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
Friday, March 30, 2012
Rue the Day: Hunger Games and the power of race in our collective imaginings
Labels:
Opinion,
Politics,
Race,
Real Life,
Social History,
Social Networking
It's been a couple of days since I read about it on Gawker Media. There are (or were) some vocal fans who were intensely disappointed to discover that a tragic young character from the books was being played by a black actress. Not because she was white in the books -- she wasn't -- but because they had pictured her in their heads with white skin.
I've talked to friends all over the world about it, talked to my wife, and read the detailed analysis of many commentators and have yet to find anyone else who rises above the "How are we still here after all these years?"
The simple answer is that if you draw together a huge and diverse cross section of humanity, you're going to get some racists. Twitter, of course, is about encouraging the broadcasting of surface thoughts and soundbytes. That's the simple answer. But some questions defy the simple answer.
Many of the posts from Twitter were racism in the starkest terms. I have nothing to say to those people. If you hate someone because their skin color or think yours makes you superior, I have nothing to say to you; that the amount of melanin in our skin somehow denotes our value is anathema to me.
However, many of the tweets (most deleted since Gawker threw a spotlight on them) included hashtags like "#ihatemyself" and a lot of the posters seemed genuinely taken aback by their own racist brains.
It is to those people that I choose to address myself.
Because they were surprised by their own feelings and confused by them. The internet is not a place where calm and rational examinations of feelings and nuance are encouraged, but this is my space to stand and speak and I choose to dig for the nuance. Not to make excuses, but to hope that those who are surprised by their own feelings are those who are open for change.
I am going to dig into this as deeply as I can go in a blog post and I am going to end it without having answered any questions. That's the nature of the thing: There are no easy answers, there are only more questions.
Color is woven so deeply into our culture that most of us are unaware of it.
There is an implicit association between "good" and "fair" in the English language and the culture it influenced. But what many don't realize that when the Grimm brothers called Snow White 'the fairest in the land' it is her pale skin that is being referenced just as in her name. She's the whitest white girl in the land. This was because in Medieval Europe, fair skin meant you did no work in the sun.
Shakespeare makes use of this dual notion of 'fair' in several of his plays and sonnets. In Sonnet 18: "Every fair from fair sometimes declines" when he is warning the recipient of his verse about how too-short the summer of our lives and by Sonnet 130, when he's in the throes of love to his mysterious "Dark lady" he describes her thus in pointed contrast to the lies told by other sonneteers...
Fairy tales, and sonnets, and history, oh my! But what does it and have to do with the Hunger Games? Because it's all about the power of words. About the power of our assumptions. And it's about the implicit associations between a word like fair or innocent and the mental image of Snow White, a child of pale skin and blue eyes.
This reminded me of a story told by Studs Terkel in the introduction of his book Race:
The experiments demonstrated something called 'implicit association', which is what Studs was talking about in the anecdote about his wife. It's the deeply-ingrained reactions that our society programs into us without our necessarily being aware of them: that dark skinned folks are scary, or at the very least, less trustworthy. It's in our movies and our fairy tales and our cartoons. The Clark Doll Experiments demonstrated this in stark terms, that the fair-haired cultural stereotype was so deeply ingrained that even those who recognized themselves in the toys presented to them chose the white baby as better, prettier, and more desirable. The study compared kids from segregated schools and desegregated schools and the differences were marked. By some accounts the Clark's testimony was instrumental in the Supreme Court's landmark Brown -v- Board of Education decision that made desegregation the law of the land.
Brown ended segregation in the United States. It meant that my upbringing in rural Missouri was not all white faces and white culture. But it did not mean racism was at an end any more than the inauguration of President Obama meant that we were exiting a racial phase of our culture.
Flash forward to today, in our supposedly post-racial America and The Hunger Games...
Susanne Collins makes it clear in several places that Rue has "dark brown skin and eyes" but the innocence of the character drove these readers back to their societal default: fair skin and light eyes. So that confronted by the visual contrast between their expectations and the reality of a lovely young actress with African skin, the dissonance drove them to sound off on Twitter.
While this is sickening for many of us who hope daily that we will get past this horrible phase of our history, it is all too apparent that we are not. And while it would be easy to decry the mile-wide-inch-deep nature of Twitter, I cannot. Because I think that getting this stuff out in the open will -- I hope -- turn out to be a positive thing in the long term.
If culture is the lie we tell ourselves about ourselves, then let this show how thin the 'post-racial' lie really is. Which is sad, but I can't help but hope it's healthy for our society as a whole to see itself clearly in the mirror.
The Huck Finn kerfuffle last year should have warned us this was still lurking out there, but race still has the power to sneak up on us. And I think nothing surprises us more than the fact that we're surprised by it. This is the ongoing power of literature and movies to bring out that which would otherwise be hidden. Our preconceptions and our prejudices laid bare...
