Canada considering tough new copyright law?

Canada considering tough new copyright law?:

"Graham Henderson, who heads the CRIA, didn't want to talk about fair use as much as he wanted to get the word out about piracy and the culture of 'free music' that he claims has developed within Canada. Legal music download services have not flourished in Canada, he tells the Canadian Press, because 'it's a big black market effect and so instead of 25 percent [of the total music market], it's 8 percent here. People are simply abandoning the marketplace altogether, and they've made the decision they'll just download the music and worry about how the artist gets paid later.'"

Click on the title.
Blogaulaire, has to agree that the country has a flair for using the back door to avoid the ticket booth, just from seeing how Canadians jumped at the chance to 'pirate' satellite signals and ignore commercial subscription packages for the past decade.

Thanks to Digg/News for pointed up and voting in this headline article on their site.

Is Amazon (Dot) Com So 'The Establishment' in 2007 -- "It's Boring All of Us?"

The Scotsman, on the occasion of Amazon(dot)com's 10th birthday two years ago, nearly extolled Amazon's UK performance after a mere 3 years on the ground delivering to the Brits and Scots as well as Wales.

Scribes who, for nearly a decade, reached post-Christmas heights each New Year bitching about how customers' online orders were botched by Amazon, had already turned their sights upon online banking identity theft. Had they just dropped the poison pen and moved on because it became boring?

A quote from the Time text below:
"Books . . . are among the most highly databased items on the planet. The wholesalers even had CD-ROMs listing them," Amazon CEO Bezos.

Amazon the Pre-Teen

Boring? Books? P2P music downloads? Whatever. Who would have guessed that by today's 12th anniversary of Amazon's IPO start-up, commentators everywhere would find E-commerce so boring a theme that online shopping was barely discussed as bankruptcy loomed for the 3rd largest distributor of books on pallets to the retail outlets, viz AMS? It is as if Amazon competition in the bookbuying business is such a given, we cannot fathom that old-style distributors have not completely factored in Amazon into their daily equation of hauling books in and out of the warehouse.

If you forget history, you're forced to re-live it.
Cut and Pasted from TIME (dot) COM

11 Years Ago
Amazon launchs it's first IPO on Wallstreet

In May 1996, Amazon landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The story did two things: it introduced Amazon to a whole new stream of customers, and it caught the attention of rivals like Barnes & Noble and Borders Group, which hadn't yet moved online. Barnesandnoble.com would appear a year later--just before Amazon's initial public offering, which went off at a modest $18 a share. Never mind that the celebrated venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was its biggest institutional investor before the ipo. Wall Streeters were afraid of the threat posed by the giant Barnes & Noble, whose national network of bookstores looked unbeatable, prompting George Colony, president of Forrester Research, a prominent technology-analysis firm, to pronounce the company "Amazon.toast." Other naysayers referred to it as "Amazon.org"--".org" being a domain name reserved for nonprofit companies. But Barnesandnoble.com did nothing to stall Amazon's amazing sales.

8 Years Ago

Much of the Silicon Valley/Wall Street/media complex believes the commodification of online retailing will lay their company to waste. Amazon the Web's golden child, darling of NASDAQ day traders who raise its market cap even faster than the company bleeds money, is also Amazon the avatar of all that may be ephemeral and fraudulent about the dotcom revolution.

7 Years Ago

Marcus, who joined Amazon in '96, recalls learning Web coding on the fly in order to get his reviews online. Kerry Fried sardonically references "my assistant" to refer to her endless clerical duties. Almost every Amazonian spends half his time each December wrapping packages and manning customer-service lines. "It doesn't matter what you've done before and what you're going to do later," says Moe. "You figure it out as you go along."

That even goes for where you sit. Amazon offices are scattered across Seattle: the flagship Art Deco Pacific Medical Center, the Pike Street skyscraper, the original Columbia building and so on. Stunning mountain-flanked views of Lake Washington and Puget Sound are the only luxury the spartan corporate aesthetic allows. Employees are crammed two to a bare-walled office and work at Bezos-designed desks made of old doors with legs stuck on them (design director Helen Owen bets me lunch that she will still have a door-desk in five years, even if Amazon flourishes).

