Sunday, April 29, 2012
Saturday, April 28, 2012
The Future in Spite of Ourselves :: How we're accidentally creating the World of Tomorrow
Labels:
Future,
Futurism,
Science,
Science Fiction
While I was never going to vote for him, there is an aspect to Newt Gingrich's faded political fortunes that has troubled me for awhile now. I'm not talking about any of the real 'hot button' political issues of our time, but the Big Dream that seemed tailor-made to create laugh-track fodder for late night comedians. Most pundits agree that vowing to put a colony on the moon was a ridiculous hail Mary from a dying campaign.
Maybe so, but should it have been?
I'm currently running a bit of a fever, so it's possible I will wake up tomorrow and wonder what I was doing, bringing this up, but we're going to go with it for now.
Why?
Because this goes back to my central thesis that Science and Science Fiction should be fun again. That even though I enjoy a good post-apocalyptic yarn, I think we would benefit from more dreams and fewer nightmares. And anytime the political theater in this country shifts for a moment from doomsaying to dreaming, I think we should pause and wonder why it doesn't happen more often.
This is why I wrote Howard Carter Saves the World.
There's also the fact that anytime I hear or type the phrase "Most pundits agree" my hackles rise and I find myself taking a harder look at whatever it was they allegedly agree upon.
Why do I care about Newt's moon colony? Possibly because America's premier astrophysicist made the case that Gingrich wasn't as far off-base as you might think: Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it's a good idea.
I don't bring up the politician to make fun of him, nor the eminent astrophysicist because, well, if Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it's good, we all should. Not at all. Even though -- as Tyson notes -- "the naysayers aren't the engineers." NASA said it was feasible as early as the 1970's. I only bring up Gingrich and Mr Tyson because I agree with the latter when he says it's high time America started dreaming big again. And I think it's worth considering why and when we started punishing our leaders (or those who want to be our leaders) for setting lofty goals for us to strive toward.
Tyson's support for the Gingrich's idea isn't surprising. He had written a book about this, in fact, that makes that case for the starry-eyed dreamer, looking back at the space age and pondering what happened to our dreams of jetpacks and flying cars, zipping around a domed city on the Sea of Serenity?
(Spoiler: We won the cold war and lost a rival to vie against.)
Not to quibble with Dr Tyson, but that claim has many problems. While the highest areas of government and industry certainly stopped being a haven of starry-eyed dreamers, and turned their eyes toward terrestrial concerns instead of heading out to explore the stars, that's not to say that the people stopped dreaming. I would posit that we just stopped expecting our government to do it for us.
You've heard of Maker Fair, right?
Did we really stop dreaming? Did we really stop taking action to make those dreams real? Have we turned inward in an endless and pointless spiral of internet navel-gazing to the point where we forgot that space can be amazing and engineering can perform marvels outside of the gardens of cyberspace? Or did the future envisioned simply turn out to be too big, too impractical and/or impossible for us to achieve it all at once?
Perhaps to achieve such a large scale dream, it was necessary at some point that we break it up into manageable bits and allow those whose dearest dream was to put the Library of Congress in our pockets or fly a jetpack or make a flying car, or mine the asteroid belt to go it on their own.
Because all of those ultra-futuristic things are coming to pass. The Maker Movement, that mad assortment of civilians who took to their garages and sheds to create something that they'd dreamt of has -- in a way -- democratized the development process.
Without much in the way of direct government assistance and with the help of new ideas like Kickstarter, we've taken what started out as a government initiative like the internet or space travel and moved it into the civilian realm. We've actually achieved commercially-viable jetpacks, and asteroid mining is on the horizon entirely financed by private money.
Air cars are still quite a ways away, but considering I can't feel entirely comfortable with the way people drive on Interstate 5, what makes anyone think it's a good idea to put everyone a thousand feet in the air?
It's a terrible idea... until we figure out a way to take human error and inattention out of the equation, that is.