If nothing else, it's a wake-up call to those who think we are in a post-racial phase just because we elected a black man president.
If sunlight is the best disinfectant then this is a good thing. Let us be aware of ourselves, warts and all. Let us do something about it in the light of day rather than shoving uncomfortable subjects under the rug where we can pretend they don't exist.
In Paradise Lost, Milton noted that: "Long is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light." We have a habit of burying our sins and thinking our culture more civilized than is warranted and times like this are necessary to remind us that though there is a rocky road behind us, there is yet more ahead.
I've talked to friends all over the world about it, talked to my wife, and read the detailed analysis of many commentators and have yet to find anyone else who rises above the "How are we still here after all these years?"The simple answer is that if you draw together a huge and diverse cross section of humanity, you're going to get some racists. Twitter, of course, is about encouraging the broadcasting of surface thoughts and soundbytes. That's the simple answer. But some questions defy the simple answer.
Many of the posts from Twitter were racism in the starkest terms. I have nothing to say to those people. If you hate someone because their skin color or think yours makes you superior, I have nothing to say to you; that the amount of melanin in our skin somehow denotes our value is anathema to me.
However, many of the tweets (most deleted since Gawker threw a spotlight on them) included hashtags like "#ihatemyself" and a lot of the posters seemed genuinely taken aback by their own racist brains.
It is to those people that I choose to address myself.
Because they were surprised by their own feelings and confused by them. The internet is not a place where calm and rational examinations of feelings and nuance are encouraged, but this is my space to stand and speak and I choose to dig for the nuance. Not to make excuses, but to hope that those who are surprised by their own feelings are those who are open for change.
I am going to dig into this as deeply as I can go in a blog post and I am going to end it without having answered any questions. That's the nature of the thing: There are no easy answers, there are only more questions.
Color is woven so deeply into our culture that most of us are unaware of it.
There is an implicit association between "good" and "fair" in the English language and the culture it influenced. But what many don't realize that when the Grimm brothers called Snow White 'the fairest in the land' it is her pale skin that is being referenced just as in her name. She's the whitest white girl in the land. This was because in Medieval Europe, fair skin meant you did no work in the sun.
Shakespeare makes use of this dual notion of 'fair' in several of his plays and sonnets. In Sonnet 18: "Every fair from fair sometimes declines" when he is warning the recipient of his verse about how too-short the summer of our lives and by Sonnet 130, when he's in the throes of love to his mysterious "Dark lady" he describes her thus in pointed contrast to the lies told by other sonneteers...
Her breasts are dun, which is a shade of brown and he doesn't care who knows it, nor will he conceal it with false flattery. Because calling them 'fair' or 'alabaster' or any one of a hundred other metaphors for pale skin would be considered flattering and in Elizabethan England, white still equals beauty and our poet defies that convention.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head...
Fairy tales, and sonnets, and history, oh my! But what does it and have to do with the Hunger Games? Because it's all about the power of words. About the power of our assumptions. And it's about the implicit associations between a word like fair or innocent and the mental image of Snow White, a child of pale skin and blue eyes.
This reminded me of a story told by Studs Terkel in the introduction of his book Race:
In the 1940's, Mamie and Kenneth Clark conducted a series of experiments with African American children where they were asked to choose between two dolls: identical except that one was white and one black. When asked to choose the pretty doll, the 'good' doll, they overwhelmingly chose the fair-haired and white skinned doll."My wife was driving down the street in a black neighborhood. The people at the corners were all gesticulating at her. She was very frightened, turned up the windows, and drove determinedly. She discovered after several blocks, she was going the wrong way on a one-way street and they were trying to help her. Her assumption was they blacks and out to get her. Mind you, she's a very enlightened person. You'd never associate her with racism, yet her first reaction was that they were dangerous."
The experiments demonstrated something called 'implicit association', which is what Studs was talking about in the anecdote about his wife. It's the deeply-ingrained reactions that our society programs into us without our necessarily being aware of them: that dark skinned folks are scary, or at the very least, less trustworthy. It's in our movies and our fairy tales and our cartoons. The Clark Doll Experiments demonstrated this in stark terms, that the fair-haired cultural stereotype was so deeply ingrained that even those who recognized themselves in the toys presented to them chose the white baby as better, prettier, and more desirable. The study compared kids from segregated schools and desegregated schools and the differences were marked. By some accounts the Clark's testimony was instrumental in the Supreme Court's landmark Brown -v- Board of Education decision that made desegregation the law of the land.
Brown ended segregation in the United States. It meant that my upbringing in rural Missouri was not all white faces and white culture. But it did not mean racism was at an end any more than the inauguration of President Obama meant that we were exiting a racial phase of our culture.