"We're constantly told not to get too attached to our office," says Marcus, who has moved nine times in three years.

The Brainchild
Some 14/15 Years Ago

Bezos recalls, "I'm sitting there thinking we can be a complete first mover in e-commerce." He researched mail-order companies, figuring that things that sold well by mail would do well online. He made a list of the Top 20 mail-order products and looked for where he could create "the most value for customers." Value, in his equation, would be something customers craved: selection, say, or convenience or low prices. "Unless you could create something with a huge value proposition for the customer, it would be easier for them to do it the old way," he reasoned. And the best way to do that was "to do something that simply cannot be done any other way."

And that's what ultimately led to books. There weren't any huge mail-order book catalogs simply because a good catalog would contain thousands, if not millions of listings. The catalog would need to be as big as a phone book--too expensive to mail. That, of course, made it perfect for the Internet, which is the ideal container for limitless information.

Bezos needed to learn the book business fast. Fate was his handmaiden: the American Booksellers Association's annual convention was set for the very next day in Los Angeles. He flew out and spent the weekend roaming the aisles and taking a crash course in the business. Everything he learned encouraged him. The two big wholesalers for books were Ingram and Baker & Taylor. "So I went to their booths and told them I was thinking of doing this."

"Books, it turns out, are among the most highly databased items on the planet. The wholesalers even had CD-ROMs listing them. It seemed to Bezos as if all the stuff "had been meticulously organized so it could be put online."

Bezos realized he desperately wanted to start his own online bookstore. First he talked it over with MacKenzie. She too had graduated from Princeton, but six years after him; they met at Shaw, where she worked as a researcher. An English-literature major at the university, she had been novelist Toni Morrison's assistant and now had begun a novel of her own. MacKenzie was all for the adventure.

Between Bezos's Garage and His Wallstreet Début

The most important person Bezos hired was probably the first: Shel Kaphan, a brilliant programmer in Santa Clara, Calif., and veteran of a dozen start-ups, many of them, in fact, failures. Bezos persuaded him, over the course of a few months, to join his company in Seattle.

Back in the winter of '95-'96

To save money, Bezos went to Home Depot and bought three wooden doors. Using angle brackets and 2-by-4s, he hammered together three desks, at a cost of $60 each. (That frugality continues at Amazon to this day; every employee sits behind a door desk.)

. . On July 16, 1995, Amazon.com opened its site to the world . .

IN 2006, Amazon.com experience it's biggest Christmas buying spree yet:

See the Wednesday, 14 January Post HERE on the latest analysis.

"Watermelon No. 2" Portrayed as 'The Crash' Crop of Lowthorp Farm in Hope, Arkansas ('O.D.' Out-Did It)

1930 - A.B. Turner and "Jumbo" - This was the 1st of 3 record size watermelons for the year. The final record watermelon was brought in by O.D. Middlebrooks on October 18, 1930 and it weighed 164 & 3/4 pounds. Due to the Great Despression, the 1930 festival was the last at Hope until the 1970s.
Blogaulaire - I'm outta here if Hope cancels this year's festival . . if the folks down there think the Great Depression lasted til the '70s, how long do ya figger the next one's gonna drag on fer?

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 13 January

"Good luck comes like a large watermelon sitting in the middle of a freshly tidied room."

. . (49) Chinese

Photo Courtesy of Blaikie Turner

Campaign for the American Reader: Books and their covers

This is a post we archived as a draft. We bring it forward because it hits on some points made in today's other posts. (By coincidence there is mention of last year's publication of the E. L. Doctorow novel "The March".

What I think is pertinent is the ease with which copyright in images is violated to put a book cover together. I am thinking about the digital book world along the lines that Google proposed to the publishing industry last Thursday (at the meeting in the New York City Library). Well I think that even for digitized fiction there will be a need for a digital cover, something attractive and a come-on to potential readers. And the whole thing being pitched as 'free' makes me conclude that all these backlist or even current titles will be 'covered' using unpaid artwork.