(Via NPR: Flying cars (and why we still don't have them).
Not to count NASA completely out of the game. They've recently revealed medical advances that beggar the imagination and leave science fiction racing to catch up.
Maybe so, but should it have been?
I'm currently running a bit of a fever, so it's possible I will wake up tomorrow and wonder what I was doing, bringing this up, but we're going to go with it for now.Why?
Because this goes back to my central thesis that Science and Science Fiction should be fun again. That even though I enjoy a good post-apocalyptic yarn, I think we would benefit from more dreams and fewer nightmares. And anytime the political theater in this country shifts for a moment from doomsaying to dreaming, I think we should pause and wonder why it doesn't happen more often.
This is why I wrote Howard Carter Saves the World.
There's also the fact that anytime I hear or type the phrase "Most pundits agree" my hackles rise and I find myself taking a harder look at whatever it was they allegedly agree upon.
Why do I care about Newt's moon colony? Possibly because America's premier astrophysicist made the case that Gingrich wasn't as far off-base as you might think: Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it's a good idea.
I don't bring up the politician to make fun of him, nor the eminent astrophysicist because, well, if Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it's good, we all should. Not at all. Even though -- as Tyson notes -- "the naysayers aren't the engineers." NASA said it was feasible as early as the 1970's. I only bring up Gingrich and Mr Tyson because I agree with the latter when he says it's high time America started dreaming big again. And I think it's worth considering why and when we started punishing our leaders (or those who want to be our leaders) for setting lofty goals for us to strive toward.
Tyson's support for the Gingrich's idea isn't surprising. He had written a book about this, in fact, that makes that case for the starry-eyed dreamer, looking back at the space age and pondering what happened to our dreams of jetpacks and flying cars, zipping around a domed city on the Sea of Serenity?
(Spoiler: We won the cold war and lost a rival to vie against.)
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Neil deGrasse Tyson | ||||
| ||||
Not to quibble with Dr Tyson, but that claim has many problems. While the highest areas of government and industry certainly stopped being a haven of starry-eyed dreamers, and turned their eyes toward terrestrial concerns instead of heading out to explore the stars, that's not to say that the people stopped dreaming. I would posit that we just stopped expecting our government to do it for us.
You've heard of Maker Fair, right?
Did we really stop dreaming? Did we really stop taking action to make those dreams real? Have we turned inward in an endless and pointless spiral of internet navel-gazing to the point where we forgot that space can be amazing and engineering can perform marvels outside of the gardens of cyberspace? Or did the future envisioned simply turn out to be too big, too impractical and/or impossible for us to achieve it all at once?
Perhaps to achieve such a large scale dream, it was necessary at some point that we break it up into manageable bits and allow those whose dearest dream was to put the Library of Congress in our pockets or fly a jetpack or make a flying car, or mine the asteroid belt to go it on their own.
Because all of those ultra-futuristic things are coming to pass. The Maker Movement, that mad assortment of civilians who took to their garages and sheds to create something that they'd dreamt of has -- in a way -- democratized the development process.
Without much in the way of direct government assistance and with the help of new ideas like Kickstarter, we've taken what started out as a government initiative like the internet or space travel and moved it into the civilian realm. We've actually achieved commercially-viable jetpacks, and asteroid mining is on the horizon entirely financed by private money.Air cars are still quite a ways away, but considering I can't feel entirely comfortable with the way people drive on Interstate 5, what makes anyone think it's a good idea to put everyone a thousand feet in the air?
It's a terrible idea... until we figure out a way to take human error and inattention out of the equation, that is.
(Via NPR: Flying cars (and why we still don't have them).
Not to count NASA completely out of the game. They've recently revealed medical advances that beggar the imagination and leave science fiction racing to catch up.
