The Egatz Epitaph

It’s an interesting time for the publishing world, to say the least. Those with e-book aspirations—authors, publishers, and e-book sellers (Amazon, Apple, et al.)—continue to jockey for front row seats to watch the continued implosion of retail giant Barnes & Noble. Posting a fiscal first-quarter loss, the vultures continue to circle the B&N carcass. Some, like investor Ronald Burkle, are already on the ground, and eating the cadaver from the inside out in hopes of wresting control from the bewildered Riggio brothers, Lenny and Steve. Others, like Amazon and Borders are moving forward with their own somewhat misguided plans as they wait to see what a Riggio-less Barnes & Noble will be like. Can new owners embrace emerging technologies and business models, or will the shakeout end with Barnes & Noble becoming as relevant as the vinyl retail business? The smart money is staying in other pockets.

On Tuesday the news for Barnes & Noble investors was not good. The quarterly loss was steeper than expected, and the proxy battle between the Riggio regime and Burkle is costing significantly. Stock hit perilously close to the $13 per share mark. It’s hard to know if Burkle is rubbing his hands together in glee or strategically placing his mouth beneath an open sangria spigot. Still, the stock is trading better than their previous 52-week low of less than $12 per share. As the eighties taught us, even the rotting carcass of a behemoth is worth something. The trick, as always, is to pay less than what you can carve up the pieces for.

Running a brick and mortar store is expensive. There’s the nasty issue of employing humans. Humans who actually know something about books is another issue altogether, and the problem of ever-increasing rent is a different nightmare altogether.

Let’s take the former, for instance. As Circuit City learned, the lower you pay your employees, the lower the quality of those employees. That formula equals a consumer retail experience lacking, at best, and your customers will go elsewhere. For those of you who missed it, Circuit City imploded into bankruptcy when upper management got a unique idea to reduce costs in effort to continue quarter on top of quarter profits. In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, this is an impossibility, of course. You don’t need an MBA to assume durable goods such as larger flat panel television purchases are going to be put on hold when one or both parents are out of work.

The geniuses at Circuit City figured out a way to trim costs, though. They fired retail staff who had been loyal employees for years. Longtime workers who earned a few bucks per hour more than minimum wage and had acquired a deep understanding of products, installations, and technology they were charged with selling were given the axe. What upper management and consultants didn’t grok was the simple fact customers relied on knowledgeable floor staff to get reliable information. Sometimes “out with the old and in with the new” is a good strategy, but not regarding salespersons who know what they’re doing.

Deceased founders Samuel S. Wurtzel and Abraham L. Hecht rotated in their graves as the minimum wage brigade replaced staff who were valuable to the buying public. In-store product knowledge went out the window. Customers voted with their feet once they realized they could get more information about products via the Internet. Hello, Amazon! In January, 2009, the last 30,000 staff were let go, thus killing a company started in 1932, in the heart of the Great Depression. Better or worse?

As we see malls closing around the country and big box chains being made irrelevant by the power of consumer reviews on the Internet, the writing is on the wall in flashing neon. For the quarter ending 31 July, Barnes & Noble posted a loss of $62.5 million, or $1.12 a share. Advice to the Riggio family: start moving cash into off-shore accounts. Advice to Barnes & Noble staff: bust out those dusty resumes and start getting more creative than your soon-to-be former employer. As a lover of books, I can only hope I’m wrong, but I’m not betting that way.

Recently, a saner mind than mine convinced me to clear out a rented storage space full of many things I’ll never use. As a writer, I went through a period of amassing articles, newspapers and magazines containing things which might eventually find their way into a short story, novel, poem, or article I would write one day. Pretty soon, my place was looking like the Collyer brothers brownstone. Women fled, screaming. Potential girlfriends were lost. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but I lived, worked, and ran a few businesses out of a one-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment for longer than I care to remember. The brilliant poet Dean Parkin dubbed it “the mancave.”