Marshal Zeringue could write 'steal' cover designs; Not 'reuse photography', in the text blogged below:


Books and their covers
Friday, January 12, 2007

Jeff Pierce writes at The Rap Sheet:
One of the very first posts I wrote for The Rap Sheet blog had to do with publishers and book jacket designers who, probably through inattention, reuse photography that’s previously fronted one or more other books.

Ever since, I’ve been keeping track of these “copy-cat covers,” and now present two more examples, from UK publishers.

See what he's talking about at: 'Did They Really Think Nobody Would Notice?'

Also on the subject of book covers, Pete Lit has posted on the 'Best and Worst Book Covers' of 2007. The worst cover belongs to E.L Doctorow's The March.

What a great book, what an awful cover. Click over to Pete Lit to see for yourself."

Click on the links to find the source posts mentioned above.

No Bankruptcy Court in the World Can Stay or Delay Harlequin Romance from Her Appointed Rounds

King of the Castle (1978)

The Enchanting Island (nd)

The Sofa (A Belmont title) Some of the far racier stuff, also available (if it passes customs).

Bride of Zarco by Margaret Rome (c)1976

Where No Roads Go (1963), by Essie Summers. (So rare, Brinks was present.)

Simon & Schuster went to court today to release books from the limbo of possible seizure under Chapter 11 ; we posted a link about one bookseller's take on this issue earlier today.

Upon learning that some/much of what S & S is trying to 'liberate' from AMS's Indiana warehouse consists of recently released Harlequin Romance titles. That got Blogaulaire thinking about how WE could help the Big Publisher in the eventuality that the Harlequin's 'stay stuck on the pallets.

Buy Canadian! Here in the North, we consider Harlequins specifically (and Romance fiction generally) a natural resource, almost like primary resources as 'natural' as paper-pulp and raw nickel.

Canada stands ready to ship every sort of Harlequin: new, old, and middle-aged, to our American cousins in the South. Hell, anything we don't have in Popular Romance Fiction, we'll write for you on the spot we're so good. And the price is dirt cheap: as low as US$4.50 a pop per book (You're welcome to scrounge around (if you buy bulk) in some of the 40-centers, where you might find treasures that can fetch over US $150 from a true collector. You never know!

So to whet the Simon & Schuster appetite and demonstrate that Blogaulaire means business when he speaks for Canadian bookdealers from Coast to Coast all the way north to the Beaufort Sea, we hurried out to OUR warehouse and safe-deposit box for a few sample image uploads running (above) on Cheap Priceless Editions.

Radio Free PGW: PUBLISHERS GROUP WEST, 1976 - 2007

RF-PGW Tutors the World About the Sales End of the American Booktrade

Blogaulaire would have blogged todays installment of Radio Free PGW instead of yesterdays. But things are moving quickly into courtroom issues, and we should all know that playing living room coach for a team in litigation is foolish at best.

But on Thursday, 11 Jan 07 the blogger on the inside gave us the dope on how Publishers Group West got its start 30 years ago and how it grew by promoting the sales of the small, independent publishers it represented. He gives names, dates and policy for guiding the sales staff at PGW. Whether this is a guidebook for success or for failure -- I'll let my own readers decide that one.

Simon & Schuster will do what they have to do to promote their own interests, their own titles. Just because their interests are bigger in dollar amount or their titles include Harlequin Romance paperbacks, for Bogaulaire, does not cut it one way or the other. You can be for the 'little guy' all the time and spend all day reading Tolstoy and Proust; in my mind neither 'prejudice' means you go to 'war' with 'pride' or with 'peace' in your heart AGAINST S & S. In fact, I hope the big publishers in this mess and the small press players help each other out at finding beneficial solutions.

A QUOTE from
Radio Free PGW

One of the great contradictions about PGW since Charlie sold it to Satan of San Diego in 2002 is that for many of us, PGW has never been better. Many of us had our best year ever in 2006. Much of the credit for that goes to new PGW president Rich Freese. He was able to take the torch from Charlie and energize an already productive PGW crew. Unfortunately, the sins of AMS would eventually be visited on PGW.