The NASA Biocapsule—made of carbon nanotubes—will be able to "diagnose" and instantly treat an astronaut without him or her even knowing there's something amiss. It would be like having your own personal Dr. McCoy—implanted under your skin. It represents one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of medicine, and yes, it'll work on Earth, too. ~ Via GizmodoIt's to a point that presidential pandering about moon colonies sound positively sane by comparison. The future we keep waiting for has already happened. The future... or rather The World of Tomorrow is just soooo yesterday.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
The Generation of the Book: A culture of creativity comes of age...
I was wandering aimlessly through Tacoma, Washington recently and accidentally ended up near the campus of Pacific Lutheran University. So of course, I stopped and wandered through their bookstore.
As I was walking up and down the aisles, I began to notice that a longstanding prediction of mine was coming true: All of the displays were YA books. Every last one of them. Down the aisles, they were selling required reading and textbooks, but the endcaps and the tables were piled with books that are generally considered "Young Adult" titles.
It hit me: The Harry Potter Generation has hit college.
(Cue instant graying of hair.)
My generation, "Generation X" has many names. We're GenX, the MTV Generation,the 13th Generation, and my favorite from France: "Génération Bof". (Bof means "Whatever".) Whatever you call us, we are the children who cut our teeth on Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Our childhoods brought us Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and MTV. We sent MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice up the pop charts and turned around a few years later and supplanted them with Pearl Jam and Nirvana. And we have been told that we're the last generation to learn cursive script and the last to learn to type on a typewriter.
We are a disparate lot. We read, sure, but it wasn't a thing. I certainly don't recall us riding into college on a wave of our own literary tastes.
In fact, we arrived and smacked into a wall of our parents' literary taste and were ordered to climb it.
This seems better to me somehow.
And although the generational naming thing is more a product of news headlines than science, after us came what is often called "Generation Y" who are most noted for growing up never having known a world without an internet. These are the so-called "digital natives" the culture of the electronic. Yet I am inclined to think they might more properly be known as the generation that put their foot down and demanded their own literary canon.
For all the pissing and moaning about a generation that doesn't recognize originality, or is addicted to plagiarism, they are carving original niches out of every genre. It is a generation that breathed life into Tumblr and Youtube, and gave backbone to Steampunk.
Is it a mashup culture? Certainly, but culture has always been about the mashup. The Lord of the Rings is a mashup of Arthurian Legend, Norse Sagas and the Bible. I mentioned this in my post about SOPA: Our society's conversations have always been awash with quotes from Rhett Butler not giving a damn to Indiana Jones making it up as he went along. Heck, Harold Bloom reckons (and not entirely without merit) that most of what we consider to be modern and cosmopolitan ideas including most of what we know of humor and humanity were cribbed directly from William Shakespeare.
Do that sort of thing these days, and you would be hearing from Master Shakespeare's solicitor.
But this is not just a culture of the cribnote -- it is also a creative culture, and dare I say, a literary culture all its own. The digital natives are restless and they are reinventing the world around them, and no matter how many fingers the RIAA and the MPAA summon to shore up the dam, they are pulling it down and revealing the rusted scaffolding beneath.
They have taken up the means of production, bypassed the gatekeepers, and flooded the world in an ocean of content. A vast, raging sea of unorganized, unedited, undisciplined content. It's raw, and unfettered, and as like to shock you as it is to enlighten you. And much of it that is good will be lost by the sheer size of the pile that you have to shift through in hopes of finding anything.
But it has always been that way, hasn't it? The chaff falls away under the millstones of the market and we find the wheat... eventually.
I hope that is still so. I really do. Because most of what we know of literature grew up within those protective walls that we've been so steadily tearing down. And wouldn't it be the cruelest trick of all if a generation of books manages to accidentally kill them as a medium by making it impossible for their creators to survive on their proceeds?
Too cynical? Yes. Yes indeed, Scott, too cynical by far.
At least I have reason to hope so.