Among the things I discovered in the back of the storage unit were ten crates filled with VHS tapes. I had already thrown out several garbage bags full of videotapes when I recently moved. Now, like a fruitcake which keeps coming back to you every Christmas, I’ve got videotapes of films I’ve long since replaced by DVDs. It makes weaker humans nauseous to throw away thousands of dollars of old media, but it shouldn’t. We do it every time we step into a car, wear down all the parts we rarely think of, and then wonder why we’re lucky to get pennies on the dollar when we get trade it in or try to sell it.

From my window I watched sanitation workers get hernias carting off my old media, I found myself reflecting on the nature of good old American consumerism. How do entire industries effectively get individuals to purchase the same content multiple ways? Simple. Keep changing the format and hype each iteration as “new and improved.”

My father has been a music lover his entire life. During his long attraction to recorded music, he’s bought the same music on 78 rpm discs, 45 rpm singles, 33 1/3 rpm “long playing” albums, reel-to-reel tape, cassettes, compact discs, and repackaged box sets. He was smart enough to pass on the 8-track format, the Mini Disc, and has yet to purchase anything on the iTunes Music Store. Recently, he let more than 3000 albums go to some fast-talking swindler for a song, and there’s not much mirth in that fact to say whether the pun was intended or not.

My father isn’t alone. The recording industry is essentially able to print money by selling consumers the same tunes decade after decade. Digital technology means they have to hire new engineers to clean up old master tapes, but the ever-smaller digital formats mean they don’t have to pay designers, photographers, and artists for new work. Box sets are the lone exception, of course, but even then, what you essentially get is all the old material you own on one or more formats, plus a few B-sides or rare live tracks. As the major labels continue to implode, most consumers are not shedding tears.

The computer industry has worked similarly for decades. Software programmers and hardware manufacturers have colluded since the dawn of the personal home computer to leapfrog each other with larger software applications which require more powerful hardware to run them. Faster hardware with larger memory enable software designers to keep adding new features, bloating simple applications almost beyond recognition. When consumers realized all they needed was a minimal system to run a Web browser, basic email, and, perhaps, word processing, Apple came to the rescue and created technologies to move your record collection, your boxes of family photos, and yes, even your movies to your Mac. Turn up the need for more clock cycles, boys!

Which brings us to books. As if the Great and Powerful Jeff Bezos himself has been reading The Egatz Epitaph, his team at Amazon.com can’t seem to lower the price of the Kindle fast enough in order to more accurately reflect its capabilities in the blazing headlights of the Apple iPad. With the Kindle heading for below the psychological barrier price point of $100, does this mean the end of the book as we know it? Probably not any time soon. Unlike recorded music, written materials, including books, have been around for a relatively healthy portion of human civilization. Books in homes and offices have acted as testament to the intelligence and accomplishment of owners around the world. People have coveted books to such a degree book wallpaper has been available for over a hundred years. It’s hard to convey that kind of fine breeding with a plastic Kindle weighing a few ounces no matter how quickly technology marches on.

Things are changing. Every once in a while you read about someone shaking things up, like creating a feature film which debuts as a digital download, or an old author skipping a print edition in favor of an e-book release. This type of thing will only become more common. Still, some readers (and writers) point out serious flaws with both the current e-book publishing model and the hardware it’s delivered on.

I happen to own a lot of books. I can’t imagine living without them. I couldn’t afford to replace them all in e-book editions. Most of them aren’t available in e-pub format, either. Many of them are out of print. These shortcomings will hopefully be ironed out in the coming years, but I’m not interested in repurchasing a library I’ve been building since I was a child. I’ve done that a few times with the music and films I love, and I’m not about to do it all over again with books.

