ever. The technology and rapid delivery of eBooks makes for a feast of both new readers, i.e., paying customers, and neglected authors who can be in or back in the hands of those readers.

Stephen Fry and his publishers have announced the simultaneous release of The Fry Chronicles as a dead tree edition, an eBook, and a touch app for iOS. Promising non-linear reading possibilities with this title, writing is now being executed with nontraditional reading in mind. It’s an exciting time for authors if you’re innovative and intelligent, and downright frightening if you entertain this is the way narrative might be moving for good. This is going to be better than the dot com boom of the 1990s, kids. Grab a dart, close your eyes and throw.

In the world of hardware, Amazon.com continues to snipe at the groundshaking advance of the Apple iPad. It seems Team Bezos in Washington have hired some marketers and consultants who get it, unlike what was happening a few months ago. In classic corporate sleight of hand, Amazon is at last trying to rely on the few strengths their one-trick eReader pony, the Kindle, has over the iPad: longer battery life and… well, longer battery life. The old advertising con of pointing out what really works for you while ignoring what you don’t have is nothing new, and I applaud their new marketing campaign. What we finally see is Amazon not only realizing but admitting their Kindle is in a different class than the iPad, which can do many things very well. As proof, herewith the following quote from the Great and Powerful Bezos himself: “The evidence is very clear Kindle is a companion to tablet computers.” Amen. Clouds have parted over Seattle, Washington. Perhaps now consumers will understand these devices are in completely different classes.

With the obvious finally out in the open, like a drunk admitting there’s a drinking problem, perhaps we will now see accurate marketing of the Kindle and the iPad as different devices in completely different leagues. The difference primarily lies in the fact that, for a few hundred dollars more, with the iPad, you get a fully functional computer with a gorgeous color display, touchscreen interface, and fully capable of doing everything the Kindle does, plus a whole lot more. As Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn recently pointed out, the iPad is cutting into 50% of the laptop market. Although Best Buy issued a retraction of this quote in order to stem the stampede away from the Windows clone aisle, the smart money knows the quote was both accurate and true, and Dunn had let something slip he shouldn’t have. This cannot be ignored, and Apple’s stock has jumped accordingly to an all-time high. You can bet distilleries around the country are filling orders and shipping cases of booze to the Dell corporate offices in Round Rock, Texas. Outside Michael Dell’s office, it probably looks like a scene from the film Downfall: some officers faithfully standing at the ready, awaiting the next set of misguided orders, and others with whores on their laps while they drain bottles of schnapps and making sure their Lugers have that one last bullet in the chamber.

Samsung has responded to the Apple steamroller by cranking out their own iPad clone ripoff, but they just don’t get it, as with all corporate attempts to follow in Apple’s footsteps. You can make it look like an iPad, you can have a touchscreen like an iPad, and you can offer software which does some of the same things, but you can’t build the OS experience which makes Apple products so intuitive. You especially can’t do the latter in the short five month period the iPad has been available. Good luck with that, Samsung.

Conversely, as pointed out previously in The Egatz Epitaph, Apple has remained woefully anemic in promoting the iPad as an eReader. In fact, it defies Apple’s usual practice of hyper attention to detail to make new owners have to download the iBooks app after purchase of the hardware. Their iBookstore currently has approximately 130,000 titles, versus 700,000 for Amazon’s Kindle, and about 1,000,000 available for the kludgey Barnes & Noble Nook. Recent reviews, such as the one on 15 September in The Wall Street Journal, all point to the fact iBooks is a hell of an app. Engineers and interface designers spared no expense or detail in trying to recreate the real book experience for their eReader. Pages curve when you turn them, and there is even the faint hint of type on the other side of the page showing. Is it even possible those who designed the Kindle and the Nook even thought of that? Of course not.

Unlike their one-trick pony competition, Apple’s iBooks app has their purchasing experience built into the app. It’s astounding that if all your device can do is either display books for reading or sell you books, you still need to bounce out of the reading application and into a Web browser to buy your next title. Where did you guys go to interface design school, and, more importantly, why didn’t you hire me as a consultant—or someone more intelligent than myself—to figure this out for you?