Hard-assed days . .

Major Bunny Colvin got tired of all the violence in Baltimore. He got tired of all the shootings, all the innoncents getting victimed, all of the waste of time putting dope on the table. He wanted to make a real difference.

Hard-assed days . . hard-assed ways of learning to live together

Sounds like the story line for any one of a dozen episodes shot on location in Vancouver for DaVinci's Code or some television series that's gritty and real. It's a re-hash of an edisode another blogger would like to see made real in New Orleans. A re-hash with a purpose by Ashley Morris.

We are about to cut out from Cheap Priceless Editions to a blog from a citizen in New Orleans who is fed up with all the killing down there, a young NOLA resident who turns to places like Baltimore or Chicago or anywhere depicted on television or in grit-lit (but also real places) where the police mean business about protecting people's lives from that violent fringe, the craziest victims and self-deluded 'redeemers' of the hard drug trade . . carrying guns.

If you cannot bear to see the word 'fuck' on your computer monitor, THEN don't CLICK ON THE LINK. But Blogaulaire thinks that, despite all the macho-man talk (encouraged in music, pop fiction, video and the like), we all should encourage THINKING OUT solutions as down-to-earth implementation of programs: police programs, social programs, community clinics and, yes, public libraries.

A take on season three of 'The Wire' from Ashley Morris, who I thank for this:

Bunny decided he’d take a different track.

Bunny lectured his troops on how, in the 1950s, a “civic compromise” was struck between the guys drinking a 40 or some Thunderbird on the corner and the police. The drinkers would put their beverage in a bag, and the police would pretend not to notice.

No harm, no foul.

This allowed the drinkers to continue what they were doing, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone; and allowed the police to spend their time on more important issues.

To implement his plan, Bunny found an abandoned stretch of row houses. It shouldn’t be too hard to find something similar in New Orleans these days. He rounded up all the corner boys, all the dope slingers, all the mid-level dealers, and took them to this area. He told them that in this area, they could sell all the dope they wanted. The police would not interfere, and would, in fact, stand watch to make sure the place didn’t get violent. The corner boys had to leave their guns at home, though.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 12 January

from Justin Wintle

"Never talk pygmie to a dwarf."

. . (46) Chinese

HM Rivergroup - IRISH Software Publisher Gobbled Houghton Mifflin

The real question is whether any corporate take-over in textbook publishing will change the 'educational culture'. I suppose that without changing the 'corporate culture' of the business, content and pedogogic creativity becomes a moot point.

This post is just a reminder that we have some substantive checking to do, after we catch up with this name change. Sorry, I apologise to the faculty members; I caught on only and exactly one month after this occured.

Poets&Writers, Inc.

Houghton Mifflin, the Boston-based publisher of books by Jhumpa Lahiri and Philip Roth, as well as the 'Best American' series of anthologies, was recently acquired by the Irish educational software company Riverdeep Holdings for $1.75 billion.

Riverdeep, which is actually the smaller of the two companies, was able to purchase Houghton Mifflin, the fourth-largest textbook publisher in the United States, by securing private investment and assuming over $1.5 billion in debt. The new company will be known as HM Rivergroup.

Houghton Mifflin, which was created by the 1880 merger of publishers Ticknor and Fields and Henry Houghton’s Riverside Press, publishes poets Donald Hall and Glyn Maxwell and fiction writers Tim O’Brien and John Edgar Wideman, among others. The company was owned by three private investment groups, which bought it in 2002 from the French media conglomerate Vivendi for approximately $1.7 billion.