Flash forward to today, in our supposedly post-racial America and The Hunger Games...
Susanne Collins makes it clear in several places that Rue has "dark brown skin and eyes" but the innocence of the character drove these readers back to their societal default: fair skin and light eyes. So that confronted by the visual contrast between their expectations and the reality of a lovely young actress with African skin, the dissonance drove them to sound off on Twitter.
While this is sickening for many of us who hope daily that we will get past this horrible phase of our history, it is all too apparent that we are not. And while it would be easy to decry the mile-wide-inch-deep nature of Twitter, I cannot. Because I think that getting this stuff out in the open will -- I hope -- turn out to be a positive thing in the long term.
If culture is the lie we tell ourselves about ourselves, then let this show how thin the 'post-racial' lie really is. Which is sad, but I can't help but hope it's healthy for our society as a whole to see itself clearly in the mirror.
The Huck Finn kerfuffle last year should have warned us this was still lurking out there, but race still has the power to sneak up on us. And I think nothing surprises us more than the fact that we're surprised by it. This is the ongoing power of literature and movies to bring out that which would otherwise be hidden. Our preconceptions and our prejudices laid bare...
If nothing else, it's a wake-up call to those who think we are in a post-racial phase just because we elected a black man president.
If sunlight is the best disinfectant then this is a good thing. Let us be aware of ourselves, warts and all. Let us do something about it in the light of day rather than shoving uncomfortable subjects under the rug where we can pretend they don't exist.
In Paradise Lost, Milton noted that: "Long is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light." We have a habit of burying our sins and thinking our culture more civilized than is warranted and times like this are necessary to remind us that though there is a rocky road behind us, there is yet more ahead.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Idle Hands: Where I've been...
Labels:
family,
Real Life,
Where I've Been
Idle hands, my mother has often assured me, are the devil's playground. I have to assume that she knows from observing someone else, because I've never known hers to be idle, so it cannot be from personal experience.These are my mother's hands. I photographed them the day after her surgery for breast cancer.
It was one of the few idle moments she had and the only day she really spent resting... at least by my definition of the word. Before I knew it, she was inviting relatives over and cooking a turkey dinner.
These are not idle hands -- these are fighting hands.
It was a strange learning experience for all of us, I think. There are not many moments in your life that you can point to and say "This is a point where this changed" but this was one of those moments. Mom is an ace at not being idle and has a genuine knack for keeping her son's hands from being idle either...
Pro Tip: Before you volunteer to help someone out after surgery, first find out whether they have a deck that needs to be stained and plan (or at least pack) accordingly.
That week, I discovered that I could help clean and dress wounds without fainting (my condolences to everyone who lost money in the betting pool). Yes, I stained a deck, and I also discovered that radiation suites often don't get decent WiFi. I also awarded an honorary Nobel prize for awesomeness to the innovator that brought us the hotel lobby espresso stand. I did some sewing, some writing, and some thinking.
I am happy to say that my mom did well. I was able to return home just in time for my 12th wedding anniversary. The universe gave us the gift of a broken hot water heater.
We decided that the water heater was officially a piece of modernist sculpture (since art has no function, I couldn't feel bad that it wouldn't heat my water). It's a particularly ugly piece of sculpture, so we keep it in the closet. It's our story and we're sticking to it. Together, we mopped the floor, turned off the power, drained it, and went out to spend the day on the town.
We bought each other a bag of books.
12 years ago I said "I do" to a lovely lady who kindly agreed that she would too. You think a bit of malfunctioning junk like a hot water heater can touch that?
Life happens. Sometimes it seems to happen all at once and sometimes it stops happening before we're ready. Hug the people you love. Tell your friends how you feel about them. Because you never know when you will quite suddenly lose the chance to do so.
Also, please talk to the women in your life, tell them you care. Ask them when their last exam was. Make the appointment. Go with them if you have to. Give the gift of life and health: encourage yearly mammograms and for all women to have a baseline scan at 35.
Women's health is not a women's issue -- it is a human issue. We seem to be a society that is locked in a perpetual state of forgetting that one person's fight is everyone's fight. We may be two genders, but we are one species. That's what it really means to be a nation. We're supposed to have everyone's back because we know everyone has ours.
E pluribus unum -- from the many, one. I've got your back because I know you've got mine. We're in this together.
How different our world would be if we could just cling to that one simple truth.
-Scott
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Is it a First Edition?
Labels:
Book Collecting,
Bookhunting
Because anyone who is around me for more than a minute or two realizes that I'm a book hound, I often get asked how I know something is a first edition. I've been contemplating writing a post about it, but then I discovered to my delight that Abe Books beat me to it in style...
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