With Amazon distancing the Kindle from the iPad, they’ve made a positive step toward realigning consumer expectation. There is nothing dishonorable about having a product a few rungs down on the food chain, particularly if it does what it does very well. What is ridiculous—and will result in inevitable consumer backlash—is trying to play in the same sandbox with a motocross bike when your competition is driving an M1 Abrams tank. Market your eReader as an eReader, Amazon. People know it’s not an iPad.

Bezos and team should set their sights on eliminating the Nook, Borders’ Kobo, Spring Design’s Alex, Sony’s Reader and every other single-use eReader currently out there. Amazon can be the Kleenex of that market. Everyone needs a reliable tissue. I, and plenty of others would prefer to use something more substantial. Like a towel. With an Apple logo on it.

The inevitable struggle for eReader market dominance will not be a holy war such as the one Mac users suffered through in the 1990s. The difference between iPad versus Kindle and Macintosh versus Windows is the Mac and Windows largely did the same thing. Also, Windows was and remains in a perpetual game of catch-up to the Mac in terms of technology, quality, and experience. Although the Kindle beat Apple to market, Apple’s answer is simply better in every way except available titles, and that race isn’t over.

As stated earlier, the Kindle can do one thing, and the iPad can do almost everything. In fact, it’s an incredible eReader. The best one out there, in fact. Anyone know which one the Pope prefers?

The deceptively small entrance to the beautiful and large Ruskin Arts Club, built in the Mission Revival bungalow style.

I’m in Los Angeles, and alone in this city for the first time in almost twenty years. I read at the beautiful Ruskin Arts Club for Red Hen Press to promote Beneath Stars Long Extinct.

The woman I love, my wife Jenn, is a Los Angeles native, and she’s not with me this time around. The last time I was in her hometown alone, I was a young unpublished writer working on my third book of poetry. It’s a good chance I was more crazy than I am now, which, after this summer, is pretty hard for me to imagine. That summer I was last in L.A. alone, we were trying to claw our way out of a recession, and I was hiding out in graduate school, learning about writing and literature. Actually, things don’t feel that different, but I digress. Again. I ended up driving through the bombed-out aftermath of Los Angeles Rebellion, a Thompson Guide on the passenger seat of a borrowed car, and I got a tattoo on La Brea.

I truly hated Los Angeles that year I was an young angry dope, and had for a long time before then. Uniformed and basing my opinions on third-hand information, I was not unlike some redneck talking about burning some other group’s literature without having read, understood it, and put it in a historical context. To me, with my classic New York centrism, the entire L.A. basin was a place that had lots of sunshine, amazing produce, and none of the culture I thrived on.

Fast forward about fifteen years. I fell in love with a Los Angeles native I met on a Caribbean beach. A few years later, I promised I would do everything in my power to make her happy for the rest of our lives. Some days I can. Often I fail, but I’m too crazy to stop trying. I think she’s worth it.

On my flight to L.A., and had an iChat video chat with an old writer friend who admonished me for not yet reading the latest Bret Easton Ellis novel, Imperial Bedrooms. There I was, heading into the place Ellis had busted out of—via Bennington—in 1985 with Less Than Zero. Whether you’re friend or foe to that novel, it helped define a generation, and it impacted, directly or indirectly, most of us who were young writers when it was published. The scene with a billboard reading “Disappear Here,” pretty much summed up the tenor of the novel and other work Ellis has since published. Released on 15 June 2010, critics had the typical mixed bag of positive and negative reviews. Fans of Less Than Zero undoubtedly were thrilled at the notion of finding out what’s happened to those characters twenty-five years on. Talk is in the air of a film, but it will be hard for Hollywood to unscrew how badly it deviated from the original novel with the film they passed off under the name Less Than Zero.

When I arrived in Los Angeles this time, it was overcast and twisted. I visited a few places I cared about, wondering what the hell I was doing here without my native driver who knows the traffic patterns better than she knows herself; the woman I want to grow old with.

Sleep-deprived, I drove around Rosecrans and Aviation, looking for something to read in order to get my mind off my own poems for the next day’s reading, and some new poems I’ve been working on about the said woman I love. I kept thinking Imperial Bedrooms would do, based on my friend’s recommendation. When in Rome, right? I headed over the Manhattan Beach Barnes & Noble. I figured the Riggio family could use a little money, so I’d contribute to the cause to help out my old employer who was going down the tubes.