No stranger to the bleeding edge of technology, I’m not about to shun ebook readers, either. As an author, publisher, and reader, I’m not blind to the fact this is the way most of us will eventually be reading books. Dead tree editions will be a niche product for the wealthy, similar to the way Amazon wants to sell me a $500 edition of Exile on Main Street. The health of the planet dictates this. Forests are not being replanted fast enough, and you only get to destroy a primeval rainforest once. I just feel bad about what readers of the future are going to do when the big EMP goes off. They’ll probably sit around campfires roasting small mammals impaled on pieces of twisted rebar while they tell stories. Thus may begin the rebirth of the rhyming narrative poem.

With dead tree editions of books, there’s a lot less to worry about. Fire, followed by flood, are just about the only thing worth being concerned about. Loaning them to so-called friends is the other problem, but we’ll save that for another post. There’s something tactile and lifestyle-like about being able to walk over to my bookcase and pull out something to confirm a fact, as opposed to typing a phrase into Google. I put a little Django Reinhardt on the Victrola, sit in the sun, and sip something while turning page after page of dead trees. It’s distraction-free. It’s a nice thing. Come on over and try it some time. You can even bring your ebook reader. I might even make a latte for you, which you can enjoy as you dig through piles of VHS tapes to see what you want to bring home. I’m trying to keep some of this stuff out of the landfill. It seems the right thing to do.

Miyamoto Musashi showing how it's done.

Depending which source you believe, Miyamoto Musashi was born in 1584, and was an ass-kicker of the highest order. Author of The Book of Five Rings, a martial arts textbook I still enjoy reading now and then, although I don’t swing a sword much these days, Musashi’s writing can be applied to much of our daily life today. Like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, frustrated nonmilitary veteran corporate swine have co-opted this book and applied it to their business practices. This, of course, leads us to the business of books, which is more or less what this blog is about. Nice segue, Egatz.

Perhaps my old comrade Len Riggio would do well to track down The Book of Five Rings. Although Riggio has come a long way from his Bronx beginnings 69 years ago, times have changed, and Riggio has failed more times than not to discern this.

When I was a child, once a year my parents would make a pilgrimage to the Barnes & Noble flagship store at 18th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City, their book-loving son in tow. This was at time when there was one bookstore in the next suburban New Jersey town; a small, cramped mom and pop affair on the first floor of a former residential home, full of charm and personal service, short on selection. As my friend David Biedny is fond of saying, as with almost everything in America since 1950, we’ve chosen convenience over quality.

In terms of convenience (read: selection), here are few words other than “magic” to describe being let loose in that Barnes & Noble. There was simply nothing else on that scale in terms of the book retail business. It was worth it to brave the insanity of Manhattan back then, with the junkies, pimps, muggers and panhandlers working their trades open and unpunished in the streets during daylight hours, often within shouting distance of disinterested police officers. My father used to put a twenty dollar bill inside his sock for emergency funds to get his family home if we were mugged. Ah, the seventies. How I don’t miss you.

Although I’m sure my childhood memories are tainted, the Barnes & Noble store seemed endless. There was a turnstile and an escalator. Multiple floors! Damn. All I previously knew were small indie bookshops and a few larger, non-anchor store chain locations in ugly malls. A trip to New York City for Barnes & Noble was special and slightly dangerous. If you survived the trip without becoming a crime victim, your wallet certainly didn’t survive.

If you couldn’t get enough of your book-fix on the West side of Broadway, you could always cross Fifth Avenue and go to the Barnes & Noble Annex, which was less polished, and where a warehouse of remainders awaited bargain hunters. Barnes & Noble was something from another world for bibliophiles.

Originally started as a printer in Wheaton, Illinois one-hundred years before my parents dragged their precocious, fucked-up only child to the book temple in Manhattan, Barnes & Noble had morphed into something her founders would not recognize. Much of the transformation was in thanks to Lenny Riggio, who parlayed his college experience of founding the Student Book Exchange at NYU in 1965 into an impressive career. Gobbling up the almost century-old Barnes & Noble in 1971, he proceeded to build it into the largest book seller in the world, largely on the concept of the superstore. The sheer scale of the Fifth Avenue retail location was refined and reproduced around the country, giving shoppers a place to get coffee and sit in a decent chair with their potential purchases.