Books will survive. Of course they will. As an object, as a symbol, as a medium for storytelling, as a bundle of bytes and bits, they have a devoted following among even the youngest readers. The average book blogger on Tumblr is in their mid twenties and more are arriving all the time. There is a whole world of young people moving up through the ranks, struggling to find their voice, to tell their tales. The formats change and evolve and storytelling trundles ever onward, reinvented, rehashed, retold by each succeeding generation.
Want proof that literature and books in general will survive? Walk into any bookstore (assuming you can find one) and ask the booksellers how large the Young Adult section was ten years ago. Then go look at how big it is now.
And it's not trifling teenage drama. Some of the most exciting and innovative writers currently operating are shelved there from David Levithan, M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, Maureen Johnson, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, and John Green to name just a few. And their fans are motivated, engaged, fired-up... about books. Truly, an amazing and literate generation came of age waiting in the lines outside the bookstore at 1:00 am, parents and children huddled together in the cold, counting down the minutes to the next Harry Potter book's release.
Welcome. You've made it. And you've made it your own.
If Rowling taught us nothing else, she taught us that storytelling will out. Where stories need telling, there will be a place for people who know how to tell them. Will we be able to support ourselves on the proceeds? Only time will tell, but for my money, the Generation of the Book will not lightly relinquish their stories, nor those who tell them.
It hit me: The Harry Potter Generation has hit college.
(Cue instant graying of hair.)
My generation, "Generation X" has many names. We're GenX, the MTV Generation,the 13th Generation, and my favorite from France: "Génération Bof". (Bof means "Whatever".) Whatever you call us, we are the children who cut our teeth on Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Our childhoods brought us Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and MTV. We sent MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice up the pop charts and turned around a few years later and supplanted them with Pearl Jam and Nirvana. And we have been told that we're the last generation to learn cursive script and the last to learn to type on a typewriter.
We are a disparate lot. We read, sure, but it wasn't a thing. I certainly don't recall us riding into college on a wave of our own literary tastes.
In fact, we arrived and smacked into a wall of our parents' literary taste and were ordered to climb it.
This seems better to me somehow.
And although the generational naming thing is more a product of news headlines than science, after us came what is often called "Generation Y" who are most noted for growing up never having known a world without an internet. These are the so-called "digital natives" the culture of the electronic. Yet I am inclined to think they might more properly be known as the generation that put their foot down and demanded their own literary canon.
For all the pissing and moaning about a generation that doesn't recognize originality, or is addicted to plagiarism, they are carving original niches out of every genre. It is a generation that breathed life into Tumblr and Youtube, and gave backbone to Steampunk.
Is it a mashup culture? Certainly, but culture has always been about the mashup. The Lord of the Rings is a mashup of Arthurian Legend, Norse Sagas and the Bible. I mentioned this in my post about SOPA: Our society's conversations have always been awash with quotes from Rhett Butler not giving a damn to Indiana Jones making it up as he went along. Heck, Harold Bloom reckons (and not entirely without merit) that most of what we consider to be modern and cosmopolitan ideas including most of what we know of humor and humanity were cribbed directly from William Shakespeare.
Do that sort of thing these days, and you would be hearing from Master Shakespeare's solicitor.
But this is not just a culture of the cribnote -- it is also a creative culture, and dare I say, a literary culture all its own. The digital natives are restless and they are reinventing the world around them, and no matter how many fingers the RIAA and the MPAA summon to shore up the dam, they are pulling it down and revealing the rusted scaffolding beneath.
They have taken up the means of production, bypassed the gatekeepers, and flooded the world in an ocean of content. A vast, raging sea of unorganized, unedited, undisciplined content. It's raw, and unfettered, and as like to shock you as it is to enlighten you. And much of it that is good will be lost by the sheer size of the pile that you have to shift through in hopes of finding anything.
But it has always been that way, hasn't it? The chaff falls away under the millstones of the market and we find the wheat... eventually.