Being a poet, I first tried to find the poetry section. Typically relegated to the rear of a store between the civil servant guidebooks and the fanatical religious tracts, poetry doesn’t deserve much spotlight in the eyes of retailers because they don’t move many units. Can’t blame them for that. It’s the publishers and the educators who have done this to that form of art for the past hundred years, but that rant’s best left to another time.

The poetry section at this store was more dismal than usual. Many of the shelves throughout the store seemed understocked. Even the fiction section was jammed toward the rear, like a bad afterthought. A young surfer boy was behind the e-reader counter. He couldn’t fix an old man’s Nook. “Well, it’s got the bars, so that’s not bad,” I heard him say. The grandfatherly-type gentleman was at the end of his rope. I could practically hear him thinking, “I just want it to work.” Then he said, “I don’t understand why it just doesn’t work.” I wanted to whisper in his ear, “iPad,” but strangers whispering into the ears of old men are not appreciated, even in the most liberal enclaves of Los Angeles.

Does anyone else notice how bad the branding on the Nook is? The typemark is a lowercase sanserif “n,” which looks largely like a hump, speed bump, or a roadblock. Is that the positive image you want to get people to adopt new technology? Another blunder by Lenny Riggio and team. Keep trying guys. Maybe you’ll get it right before you’re out of jobs, but it doesn’t look promising.

If the Manhattan Beach Barnes & Noble didn’t have Imperial Bedrooms, I shouldn’t be surprised when it didn’t have other titles I was looking for which had been published before 15 June of this year. There was an earnest but sad magician doing card tricks at the front door while trying to plug his novel about a a magician. He asked a young boy to pick a card, and then he couldn’t identify the child’s card from the deck. Things would only get worse the longer I stayed. Time go to.

I got something to eat, and drove around the L.A. basin for awhile. The platinum sky eventually got darker, until it turned misty and somewhat frightening. At another point in my life, I’d call it romantic, but there was nothing romantic about this or my headspace. Going to places which remind me of the woman I love, I was wandering, lucky to have my rental car. With too much ingrained existential sadness, I realized why the homeless talk to themselves and unseen people.

Eventually I was in a parking lot of yet another string of retail operations. A Borders sat before me, the former pride of Ann Arbor. Inside, the selection was better than Barnes & Noble, the sections laid out a little more efficiently, and the whole thing just felt better than my book search earlier in the day. Their poetry section wasn’t as robust as it had been in the mid-nineties, when they offered a wide range of literary journals and many independent publishers.

Unlike B&N, it was easy to find a copy of Imperial Bedrooms. In fact, they had a lot of copies, and that got me depressed thinking Mr. Ellis was still carrying the millstone of too many bad reviews, but this is art, and art is subjective. Some people get the good stuff, some don’t. The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye were ripped by contemporary critics of the day. Now those critics are mouldering in their boxes, reeking of cigarette smoke and formaldehyde no one will hopefully ever have to smell again. Although I only had one friend telling me to read Imperial Bedrooms, and the dim memories of some reviews I avoided back in June, I figured Mr. Ellis was worth my time and money again. I grabbed a first printing, and headed to the register.

I brought the book to the register. The cashier asked for twenty-eight dollars. “Wow,” I blurted involuntarily. “Are you kidding?” It wasn’t discounted, and California tax had almost taken me for close to $30. Instantly, I heard the old Woody Allen joke from Stardust Memories. “The worst thing you could ever do in my family was to pay retail,” his character says in that film. When you’re alone in Los Angeles, in need of a literature fix, and missing the woman you love, full retail price doesn’t seem so bad.

It might be mentioned here my small company once had a Borders corporate discount account, but it had “expired.” One day, the card stopped working, thanks to the geniuses at the home office in Ann Arbor. As a thanks for my loyalty, I was cut off. Suffering from a serious book habit, I went from spending at least three hundred bucks a month there for years to zero. In the way I stopped shopping at Barnes & Noble when they executed their Walmart strategy of hook and hike, I cut Borders out of my life. All retailers have a right to charge what they want, and customers have a right to shop wherever they want. That’s part of the fundamentals of capitalism. Ask Bennett S. LeBow, CEO of Borders. He’s a corporate raider, and has infinite more experience with different corporations than Lenny Riggio. He’s also an electrical engineer. I need some track lighting installed. Maybe he can help me out when I get back to New York.