I worked far down the Barnes & Noble food chain while I was a graduate student in the early nineties. The second year of my Master’s I shelved books at a local superstore. I quit when I found out a co-worker who couldn’t spell “Faulkner” was making a dollar more per hour than I was. Working retail is seldom fair, but then, like now, I lived for literature, and I couldn’t abide the favoritism. I wrote a letter to Lenny. I’m still waiting for a reply.

In the late eighties, Barnes & Noble opened a second and third superstore in my county. You could easily drive to all three in under twenty minutes. Like other superstores in other industries, Riggio commanded his minions to follow the Walmart strategy: move into a new location, offer tremendous discounts to attract and keep new customers, then, give them the knife. I clearly remember the standard operating procedure was thirty, then twenty-percent discounts off the cover price of both hardcover, trade paperback and paperback books. I’m talking the entire store; not just bestsellers. As the independent competition was driven out of business, sure as the sun would rise, so did the prices of the previously-discounted stock at my local superstores. I voted with my dollars at this betrayal by patronizing Borders, who offered a corporate discount. Apparently, it would take years before enough of my fellow customers did the same.

Two of those superstores remain, but they’re clearly at risk. All things involve rising and falling timing, as Musashi wrote. Riggio was on the money with his purloined Walmart strategy until the early nineties. That’s about twenty years of an extremely impressive run, but when they write the Riggio biography, the second half of his professional career will be the other side—the downslope—of that meteoric rise.

Like many other corporate businessmen, Lenny missed the Internet. It blew past his consciousness like an SR-71 overhead, taking reconnaissance photos while Riggio and crew continued to build their big box stores far below. When it was too late, Jeff Bezos and some upstarts in Washington had built and deployed a Web site where you could get virtually any book in the world, and at a discount, tax-free, and often with free shipping. Take that, brick and mortar dinosaur! By the time Barnes & Noble caught up with deploying their own Web solution, the public knew Amazon.com was the brand to trust for online book sales and a whole lot more. The greatest innovation Barnes & Noble delivered during this period was same day delivery of books to your door if you lived in Manhattan.

As Barnes & Noble continued to grow to their current size of over 700 retail outlets, including their crafty assimilation and expansion of college bookstores, they made another critical error judging the timing of harmony and discord. If you missed the information superhighway as it was laid in your neighborhood, it’s no surprise you missed the rush into the e-book market. That’s what Riggio did, and for all the hundreds of millions of dollars he and his brother Steve have made at the helm of Barnes & Noble, you’d have thought they might have hired some senior management with a little more foresight and/or technical savvy. This was clearly not the case.

The Barnes & Noble Nook followed Amazon.com’s Kindle by two years. Two years too late, and when it did appear, the Nook was slow, and the software team clearly was not staffed with anyone who had previously worked at Apple. Riggio had missed his chance to own the electronic book publishing market, and he missed it by years.

This past Tuesday, shareholders disgusted with falling stock prices and missed opportunities forced Barnes & Noble to put itself up for sale. The market cap on Barnes & Noble has fallen to under $950 million from a high of $2.2 billion. Amazon’s market capitalization stands at $57.46 billion. If Barnes and Noble was a private company, there might be hopes for a substantial turnaround. Under Wall Street’s watchful eye demanding greater and greater quarterly returns, this is impossible. Shareholders have no patience, and they will not support a retailer as it tries to reinvent itself by playing catch-up to Amazon.com, or figure out how to make an e-book reader which has an additional 200,000 apps and growing daily, like the Apple iPad.

This is not the least of the Riggio brothers’ worries. Ronald Wayne Burkle has gobbled up 19% of stock in Barnes & Noble, and Aletheia Research and Management, Inc. owns about 16%. That kind of simple math is enough to keep Len Riggio awake for many nights in a row. With stock heading for below the ten dollar mark, it looks like Burkle and Aletheia will continue their feeding frenzy, and Riggio is facing a serious challenge to his position on the board.