I hope that is still so. I really do. Because most of what we know of literature grew up within those protective walls that we've been so steadily tearing down. And wouldn't it be the cruelest trick of all if a generation of books manages to accidentally kill them as a medium by making it impossible for their creators to survive on their proceeds?
Too cynical? Yes. Yes indeed, Scott, too cynical by far.
At least I have reason to hope so.
Books will survive. Of course they will. As an object, as a symbol, as a medium for storytelling, as a bundle of bytes and bits, they have a devoted following among even the youngest readers. The average book blogger on Tumblr is in their mid twenties and more are arriving all the time. There is a whole world of young people moving up through the ranks, struggling to find their voice, to tell their tales. The formats change and evolve and storytelling trundles ever onward, reinvented, rehashed, retold by each succeeding generation.
Want proof that literature and books in general will survive? Walk into any bookstore (assuming you can find one) and ask the booksellers how large the Young Adult section was ten years ago. Then go look at how big it is now.
And it's not trifling teenage drama. Some of the most exciting and innovative writers currently operating are shelved there from David Levithan, M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, Maureen Johnson, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, and John Green to name just a few. And their fans are motivated, engaged, fired-up... about books. Truly, an amazing and literate generation came of age waiting in the lines outside the bookstore at 1:00 am, parents and children huddled together in the cold, counting down the minutes to the next Harry Potter book's release.
Welcome. You've made it. And you've made it your own.
If Rowling taught us nothing else, she taught us that storytelling will out. Where stories need telling, there will be a place for people who know how to tell them. Will we be able to support ourselves on the proceeds? Only time will tell, but for my money, the Generation of the Book will not lightly relinquish their stories, nor those who tell them.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Death & Taxes: The IRS, Amazon, my dad's library, and Book Pricing
Book pricing is in the news again. The US Dept of Justice has filed antitrust lawsuits against the Big Six publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to fix prices on e-Books (which would be illegal). The complaint stems from something we've talked about a lot: Amazon's efforts to unilaterally define the value of e-Books at rock-bottom prices in order to sell more Kindles.
There's a lot of inside baseball here, and if you want to see it from the publisher's point of view, you can read the open letter from Macmillian president John Sargent over on Tor.com. Book pricing is a complex issue and I've been searching for a real-world analogy, something I can point to that will prove my thesis on the perils of training the world to expect literature to cost $.99 (or to be free). Turns out I didn't need to look farther than the outstretched hand of the tax man.
Believe it or not, the United States Internal Revenue Service has a lot to say on the subject of book pricing. And what they have to say has had a profound effect on the perceived value of books in the marketplace. It's one of the few places where the market for used books has lessons to teach us about the market for new ones.
Bear with me a moment as I put on my storytelling hat...
My dad and I have always been fond of the idea behind Henry Ward Beecher's marching orders: “A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. I library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.”
That's a lovely sentiment from Mr. Beecher but what happens to those books when you are gone?
I've been sorting the final stacks of boxes that were once my dad's library. He passed away three years ago and I'm still shifting through the boxes and looking for places to donate the ones I don't have room for. Every time I think I'm done, mom says "Have you looked in those boxes in the attic?"
For the most part, these are books I already own or simple aren't interested in. Those precious to me or the family or those in which I have a particular interest I've already sent to live on my own shelves back in Washington. The rest must find other homes, preferably homes that will continue to nurture the love of literacy that my dad spent his life kindling in me.
What does this have to do with book pricing?
Death and taxes being life's two constants, it seems inevitable that they would somehow collide in a way that impacts pretty much every other aspect of life -- including buying and selling books. Hopefully, everyone in the United States knows that donating an item to charity allows you to deduct that item's "Fair Market Value" from your taxes for that year as if you had made a monetary donation in that amount.
This is how the IRS defines fair market value:
Sounds simple enough, right? I mean, books have the market price printed on the cover. Publishers sell them for that price, so it seems simple enough, right?
Not so fast.