Benny LeBow will be happy to know I did pay full price that night at Borders. With their Kobo e-reader down to $130 and struggling for market share, he needs all the help he can get. Here’s some other pricing facts.

• Borders is also selling an unabridged audio version of Imperial Bedrooms for $25.00.
• Audible.com is charging $18.90 for the same unabridged audio version.
• The e-book version on Amazon is a hair under ten bucks.

Two out of three with a considerable savings over the full retail price for a first printing. Is there any wonder dead tree versions of books will be a thing of the past? Makes me wonder what authors will sign at readings aside from autograph books and copies of obscure literary journals their work has appeared in.

It’s time to leave Los Angeles, and I’m ready to go. The woman I love is waiting for me, and keeps me going with encouraging phone calls and text messages. She will be unconscious in our bed when I get there, and that will be fine. There are poems to write and our comfortable home to keep improving bit by tiny bit to make us both happier in it. The next time I’m in L.A., I hope it’s with her. Maybe then I won’t have that horrible feeling driving around the great basin, where all the towns look alike, street after street, the sunlight unforgiving. On this trip, if I had come across a billboard that read “Disappear Here,” it would have been perfectly okay if I could, right at that instant.

Once, in 1994, I found myself in a car with some well-known literary intelligentsia traveling to a poetry conference. It was a seminar on a topic once considered very important. Like everything, what was once popular buzz eventually becomes trivia. This is something all artists should keep in mind, but I digress, as usual.

I was the only passenger in said car with my own Internet domain. Most people that year thought they were wired into the “Information Superhighway” if they had an AOL account. After all, it was all just one big series of tubes, right?

Somehow, between the mind-bending Gilbert and Sullivan tunes, talk turned to the Oxford English Dictionary. My traveling companions in the car were still reeling and heartbroken from just a few years earlier when the OED had been released on CD-ROM. Who, after all, didn’t want to have another 150 pounds of dead trees in their home?

I was a poor graduate student at the time, and couldn’t afford the CD-ROM version, let alone any version of this classic key to the English language. In those early days of Netscape Navigator, ridiculing comments were thrown toward the backseat when I suggested it was quicker—not necessarily better—to go to one of the nascent online dictionaries at the time. Nothing, after all, could compete with with the Oxford English Dictionary, I was admonished.

The intelligentsia fell victim to what often happens to engineers. They couldn’t imagine users might have different needs, uses and workarounds completely different from their own. They couldn’t fathom using “a lesser source” definition, or a less-vertical and probing analysis of words they had to look up. Why would anyone not want to know where the first documented use of a particular word in English was needed, nor the etymology of said word? Intelligentsia are like that, and they’re entitled to be. They’ve worked hard, foregone a lifetime of sitcoms, and run in the right circles which will get you into charity contributor circles at a discount.

My old traveling companions from that road trip have either embraced digital content or are about to have another serious slap of reality upside the head. With sales of the Oxford English Dictionary’s current edition sucking serious wind due to free Internet alternatives, publisher Oxford University Press has announced it’s game over for the 150-pound 20-volume dead tree edition. Countless forests and their inhabitants are breathing easier. Plenty of trees will die in the meantime, though. Although you can subscribe to the Web-based version of the OED for a fee, it looks like the next edition won’t be out for another ten years.

The Telegraph published an excellent article on the state of the OED, and quotes author Simon Winchester as saying, “Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea printed books would likely last forever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise. The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed. I have two complete OEDs, but never consult them—I use the online OED five or six times daily. The same with many of my reference books—and soon with most. Books are about to vanish; reading is about to expand as a pastime; these are inescapable realities.”

There’s little doubt Samuel Johnson’s project is the definitive authority on the English language. What my old companions could not see in the mid-1990s was Americans will always choose convenience over quality, as I love to frequently quote my friend David Biedny. If the opposite was true, we’d all be using OS X instead of the cheap and syphilitic abomination that is Windows, and Betamax would’ve never been usurped by VHS technology. The list goes on and on.

It’s almost predictable the bible of the English language has never turned a profit, according to its publishers. There’s just not enough intelligentsia around willing to buy the Oxford English Dictionary, either online, CD-ROM, or the soon-to-be-obsolete dead tree edition. Time will tell what Apple will eventually charge for the iBookstore edition. Until then, I’ll figure something out, as many other writers seem to have.