Although Riggio’s public face is one of optimism to keep the brand he revitalized one hundred years after it’s birth alive, this much is certain: “There is timing in the Way of the merchant, in the rise and fall of capital. All things entail rising and falling timing.” Unfortunately for the Riggio family, Lenny, Steve and those they hired were unable to discern this. It’s nothing but a matter of time before the book superstore will be thought of with nostalgia, exactly the way I think of that little suburban mom and pop bookshop on the first floor of an old residential home.

©2010 Amazon.com

Amazon’s latest push into the e-reader market are two new versions of Kindle. As with previous versions, the PR muscle is hard behind these models, set to ship 27 August. Priced a dollar short of $140 and $190, it seems Amazon is competing with Apple’s iPad in the only space they can: price. These models are smaller and lighter than previous Kindles, but still only do one thing, and they do it in black and white.

I received a huge amount of reader mail over my announcement I’d consider purchasing a Kindle for fifty dollars or less. Some readers saw the logic. Others ranted about free market pricing. Some said the Kindle should be given away, like the old razor blade practice: make the money on the software—the content. Others said they’d avoid the whole issue by continuing to purchase dead tree editions of books.

For those vitriolic responses citing free market economics, you’ve answered the question yourselves. Amazon is faced with iPad, which Apple’s suppliers can’t make fast enough to meet demand. Priced significantly higher than Kindle, the iPad can do a whole lot more, and with the App Store, there’s virtually no end to what developers can make it do in the future. Amazon has responded in turn, first by buying a touchscreen technology company, but before that acquisition can bear fruit, the best Bezos and crew can do is lower the price of what they’ve got. People are voting with their dollars.

To the readers who said the Kindle should be given away, or, more accurately, sold below manufacturing cost, I have mixed feelings. Microsoft built an empire based on giving away product to dominate market share. Their lack of innovation despite millions upon millions of dollars in research and development each year has been astonishing. Will Amazon fall into the same trap with Kindle? On the surface, things aren’t promising. They have no track record of creating and delivering products people want. They’re essentially a database company with a massive shipping component.

Amazon’s history and business model aside, the fact is they’re already undercutting Apple’s e-book sales by selling e-books at a loss in order to gain market share. This has publishers livid, but as long as they’re getting paid what they negotiated, they don’t have much to say about it. Will they continue this race to the bottom by taking a massive loss on hardware, too? It doesn’t seem unlikely. For many years after they first started selling books, Amazon rode the .com bubble by operating at a loss in order to become the Walmart of online selling. Many on Wall Street decried this business practice as unsustainable. Fortunately for Amazon, with well-planned growth into non-book products, they survived.

In the simplest of terms, e-books are here to stay. The planet is changing, and the publishing world must follow suit. Something with no less authority than the planet Earth is making it happen. Yesterday, even The Wall Street Journal has reported on The State of the Climate in 2009 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The short story, kids, is something has inexorably been set in motion. You can blame your parents and grandparents for this one, and every day we do nothing about it, well, you can blame yourself for that, too.

Here’s the short version, and climate change deniers can stop reading now. The oceans are warming. Good for humans frolicking on beaches, bad for our long term survival. As the seawater temperature increases, phytoplankton, a drifting plant so small it can’t be seen with the naked eye, dies. Unfortunately, phytoplankton is a lynchpin in the food chain. The health of the oceans and marine life depend on it, and we’re running out. In fact, NOAA reports we’ve lost about one percent of phytoplankton each year for the past forty years, at least. That’s right. We’re down 40%. This means less food for marine life to eat, which means less fish for humans to eat, on top of massive deregulation of the fishing industry since the early eighties.

What the hell does tiny phytoplankton have to do with e-books? Trees reduce they temperature of the planet. It’s probably to late to see a reversal any time soon in the warming trends our ancestors have set in place for us, but that’s no reason to not try. If you’re not interested in planting a tree, maybe it’s time to start buying your books as e-books. Amazon.com’s selling them cheap.