What Vivendi did and did not own, who owns it now (especially which Canadians are still in it), all of this extends my comprehension to the limits. Sitting in Québec, I have the feeling that the corporate stakeholders in publishing with names like Transcontinental and Quebecor World, the names that change little, may turn out to be the biggest players. Maybe it is more important to first ask who prints your phone book and then ask who publishes your child's textbook to have a feel for where this is all going.
(-: my Smiley with a quizzical expression. :-)
posted 12.04.06 "

Cheap Priceless Editions: I'm 'Goody Two-Shoes'

FILED: Next to Norman Mailer's "Advertisements for Myself"
--------- and thanks to Sarah's Books Used & Rare (click title) for reminding me what 'Goody Two-Shoes' means literally ---------

I'm 'Goody Two-Shoes'

From smallfry at the end of November to big guy in mid January, in the blogosphere for a mere month and a half, Cheap Priceless Editions is in the news and in your views.

If the number of visitors doubles again, just running ads here will (would if we ran them) bring in US $1.95 !!!

A full-blooded, bona fides blogger-member of MetaxuCafé -- the litblog network that stands high on respected blogrolls in 'our' sphere -- let's tone this down a notch -- in other words, this guy said of the blog you're on, Cheap Priceless Editions the following:

I have never commented, so, I wanted to take the time and let you know even though I don’t comment, I READ you all the time, and LOVE THIS BLOG!

Checkhov's Mistress

No wonder I am being visited daily by the 'Scouts' at Grey Advertising. Yoo hoo!

Mother of a nation: LIBERIAN President Johnson-Sirleaf

By Ruthie Ackerman | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

'ARE YOU IN SCHOOL?' Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf talks to a group of children outside a church in Monrovia, Liberia, to see if they're going to school. In 2005, she became the first woman elected to lead an African nation.

RUTHIE ACKERMAN

MONROVIA, LIBERIA – At the First United Methodist Church in downtown Monrovia, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf sits in the front row for the Sunday morning service, wearing a golden robe and headdress befitting a queen.
Hours later, she wears white sneakers and a baseball cap as she dribbles a soccer ball across a soccer stadium, showing off some of the moves she learned as an 8-year-old girl on an all-boy soccer team.

'Instead of telling them "We're going to build you a school," we ask them, "What is your priority?"
- Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

"This is reconciliation," she says, aware that most people in the crowd probably voted for her opponent, soccer star George Weah, in Liberia's 2005 presidential election. But her presence at the soccer game proved something more than just her athletic prowess: It showed her willingness to try to bridge the gap between opposing political parties and bring strong leadership to Liberia, a country still devastated by a 14-year civil war that ended in 2003.

These dichotomies - athlete/intellectual, fierce fighter/ nurturer, Harvard-educated economist/African leader, technocrat/feminist - are what give Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf a unique perspective, both as the leader of Liberia and as the first democratically elected female head of state on the continent . . . Yet, how can she realistically restore her nation with an $80 million annual budget and a $3.7 billion debt?

Answer: Slowly.

Looking to the Peace Corps for help

The United States Peace Corps is one way the president says she hopes to recruit teachers to teach the 50 percent of Liberian children who aren't attending school. She also would like to see the 450,000 Liberians currently living outside the country - a group she calls Liberia's biggest national asset - to return home.

"Most of our talents that are out there in the diaspora, once we get them back, then we have the basic ingredient to be able to move our development agenda," she says.

But the president is aware that there are still many impediments for Liberians wishing to return: a lack of good schools and good healthcare, to name two.

With so many major celebrities focusing on Africa - Angelina Jolie, Bono, Madonna - and Hollywood movies choosing Africa as their subject - "Blood Diamond," "The Last King of Scotland," "The Constant Gardener"

- Johnson-Sirleaf says the hot-button issue right now is poverty. "[Poverty] becomes the No. 1 priority, the one thing that needs to be addressed if you're going to really achieve your development goals, and I think that has brought to the forefront a whole new sensitization about how we do development," she says.

Permission to reprint/republish can only be granted by The Christian Science Monitor. See their representative.

Oklahoma family needs: $33,000

Life at America's bottom wage
The House is to (did) vote Wednesday on a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.


In an unrelated ("UNrelated, my rear-end," says Bogaulaire over my left shoulder. "Look at my sidebar, my profile, idiot!")