The chore of determining the fair market value of most items falls to the tax payer seeking the deduction and woe betide the person who gets it wrong. The penalties for over-estimating the value of donations are prohibitively steep. And I'm sad to say that no matter what the publisher prints on the cover, the FMV for books has little or nothing to do with what they cost at Barnes & Noble.
Donate your books to Goodwill, and you can expect to claim Goodwill's value for those books. They will usually sell them for somewhere between $1.00 and $3.00 each regardless of their rarity or condition. You can't claim more than they are worth on the open market, and no market is more open than Goodwill.
Fair enough. But what if I donate them to a library? Or my church? Or a prison literacy program? Having done exactly that -- literally by the truckload and with the receipts to prove it -- I wondered what my family might claim as a deduction for those books.
The answer: From $1.00 to $3.00 for hardbacks. Because that's what those libraries, churches, and prisons could theoretically buy them for if they bought them from Goodwill or the Salvation Army. It doesn't matter that for the most part, the libraries of the world wouldn't be caught dead buying books from those sellers, that's their "Fair" market value, defined by the free market.
In IRS Publication 561, the tax agency has defined the 'Fair Market Value' of most goods as the price two honest people can be expected to arrive at if one sells it to the other. For cars, it's the Kelly Blue Book value. But for books as the amount charged not by used bookstores in your area, but as the amount charged by Goodwill and the Salvation Army.
It's the Law of Unintended Consequences in full force.
Even if Half Price Books operates in your area, selling Stephen King hardbacks by the truckload at 1/2 their face value, the IRS wants you to declare their value as $3.00 per copy or explain why. And that explanation had better come in the form of a professional appraisal.
The cover price of the average new hardback novel is about $26.00. And to be fair to our friends at thre IRS, unless you are buying a signed first edition no one really expects that valuation to hold once you've taken the item home. It's like driving a car off the lot depreciates the car -- this is the way of things.
By charging too little for books for too long, these national thrift store chains have had a profound effect on the perceived value of used books. A perception that has taken the force and effect of law unless you care to pay for a professional appraisal.
I checked with my tax preparer, and it's not worth fighting them over it. Either pony up for a professional appraisal (which will also be affected by the degradation of market value) or take your medicine and collect your books for their content, not their value.
If you've ever discovered a rare gem in a thrift store and paid a song for it, you really have no right to complain.
There's a lot of inside baseball here, and if you want to see it from the publisher's point of view, you can read the open letter from Macmillian president John Sargent over on Tor.com. Book pricing is a complex issue and I've been searching for a real-world analogy, something I can point to that will prove my thesis on the perils of training the world to expect literature to cost $.99 (or to be free). Turns out I didn't need to look farther than the outstretched hand of the tax man.
Believe it or not, the United States Internal Revenue Service has a lot to say on the subject of book pricing. And what they have to say has had a profound effect on the perceived value of books in the marketplace. It's one of the few places where the market for used books has lessons to teach us about the market for new ones.
Bear with me a moment as I put on my storytelling hat...My dad and I have always been fond of the idea behind Henry Ward Beecher's marching orders: “A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. I library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life.”
That's a lovely sentiment from Mr. Beecher but what happens to those books when you are gone?
I've been sorting the final stacks of boxes that were once my dad's library. He passed away three years ago and I'm still shifting through the boxes and looking for places to donate the ones I don't have room for. Every time I think I'm done, mom says "Have you looked in those boxes in the attic?"
What does this have to do with book pricing?
Death and taxes being life's two constants, it seems inevitable that they would somehow collide in a way that impacts pretty much every other aspect of life -- including buying and selling books. Hopefully, everyone in the United States knows that donating an item to charity allows you to deduct that item's "Fair Market Value" from your taxes for that year as if you had made a monetary donation in that amount.