Today’s lesson is, if you ever perversely doubted it, not all top management is infallible.

In a bizarre four-way race with British Petroleum, AT&T and Sarah Palin to see who can deny reality the longest, Apple made my prediction come true regarding the giving away of free “bumpers” for the iPhone 4 in order to stem the inevitable waves of class action lawsuits. With one-armed research chimpanzees able to reproduce the now-infamous Apple “death grip,” and an initial wave of a lame and misguided PR effort to deflect bad hardware design as a software bug,

Originally sent out via Twitter on 24 June, I wrote “Who wants to bet Apple’s $30 bumpers are going to be given away for free?” It’s the fastest and cheapest way for the Great and Powerful Jobs to avoid a mandatory hardware recall by giving away a $30 product that had a $28.50 profit. Still, Apple’s magic is holding. On Tuesday, 20 July, Apple destroyed Wall Street expectations with a 77 percent profit growth on the backs of 3.47 million Macs, 3.27 million iPads, and 8.4 million iPhones sold. Despite the most glaring PR misstep since Apple’s old 90-day warranty in the pre-Internet days, Jobs has heard and listened, despite the public face-saving denials.

The Street and the hands of most users are not the only places Apple’s usually-stellar engineering has won friends. Jakob Nielsen and team have released a report showing Apple’s iPad trounces Amazon’s Kindle in users’ reading speeds. I’ve made it no secret I wouldn’t pay more than fifty bucks for the Kindle, a one-trick black and white pony with a lot of bad plastic buttons and an interface that appears it was designed by Microsoft on a good day. Looks like usability and interface expert Jakob feels the same way.

Jeff Bezos and team at Amazon recently announced they’re selling more e-books than hardcover copies of similar titles. This claim is dubious, but for the sake of trees and the air we breathe, I hope it may be true. The reasons for this announcement are suspicious, at best. First, the iPad is eating their lunch. The numbers are not lying.

Second, rumors abound Apple will quickly capitalize on the runaway success of the iPad with new 5.6- and 7-inch models in time for the Christmas shopping frenzy. If you doubt this, study your history of what Apple did with iPod technology, which wasn’t initially anywhere near as wildly successful as the iPad: exploit the brand over a range of price points. Can you say “paperback iPad?” Of course it won’t be made of paper, but Cupertino could swing a similar form factor without reinventing the wheel. I wonder how much sleep Jony Ives is getting these days.

Third, Amazon notoriously was silent on numbers of Kindles sold until the iPad exploded. Numbers were revealed in ballpark terms (don’t these guys have databases tracking their products? You’d think they would, selling stuff over the Internet) only as a defense against the giant on the southern horizon was undeniable.

Fourth, the Kindle prices continue to drop. The new and improved model, the Kindle DX is down to $380. That’s still hundreds too much to pay for a device that essentially does one thing in black and white (okay, a few shades of gray), compared to a fully functional computer called the iPad, which starts at $500.

Fifth, Amazon sells stuff. They’re e-commerce and database experts, not designers. This is pretty clear from using a Kindle itself, particularly their first offering. Have you ever just held one in your hand? The subliminal message I get is “cheap.” That’s how it feels, and Apple knows feeling is everything. Despite Amazon quickly buying up touchscreen technology upon the announcement of the iPad, don’t expect to see anything as slick and integrated as Apple hardware and software coming from Amazon any time soon. Apple’s got decades of lead time on Amazon, despite how quickly Bezos and the boys may be buying up disparate technologies and selling books at a loss to gain marketshare.

Some top management continues to fail. Some top management makes missteps. Meanwhile, publishers who failed to learn the lessons of the music industry continue to watch largely from the sidelines while hoping they choose right. I do, too.

©2010 Apple Inc.