Okay: Two days ago. in an article unconnected to anything else posted immediately above or below in this column, The Christian Science Monitor ran staff writer Mark Trumbull's fine piece about living on the minimum wage in the US, and I quote the copyeditor in the title:

"Oklahoma family's needs: $33,000"

Oklahoma doesn't have high living costs, compared with some other states. But to cover the basic needs of a family of four here (the Hosiers, are the example) typically requires an income of more than $33,000, according to an online budget calculator created by the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

At $5.15 an hour, it would take three full-time jobs for a family to earn that much.Many minimum-wage workers, it's true, don't have children. Often they are young people on their first job.

But the Hosier family is not unusual.

On Reading The Xian Sci Mon

Cross-listed under

Rmbling Thots of BLGaire

-------- whose been running into far too many Caucasians with Jamaican accents and full-blown Caribbean patois lately -------- and whose own Black Irish roots are starting to tremble in foreboding anticipation of the next wet spring

I know, I'm not a very sophisticated reader if I even 'think' about religion when I read the CSM. We will never, ever see a news magazine run under the name The Unitarian-Universalist Gleaner, and if we did I will not guarantee that I would want to read it. ((Would such a putative UUG have the soul to dig the Latin vibes of . . . The ecstatic religious experiences in the Church of . . . )) Well does The Christian Science Monitor? I'll let that go, sorry.

But then, if I'm blunt, slow and a certified cretin for even hinting at religion when I think about dropping by a Christian Science Reading Room for a free read of their own print news, our friend George over at Bookninja is an even greater nincompoop when he blogs an item on free evening classes being run by local TO anarchists. George starts doing a riff on throwing bombs. (Sorry George, I almost had a bar fight with my best friend over that one long ago, and I cannot let it pass).

Neither can I let a good article on Madam president Johnson-Sirleaf pass when I see Ruthie Ackerman writing in The Christian Science Monitor. (Ms Ackerman, do you happen to know if she (their prez) needs a French tutor (moi) so that she can better get on with Madam Gbagbo in neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire? I know a guy who would jump at the opportunity of tutoring Johnson-Sirleaf.)
Internet reading of CSM is free, no subscription required. CLICK THE TITLE

Press Release: United States Supports Education in Mauritania Continues Campaign to Distribute Books to Schools

December 21, 2006
Nouakchott, Mauritania

Ambassador Charles H. Twining, Chargé d’Affaires of the Embassy of the United States in Mauritania and Cheikh Ahmed Ould Sid’Ahmed, Minister of Primary and Secondary Education, presided at a ceremony this morning to mark the donation of books to the Arafat secondary school in Nouakchott. The donation included a collection of over 300 titles in Arabic, French, and English covering subjects such as history, literature, science, economics and finance, computers, health and several others.

The contribution was part of the continuation of a vast campaign against illiteracy that the Embassy of the United States began September 8, 2006 on the occasion of International Literacy Day. The secondary schools of El Mina 2 and Sebkha also received donations at ceremonies involving other officials from both the United States Embassy and the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education. A planned seventy-six schools in all thirteen regions of Mauritania will receive books under the literacy campaign, which the Embassy is conducting in close collaboration with the Ministry.

This press release "looks" more official on the virtual stationery of the US Embassy, plus you have the public affairs links and access to other background info.

Maybe Sending Books to Africa is Not Just Hot Air . . .

Speaking frankly, in North America, over the next several years, we have millions MORE new and used books that are going to do nothing but sit in warehouses or even damp basements until they are no longer even worth being hauled out and pulped (though pulping could be easily arranged at a profit).

In Europe there are real distribution-to-Africa programs in place -- even tax incentives for modest numbers of titles that get sent at cost or below through several African channels. In a few cases, unfortunately, some of the textbook titles have been ordered and paid for through African ministries of education because the educational publishing infrastructure does not exist locally - - all the editorial and production jobs stay in the Western home headquarters of the Western publishers under such export incentive programs. (Something to think about when we consider 'dumping' our surplus on poor nations.