This is how the IRS defines fair market value:
Fair market value. Fair market value (FMV) is the price that property would sell for on the open market. It is the price that would be agreed on between a willing buyer and a willing seller, with neither being required to act, and both having reasonable knowledge of the relevant facts.http://www.irs.gov/publications/p561/ar02.html#d0e139
Sounds simple enough, right? I mean, books have the market price printed on the cover. Publishers sell them for that price, so it seems simple enough, right?
Not so fast.
The chore of determining the fair market value of most items falls to the tax payer seeking the deduction and woe betide the person who gets it wrong. The penalties for over-estimating the value of donations are prohibitively steep. And I'm sad to say that no matter what the publisher prints on the cover, the FMV for books has little or nothing to do with what they cost at Barnes & Noble.
Donate your books to Goodwill, and you can expect to claim Goodwill's value for those books. They will usually sell them for somewhere between $1.00 and $3.00 each regardless of their rarity or condition. You can't claim more than they are worth on the open market, and no market is more open than Goodwill.
Fair enough. But what if I donate them to a library? Or my church? Or a prison literacy program? Having done exactly that -- literally by the truckload and with the receipts to prove it -- I wondered what my family might claim as a deduction for those books.
The answer: From $1.00 to $3.00 for hardbacks. Because that's what those libraries, churches, and prisons could theoretically buy them for if they bought them from Goodwill or the Salvation Army. It doesn't matter that for the most part, the libraries of the world wouldn't be caught dead buying books from those sellers, that's their "Fair" market value, defined by the free market.
In IRS Publication 561, the tax agency has defined the 'Fair Market Value' of most goods as the price two honest people can be expected to arrive at if one sells it to the other. For cars, it's the Kelly Blue Book value. But for books as the amount charged not by used bookstores in your area, but as the amount charged by Goodwill and the Salvation Army.
It's the Law of Unintended Consequences in full force.
Even if Half Price Books operates in your area, selling Stephen King hardbacks by the truckload at 1/2 their face value, the IRS wants you to declare their value as $3.00 per copy or explain why. And that explanation had better come in the form of a professional appraisal.
The cover price of the average new hardback novel is about $26.00. And to be fair to our friends at thre IRS, unless you are buying a signed first edition no one really expects that valuation to hold once you've taken the item home. It's like driving a car off the lot depreciates the car -- this is the way of things.
By charging too little for books for too long, these national thrift store chains have had a profound effect on the perceived value of used books. A perception that has taken the force and effect of law unless you care to pay for a professional appraisal.
I checked with my tax preparer, and it's not worth fighting them over it. Either pony up for a professional appraisal (which will also be affected by the degradation of market value) or take your medicine and collect your books for their content, not their value.
If you've ever discovered a rare gem in a thrift store and paid a song for it, you really have no right to complain.
Here's where we pick up the thread of the multi-faceted dispute between the publishers, Amazon, and the US government. The publishers have, for most of their existence, defined the retail price of their product. As they used to tell us at Borders, you can't very well threaten to go down the street to some other publisher and buy Stephen King's new book. If you want to sell King's books, you have to buy them from King's publisher at their asking price. If you discount them, that's up to you.
Enter Amazon.com and the uncertainty of the brave new world of e-books. Amazon came out of the gate insisting that the fair market value for e-books (regardless of what they may cost to produce) is $9.99 or less. They trained the market to expect e-books to be less than ten bucks, and to expect most of them to be a dollar or even free. And in spite of voices raised in protest (including mine) the publishers mostly went along with it. Even when they started to realize that they were eroding the fair market value of their product as surely as Goodwill has incidentally eroded the value of used books, Amazon was still the only game in town... until Steve Jobs reversed his previous assertion that books were dead and offered publishers a better deal: the "Agency Model". It was a better deal that publishers were able to leverage into a (somewhat) better deal with Amazon.
All well and good. But if they cooperated in any way, that's market collusion and it's illegal. Enter the US Attorney General and the current lawsuit against publishers for price-fixing.
What a mess.