Much has happened in the world of e-books this past month. In the face of iPad juggernaut, Amazon.com has been forced to accept reality. The Kindle’s price has been brought more in line with it’s abilities compared to the full-functionality of the iPad. With the Kindle down to $189 from $259, and the Wi-Fi-only version reduced more than $100 in a single day, Jeff Bezos and crew understand what happens when a singular-use device faces a computer. Humans are visual creatures, and it might be worth reminding at this point the Kindle is essentially a singular-use device with a black and white display.

E Ink technology is impressive, but throwing a few hundred dollars more for a device you can watch movies on creates a serious problem for Amazon. Throw in email, Web browsing, writing, and early versions of rich media e-magazines and books, and the playing field is drastically altered compared to the beginning of the year. Throw in 200,000 applications, and it’s game over in the minds of many consumers.

As Amazon attempts to remind readers their content can be used on the iPhone, iPad, and even Mac via their Kindle app, it begs the question of what’s a Kindle worth. It wasn’t long ago cellular carriers gave away hardware to entice subscribers to sign-up for years-long contracts at insane prices. My first mobile phone service ran me $65 a month for 45 minutes of service in 1994, and I got a free phone. Yes, those numbers are accurate. Thanks, NYNEX! Anyone remember NYNEX? For me, what the Kindle—a one-trick pony—is worth is about fifty bucks. I could see paying an absolute maximum of fifty bucks for an e-book reader tied to a business that’s going to reap an ongoing revenue stream from my book habit.

Barnes and Noble is still in the game with their Nook, which runs either $150 or $200. Some engineers and even more marketing poltroons thought building a device with two displays was a good idea. It’s not. Trying to be the best of both worlds without the full-functionality of a computer, the Nook uses E Ink for book reading, and a 3.5-inch color touch screen for everything else, which isn’t all that much. Len Riggio and cohorts actually did get a few things right with Nook. You can connect to Wi-Fi networks in Barnes & Noble stores and browse entire e-books before purchasing, just like the dead tree versions. Makes sense. You can also lend e-books for up to 14 days, which is another cool move. I’ve learned my lesson on lending out dead tree books, but if I let someone borrow an e-book, in theory it defaults back to me in a fortnight. Good job, Lenny, but I’m still waiting for you to respond to the letter I wrote you in 1993. Barnes and Noble has shown the bigger players that if you’re coming to market with a lesser-device, you can innovate on the sales model and pricing (500,000 out of 1.5 million e-books for the Nook are free).

Borders is also in the game, with the Kobo, at $150, covered here.

In last place is Spring Design’s Alex. Way out of step with a price of $400, Alex suffers from the Nook’s approach of dual screens, making it a sloppy, almost nine inches tall. Didn’t anyone tell the engineers at Spring Design what the dimensions of an actual book are? How about a typical book?

Do readers want an oddly-shaped device to read their books—a shape unlike the dimensions of books they’ve lived their whole lives reading? I think not. Do they want a dual-display device so they can look at bookcovers in color? Probably not. Do they want a singular-use device, with a few extras ungainly and awkwardly thrown in, such as the ability to use Twitter? Not really. The problem to these approaches is the hardware and the pricing. Apple has been doing software with incredible user interfaces since the Lisa. They are here to eat other hardware for breakfast. If they provide a third of the e-books Amazon does, they will be successful. They sold 2 million iPads in less than the first sixty days of the device being available. They sold 3 million by mid-June. These numbers will progress geometrically as availability is rolled out in other countries.

As we see the old warhorse iPod effectively being phased out, the writing is on the wall for hardware designers of e-book readers. In 2007, the iPod became obsolete as music listening functionality was folded into the iPhone. If you don’t want to be sodomized by AT&T each month, the iPod Touch is still selling like hotcakes. Not only does it offer iPod functionality, but there’s those undeniable 200,000 applications at the ready. It’s a miracle the Great and Powerful Jobs hasn’t killed the other iPods off already.