Whatever the case, 'we', including used book people, own a ton of dead pulp we refuse to release onto our own local markets YET we know this material will never see the light of day or a readers' eyes WHILE the US Embassy is making claims, at least, of supporting 'vast' English-language literacy campaigns in several African nations. Last I heard, the US owns many huge cargo planes as well (though Canada has none).

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 11 January

from Justin Wintle

"If a person is seventy, do not put him up for the night; if a person is eighty, do not ask him to sit down."

. . (41) Chinese

JustSeeds needs your help!

!
Help save a priceless radical art project from shutting down!
By ryan

For 10 years, JustSeeds has been a critical resource for radical artists working outside the 'art world' system. In the process of becoming a decentralized artist-owned cooperative, the floor suddenly fell out from under them. The collapse of Clamor Magazine leaves JustSeeds without a distributor and in colossal debt. Help save a priceless radical art project from shutting down forever. The community of art-activists around JustSeeds have launched national projects like the Celebrate People's History poster series, Street Art Workers, Drawing Resistance, Cut & Paint, and a hell of a lot more: now they need your help to continue.

Independent Press Association Ceases Operations

FROM Infoshop News -

Blogaulaire constantly emphasizes the importance ofdistribution for small press book and nearly all independent publishers: bound books, magazines, zines, tabloids . . . and even art and art posters.

So far, what I have posted about distributors has been negative, bad news. First it was regarding the Chapter 11 filing by AMS (at exactly the same date as this story about IPA broke). THIS - the continuing new NOW is once again bleak news for small press, independent PERIODICAL publishers. (Volunteer contributions and new subscriptions plus direct purchase of imprint titles is what's needed to stop the bleeding, simple as that.)

Pretty soon people will start rummaging around secondhand shops looking for old mimeograph machines and unused stencils. Campus scribes and artists will revive handout culturesof leafleting to get out the copy. I'm only half kidding.

Please read the text blogged below from Infoshop, then click on the titles we've run to read the entire article. Finally, come back to Cheap Priceless Editions, because an entire comment cut 'n' pasted from ChuckO over at Infoshop appears here in italic.

Chuck is the guy who apparently knows how to put this in context better than anyone else.

Blogaulaire is not asking you to use your street sense to figure out what the impact of the AMS-PGW bankruptcy and the IPA closure will mean for New Writing. I'm telling you that many interesting and dedicated people in editorial and production for the words that mean the most are going to have a rough time paying the rent and . . .

Another Distributor for the Independents Goes Under

Wednesday, January 03 2007 @ 09:44 PM PST


Founded in 1996 'to promote and support independent publications dedicated to social justice and a free press', the Independent Press Association (IPA) announced Dec. 27 (two weeks ago) that it was ceasing operations immediately.

Based in San Francisco, IPA's demise follows more than a year of growing concerns about financial mismanagement of the organization's newsstand distribution service which in turn has wreaked havoc on dozens of small, independent publishers. IPA's New York office, which bears no responsibility for the crisis, will also be closing down.


COMMENT QUOTE
Jesus H. Christ! This was totlaly off my radar, although I'd heard about concerns people had about Big Top.

This is really bad news folks. The implosion of the radical press that we saw last month with the demise of Clamor has now turned into a black hole that has taken out IPA and likely a whole slew of radical and progressive magazines. This is going to effect progressive and cultural magazines more than anarchist magazines, but this will probably cause the demise of more than a few magazines and zines.

The SF Weekly article from last June notes that IPA's Big Top distribution project owed magazines around $500,000. That is an amazing shitload of money to owe a bunch of small magazines. That's a half million dollars that small and alternative magazines won't be getting. They won't be able to pay their printers, pay for postage and given that most magazines operate on precarious margins, this will be a disaster.

IPA was a pretty good association, lobbying on behalf of indie magazines. They took on the postal service after the recent rate hikes which fucked over magazines. They took on chain bookstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders, which were screwing over magazines with a "chargeback" scam (the bookstores charged publishers extra money if bar codes didn't scan). The IPA ran several good programs that supported small ethnic presses.

Dear readers, let me try to emphasize how bad these developments are for publishers and why the alternative press is being sucked into a growing black hole.