The big publishers aren't going to come out well in this. The DOJ thinks they've got a good case, and they probably do. But even if they defeat the suit by DOJ, (and there's a settlement already in the offing) they already can't afford the protracted battle.
Big Publishing may or may not be an outdated model. They might crumble under the weight of this thing, or they may consolidate further and get even bigger -- either way, there will always be publishers of some kind, whatever size they may be or whatever name might appear on their letterhead. Self-publishing is well and good, but there will always be writers who don't want or aren't able to do it themselves and there will always be people who will stand up and say "Give it to us and we'll be the middle-men for a cut of the take." It won't look like it did in Salinger's day, but it already doesn't. Those days are gone.
Here's all I care about: the written word has to have a market value that allows writers to make a living writing it. If the agency model falls, if the seller-side model of pricing wins and booksellers set the price too low for the real professionals to stay in the market, we will all suffer for it. Even if it is more legal than what we've already got.
The bulwark of our literary canon is and always will be the professional writer devoted to holding up the literary mirror against all efforts to cover it. Without that professionalism and dedication to craft, we might get more books shoveled at us over the transom in the anarchic e-book free-for-all but we will get less and less of the real quality that already seems too rare.
This is the challenge of writers and publishers going forward: This is a tough thing to describe in a way that is interesting, sounds rational, is devoid of alarmist warnings but isn't laden with statistics, but it's paramount to our future literary legacy that we preserve the value of books.
If we don't, we will one day be gone and we will have left our heirs with a legacy that they can't even give away.
Enter Amazon.com and the uncertainty of the brave new world of e-books. Amazon came out of the gate insisting that the fair market value for e-books (regardless of what they may cost to produce) is $9.99 or less. They trained the market to expect e-books to be less than ten bucks, and to expect most of them to be a dollar or even free. And in spite of voices raised in protest (including mine) the publishers mostly went along with it. Even when they started to realize that they were eroding the fair market value of their product as surely as Goodwill has incidentally eroded the value of used books, Amazon was still the only game in town... until Steve Jobs reversed his previous assertion that books were dead and offered publishers a better deal: the "Agency Model". It was a better deal that publishers were able to leverage into a (somewhat) better deal with Amazon.
All well and good. But if they cooperated in any way, that's market collusion and it's illegal. Enter the US Attorney General and the current lawsuit against publishers for price-fixing.
What a mess.
The big publishers aren't going to come out well in this. The DOJ thinks they've got a good case, and they probably do. But even if they defeat the suit by DOJ, (and there's a settlement already in the offing) they already can't afford the protracted battle.
Big Publishing may or may not be an outdated model. They might crumble under the weight of this thing, or they may consolidate further and get even bigger -- either way, there will always be publishers of some kind, whatever size they may be or whatever name might appear on their letterhead. Self-publishing is well and good, but there will always be writers who don't want or aren't able to do it themselves and there will always be people who will stand up and say "Give it to us and we'll be the middle-men for a cut of the take." It won't look like it did in Salinger's day, but it already doesn't. Those days are gone.
Here's all I care about: the written word has to have a market value that allows writers to make a living writing it. If the agency model falls, if the seller-side model of pricing wins and booksellers set the price too low for the real professionals to stay in the market, we will all suffer for it. Even if it is more legal than what we've already got.
The bulwark of our literary canon is and always will be the professional writer devoted to holding up the literary mirror against all efforts to cover it. Without that professionalism and dedication to craft, we might get more books shoveled at us over the transom in the anarchic e-book free-for-all but we will get less and less of the real quality that already seems too rare.
This is the challenge of writers and publishers going forward: This is a tough thing to describe in a way that is interesting, sounds rational, is devoid of alarmist warnings but isn't laden with statistics, but it's paramount to our future literary legacy that we preserve the value of books.
If we don't, we will one day be gone and we will have left our heirs with a legacy that they can't even give away.
Monday, April 2, 2012
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