As the summer draws to a close, we see Amazon.com dropping prices of Kindle e-readers faster than wet bikinis in a Minnesota February. In its Microsoft-like frenzy for market domination, we’ve seen Team Bezos do everything from sell e-books at loss to multiple revisions of their kludgey hardware.

Now, following the Kindle’s move into Target stores, Amazon has partnered with Staples to sell their hardware to people buying book bags, Number Two pencils, and the chiropractor’s ultimate wet dream: the sub-$100 Staples office chair. If anyone remembers shopping at a Staples for printers and computers, they’ll quickly ascertain where this venture is going to go. Consumers might buy the Kindle at Staples if:

1. The Kindle is priced cheaper there than anywhere else.
2. Consumers already know they want a Kindle and why.

Hoping to get knowledgable assistance on digital device purchases at Staples is like hoping for accuracy at a British Petroleum press briefing. It brings back memories of overhearing a Sears saleswoman trying to sell a Macintosh a few decades ago. “It comes with four em-bees,” she said. “What’s an em-bee?” asked the customer. “I don’t know, but it says it here.”

After the smallest Kindle hit the $140 pricepoint, Borders followed suit with dropping the Kobo e-reader to $130. The bottom of the barrel Aluratek Libre was dropped to a buck shy of the magic $100 barrier. Cover your head and watch for further falling prices as more people see through the reality distortion field on one trick pony black and white e-readers.

Media giant Sony is still scrambling to be a relevant player in the e-book business with their new Sony Readers. Betting their farm they know more than the Great and Powerful Bezos, Sony is gambling

1. Consumers want touchscreen technology. (Good)
2. Consumers will pay more than they would for the Kindle. (Bad)
3. Consumers don’t care about wireless technology in their e-reader. (Split decision, at best)
4. Consumers know plastic feels cheap, so Sony has moved to aluminum. (Good)

The new $180 Sony Reader Pocket Edition has just a five-inch display and a USB cable to suck books off your computer. The $230 Sony Reader Touch Edition weighs in with a six-inch display and a USB cable. Both these models have no wireless connectivity. Rounding out Sony’s offerings is the Sony Reader Daily Edition with a seven-inch display, 3G and Wi-Fi for a whopping $300, but isn’t shipping until November. We expected considerably more from the company which changed the world by introducing the Walkman, but then again, they also introduced the MiniDisc and watched the iPod make them largely irrelevant.

Queue for Beneath Stars Long Extinct signing, Decatur Book Festival 2010.

I’m writing this from the Decatur Book Festival, where thousands of readers are navigating gauntlets of dead tree books, handmade soap vendors, and special interest group tents. I’ve seen a only single digits of depressive writers slouching up against walls and staring blankly into their e-readers. Oddly enough, the discussions on the future of publishing here have almost completely ignored e-book technology. Aside from a few informal talks among old colleagues, e-books are off the radar here. There wasn’t one official seminar or event devoted to how all these readers and writers are going to be consuming and publishing books in the future. At least there wasn’t one e-publishing event I could find, but it’s been a few days of being directed to the wrong location by well-meaning volunteers, and I’m not the only one sent marching in the wrong direction in this hamlet.

I find the lack of e-publishing seminars astonishing, and the Decatur Book Festival isn’t alone. The technology is here, now, and available to a confused public. Writers are even more in the dark about what the shift away from physical books means to them and their livelihood. This would’ve been the perfect venue to begin an informative dialog. It’s as if we’re a nation of zombies who get in their car every morning, start it up, and not even think about the consequences to both ourselves and future generations.

Wait. We already do that. What the hell was I expecting?

How much you wanna make a bet things will be different at next year’s Decatur Book Festival? As a publisher, author, and reader, I look forward to being part of the panel discussion.

Publishers I’ve spoken to are wary of many aspects of their business model in light of the transition the industry is undergoing. As dead tree books are replaced by their digital equivalents, a very practical question arises. As one old friend who wishes to remain nameless confided, “how do I know if Amazon or Apple sells 1000 or 10,000 copies of one of our titles? 100,000?”