Small publishers are obviously hurt when any of their distribution networks go under. One of the reasons why the capitalist media maintains its hegemony is because their hugeness makes it possible to control distribution networks. The alternative media has to make do with anything they can to get magazines onto newstands or mail them to subscribers. When distros like Big Top, Clamor's infoShop Direct, Fine Print, Big Top, or Tower go under, magazines don't get paid money. This means they can't pay print bills and other expenses. This lack of cash flow disrupts their publishing schedules, angering readers and creating other headaches. The loss of any distributor is the loss of another scare network resource. The fewer the distributors, the harder it is to get into bookstores. If a distro decides to not carry your periodical, you don't have many options.

When Fine Print when under in the 90s, that really hurt the alternative media, including one anarchist magazine that I know. This past year we've seen the end of Big Top, Clamor, and Tower Records as distros and retail outlets.

The other option for publishers is subscriptions and direct sales to bookstores and events. The postal service keeps raising magazine rates, which hurts indie publishers. Selling direct to infoshops and bookstores is possible, but it is a logistical headache. The reason why magazines rely on distributors is to transfer the distro work to a service so the publisher can focus on publishing the magazine. Selling direct to bookstores and infoshops is a precarious option because fewer bookstores and infoshops are selling periodicals. They also aren't timely and efficient with periodicals, because administering periodical sales is complicated.

Then we can throw in the fact that magazine sales are down across the board. People are reading fewer magazines and zines. Some would point out that alternative websites, podcasts, and new media can take up the slack created by the demise of these magazines. This is a good point to some extent, but it masks several serious problems.

The first problem being that people don't give money to alternative websites like they do to print magazines. People like to exchange money for a tangible product. Online magazines across the board have problems raising money online. Go to any radical or progressive website--Common Dreams, New Standard, Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, Infoshop--you can see that they all have to have frequent online campaigns. Even when I worked for Science magazine, which is the most prestigious science magazine in the U.S. (circulation arounf 150,000), we were constantly worried about the Internet causing financial headaches. I attended more than a few meetings where we brainstormed, argued, discussed, and analyzed how to get people to subscribe to an online version of the magazine.

When these dead tree alternative magazines disappear, it creates new hurdles for online alternative media. We have fewer radical writers, artists, and journalists to draw on. If people don't get exposure through a magazine like LiP or Clamor, they aren't going to be motivated to compete with people for a smaller pool of online alternative media outlets. Many of these small magazines paid their contributors. Many of these contributors will have to turn to other work to earn a living or supplement their income. People complain here all the time about Infoshop News running stories from the mainstream media. I'd love to stick with all radical writers, but it will be harder to find these writers and journalists if print alternative magazines go away.

Isn't there some old saying that if we don't work together we'll hang separately? I'm not sure how that goes, but I'm more comfortable with science fiction metaphors. The black hole that is consuming alternative print magazines won't stop with just dead trees media.

Chuck0
/END COMMENT QUOTE

Creekside Quoting Stephen Dunn

In a post at Creekside by T. Jackson, quoting from Stephen Dunn's Riffs & Reciprocities, the bit from Dunn I liked a great deal was this

Best is the extra that comes unencumbered: pure generosity of spirit,
always replenishing itself. We the less generous are quick to suspect it,
remembering what we've given and why. But those who have it irradiate the day.
They redefine the meaning of wealth.

Maybe, as a box-quote out of context on Cheap Priceless Editions, sitting out there naked in the middle of my post, the words read like sloshy sentiment.

But I like the writing, the sentiments. It's the special opposite that is set up by the words below, though, that I can identify with most:

"A grudge is more my style, weeks, months of resentment silently borne. At my worst, after quarrels, I've kept it in and let it mix with any old bitterness it could find. When it finally emerged—stunted, timed, cruelly calm—I was no one's decent man. But I'm seldom at my worst and can only envy the brilliantly angry . . . "

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 10 January

from Justin Wintle

"The stingy man would rather light his finger than a candle."

. . (37) Japanese