Publishers are scrambling for a business model, and I have an answer, but only on a consulting basis. I will share this, however. The answer isn’t in the hardware any longer. As Steven Crane wrote, “That much is certainly true.”

I felt very fortunate to get a blurb for Beneath Stars Long Extinct from the literary powerhouse that is Stephen Dobyns. If you’re not familiar with his work, Dobyns is worth looking up. Here’s a paragraph of his achievements we’ve used on the Camber Press site when he judged our poetry award a few years ago:

Stephen Dobyns has published twelve poetry collections (including Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992 and Mystery, So Long), ten novels (including The Church of Dead Girls and Boy in the Water), one collection of short stories (Eating Naked), ten mysteries in his Charlie Bradshaw detective series, and the highly recommended nonfiction book Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry. His poetic works count among them a Lamont Poetry Selection (Concurring Beasts), a National Poetry Series award winner (Black Dog, Red Dog,) and a Melville Cane Award winner (Cemetery Nights). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

While recently touring for Beneath Stars Long Extinct in North Carolina, a literature professor said to me after my reading, “You know Stephen Dobyns rarely blurbs books.” It made me feel even more blessed. Never afraid, herewith the witty blurb one of America’s most brilliant writers issued for my book.

“The poems of Ron Egatz are crisp, risky and slightly peculiar. As well-built as a brick crapper, they are a pleasure to read. Like the U.S. Postal Service, they deliver in all weather.”

Love it. Thank you, Herr Dobyns.

Books, check. Pens, check. Rocket fuel, check.

It’s Open Studio Weekend here on the Hudson River. Catch a rare glimpse inside the home of Camber Press.

Swing by from noon until five, both Saturday and Sunday, if you’re interested in seeing a real live writer in his natural habitat. Ask about real life survival techniques, getting published, readings, private workshops, proofreading, and the thrilling, high-paying world of professional poetry.

Copies of Beneath Stars Long Extinct can be picked up, with an autograph. Camber Press books are available, too.

Cafe Cubano and sangria might be served with proper identification.

I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on the title of Beneath Stars Long Extinct. It seems thinking about light reaching us after leaving distant galaxies hundreds of millions of years ago has resonated with some individuals. It puts things in perspective when you’re depressed about paying another mortgage installment on a house worth less than half of what you bought it for, or bitching about a pair of socks on the floor, or moaning about a profession which gives you no joy. Coincidentally, I found an infographic about the relative size of the known universe. That certainly puts things in perspective.

Think about it. A star’s light that started it’s journey before dinosaurs walked our planet. Light traveling toward your eyes before animals flew the skies of Earth. Light which was headed our way while Einstein’s brain was dreaming about riding on a beam of light.

These kinds of things make me happy, and a book of poems with a cover I like brings a little solace to a galactic backwater in a very large universe. I think I’ve gathered the strength to pay some bills now. Good evening.

©2010 Borders Inc.

Borders announced they’re entering the electronic book market with a low-priced piece of hardware called Kobo. At a hair under $150.00, Kobo is part of a two-pronged attack to not only get inexpensive hardware in readers’ hands, but to tout their own eBook store, which promises to allow consumers to read titles across a variety of devices.

Kobobooks.com touts over 2 million titles, and is looking to become the iTunes Music Store of electronic books, as is everyone else.

With Borders giving away 100 books right out of the box, we’ll see how Apple and Amazon respond. Somewhere Marx is laughing as the publishing, retail, and computer industries collide in an attempt to lower prices below cost in order to gain market share.

Since I’ve seen Borders retail stores closing left and right, perhaps some of that savings will be shunted into a solid beachhead in the future of book sales. The formerly-Kmart-owned retailer has been hammered hard by fleeing senior management, ever-changing shotgun business plans, dwindling profits, and a stock price that fell below a dollar per share. Good luck with that interface, Mike and Mark. With fond memories of how Borders screwed up the Camber Press corporate account, I don’t have high expectations for how the Borders Group handles technology. Let’s hope they outsourced to the right engineers and consultants.