With physical books, it’s fairly easy to get an accurate quote of the numbers retailers are moving because publishers control what is being shipped. Thanks to the Great Depression, they even know what is being sold, and often, how quickly. In the First Great Depression, independent retail bookstores—then the only kind of retail bookseller—were offered new books by publishers with the guarantee they could return whatever didn’t sell. Thanks to this practice, retailers had less risk, and thus could keep their doors open when Americans had trouble feeding themselves, let alone buy books.

In Manhattan, we often see sidewalk hustlers with card tables offering the latest bestsellers at drastically-reduced rates. These are new, first editions, and where they come from is the subject of another story at another time. What is not so amorphous is the fact that any retail industry will suffer from what managers have for decades euphemistically dubbed “shrinkage.” What they actually mean is theft: stolen merchandise, plain and simple.

One huge loss sector is the retail book industry’s own workforce. Consider the disgruntled minimum wage employee working for a big chain bookstore. It’s fairly easy for them to forget to ring up a few books when their friends come to the register with a large stack of titles. This drives fraud prevention specialists crazy. Everyone knows it’s been happening for decades, and, like the never-ending War on Drugs, War on Poverty, War on Illiteracy, etc., it has no effective solution palatable to either the consumer or the employee at this time.

The leading e-book sellers are in a unique position. Since the major publishers were unable or unwilling to create a technological infrastructure to sell e-books, they have no choice but to get in bed with Amazon and Apple, to name the top two. Like all publishers, they will need to carefully review data they’re given by those sellers, and hope they’re not getting skimmed off the top, like the way many other industries function as a matter of course. This will, inevitably, open the doors for accounting firms, forensic accountants, IT specialists, and, but of course, an endless parade of lawyers to strategically place their upturned hats into the ring.

Where does this leave authors of e-books? As usual, on the short end of the stick. Without authors, publishers have no product, yet authors are the ones with the most to lose, the ones with the most ways to be violated by a long line of business interests since they reside on the bottom of the publishing food chain. Publishers not only take their due before anything trickles down to authors, but now there will be a larger and more nebulous set of accounting rules and practices put in place before publishers’ numbers, in turn, can be trusted. In short, it’s not a great time to be an author unless you’re one of the highest-paid authors able to command obscene advances even your own books might not make back.

To be sure, there will be spreadsheets, presentations, and statistics galore to back up claims of fair and accurate reporting of each e-book transaction. In the end, though, the only thing authors will be able to take to the bank is what they are given by their publishers.

We live in strange times, and they continue to get stranger. Joan Littlefield has recently offered for sale the unwashed toilet formerly belonging to J.D. Salinger. She’s hoping to get one million dollars for it. Salinger, disgusted by publishing practices by the early sixties, famously retreated to Cornish, New Hampshire to write without worrying about money. Nice for him. Old J.D. also abhorred the idea of Hollywood and/or Broadway getting their hands on his work. It makes one wonder his thoughts on the inevitable demise of the printed book. Since we can’t ask him even if he was speaking to journalists, all we can do is wait for his survivors to begin the garage sale of his manuscripts to publishers, and the rights to Hollywood and Broadway, much in the way of how we saw the Kerouac Estate do when Stella Kerouac died. No doubt, the will of one man, the sole creator and owner, has zero rights after he’s dead. If you think otherwise, behold the ongoing lessons of what’s happening to the Barnes Foundation after the death of Albert C. Barnes.

With Apple posing the largest threat to e-publishing frontrunner Amazon (who currently sells e-book titles below cost in hopes of becoming the Microsoft of e-books) and their Kindle—possibly the most poorly named product since Whack Off! Insect Repellent or AYDS Appetite Suppressant Candy—it looks like there’s troubled accounting already. In June, Apple claimed it had 22 percent of the e-book market. Author Joe Konrath offers a different reality. HarperCollins is claiming they’re selling more e-books than dead tree titles. Amazon, a publicly traded company, is strangely and notoriously tight-lipped about sales of both the Kindle and e-books. When you have a product delivering reading material with a name that instills images of Nazi book burnings, you probably have a lot you need to keep on the d-low.

What the publishing industry is now facing is more of the same. Not only are they attempting to get Americans to actually read again, but they’re trying to sell them an expensive piece of technological hardware before they buy their first title. As always, there’s little writers can do, except keep cranking out their work and hope they’re not going to get shafted even further by a few more layers of creative accounting before that thin royalty check, if any, shows up in their mailbox.