Books, Design and Culture
I wasn’t going to mention that New York Times article about Amazon. We already know the company treats its workers poorly (there are almost too many articles to link to at this point),1 it’s just that some people rather admire this kind of ruthlessness (or simply don’t care if they’re getting a good deal). Nevertheless, I did quite like this cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez for The New Yorker on the subject:
Last week, Iggy Pop delivered this year’s BBC Music John Peel Lecture on the topic of ‘Free Music in a Capitalist Society’ at Radio Festival 2014 in Salford:
I worked half of my life for free. I didn’t really think about that one way or the other, until the masters of the record industry kept complaining that I wasn’t making them any money. To tell you the truth, when it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge one unimportant detail. But, a good LP is a being, it’s not a product. It has a life-force, a personality, and a history, just like you and me. It can be your friend. Try explaining that to a weasel.
As I learned when I hit 30 +, and realized I was penniless, and almost unable to get my music released, music had become an industrial art and it was the people who excelled at the industry who got to make the art. I had to sell most of my future rights to keep making records to keep going. And now, thanks to digital advances, we have a very large industry, which is laughably maybe almost entirely pirate so nobody can collect shit. Well, it was to be expected. Everybody made a lot of money reselling all of recorded musical history in CD form back in the 90s, but now the cat is out of the bag and the new electronic devices which estrange people from their morals also make it easier to steal music than to pay for it. So there’s gonna be a correction.
You can read the complete transcript here, or listen to it (for the next couple of weeks at least) on the BBC’s iPlayer. You can also download it as a podcast for posterity.
Iggy Pop’s BBC Music John Peel Lecture 2014 mp3
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In what is possibly his last interview as Creative Director of Bloomberg Businessweek, Richard Turley talks to Gestalten.tv about his work, and the magazine he has helped shape for last 4 years:
In April, Turley announced that he was leaving the magazine to join MTV.
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Good Design is Good Business is a beautiful Tumblr archive of hi-res IBM visuals, compiled by Sue, an New York-based art director at Ogilvy for IBM.
(via Quipsologies)
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The latest issue of the New Republic looks at the book publishing industry and it includes an article by Evan Hughes on the relative health of the book business:
At the individual level, everyone in the trade—whether executive, editor, agent, author, or bookseller—faces threats to his or her livelihood: self-publishing, mergers and “efficiencies,” and, yes, the suspicious motives of Amazon executives. But the book itself is hanging on and even thriving. More than any major cultural product, it has retained its essential worth.Of course, publishers think that $9.99 is still too low for popular e-books, an assessment that drove their ill-fated effort to work with Apple to take control of what they cost… It may be that a higher price would be more equitable. But other media still have reason to look at the relative economic health of the book with envy.
There is also includes a much-tweeted interview with literary agent Andrew Wylie. Wylie is, of course, eminently quotable (I think my favourite line from the interview is this: “We’re selling books. It’s a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized.”) and interviewer Laura Bennett has posted some choice outtakes from her print piece.
Comments closedIn yesterday’s round-up I briefly mentioned DODOcase who use traditional bookbinding techniques to produce iPad and e-reader covers locally in San Francisco. Here’s a video introduction to the company and their products:
Another reason (were one needed) to get an iPad (right after Swords & Sworcery!).
Comments closedGoing Solo is a neat (not entirely safe for work) stop frame animation by South African design boutique Studio Botes sharing advice from a range of international designers on starting your own business:
(via Quipsologies)
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In a recent interview for CBC Radio show Spark, Jason Fried, the founder of 37signals, talked with Nora Young about his book Rework:
CBC RADIO SPARK: JASON FRIED | REWORK
Also doing the rounds is Fried’s article ‘How to Get Good at Making Money’:
People are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. If you pour your heart into something and make it great, sell it. For real money. Even if there are free options, even if the market is flooded with free. People will pay for things they love.
This lesson is at the core of 37signals. There are plenty of free project management tools. There are plenty of free contact managers and customer relationship management tools. There are plenty of free chat tools and organization tools. There are plenty of free conferences and workshops. Free is everywhere. But we charge for our products. And our customers are happy to pay for them… Charging for something makes you want to make it better. I’ve found this to be really important. It’s a great lesson if you want to learn how to make money.
What I didn’t know, but learnt today, was that Jeff Bezos is the sole investor in 37Signals. Make of that what you will.
Comments closedCo-founder of 37 Signals and author of Rework Jason Fried talks to Peter Hopkins, co-founder of Big Think, in this hour-long interview for HP’s Input| Output series:
It all seems like good advice, especially if you run a small business (or thinking of starting one), and while it’s hard to pin down any specific relevance for the book industry, it got me thinking about this post again, and the idea we should always focus on making stuff.
1 CommentBook Expo Canada is in trouble.
The Canadian publishing trade show has been dogged by industry apathy and persistent complaints about high costs, low attendance, and a lack of paying customers for years. But the immediate need to cut costs in the face of the economic downturn — or, at least, see some kind of measurable return on investment — has been the final straw for dissatisfied publishers.
Random House, Canada’s largest trade publisher, unilaterally withdrew from the event in November, and last week HarperCollins and Penguin — closely followed by Scholastic Canada and H.B. Fenn & Co. — announced that they would not be attending BEC in 2009 either.
Scheduled for June 19th-22nd at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, organizers Reed Exhibitions initially said that it was still their intention to hold the annual convention even though Simon & Schuster was the only one of the “Big Four” multinational publishers committed to the ailing event.
Now it seems Reed may be reconsidering that decision after Random House’s recent announcement that they would be launching a new Toronto “literary and cultural” festival with the Globe and Mail in May — one month before BEC.
With a high-profile media sponsor, and including events with crowd-pleasing luminaries such as Naomi Klein, Margaret MacMillan, Richard Florida, Pulitzer Prize nominee Ha Jin, and New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik, the two day “Open House Festival” is clearly aimed at doing precisely what BEC has seemed so incapable of – bringing in paying customers and driving book sales.
More troubling for Reed is that the new festival means their latest initiative, the Toronto Book Fair, planned for the first weekend in October, will almost certainly be stillborn.
Details of the fair were unveiled earlier this month by John McGeary, Reed’s general manager for Canada.
Hoping to win over critics of Book Expo, McGeary outlined an “inclusive celebration of reading and literacy” akin to Salon du Livre. But hampered by a venue (the Direct Energy Centre) on the fringes of public transit, and scheduled for one of the busiest months in the publishing calendar, Reed’s plans disappointed the vast majority of the invited audience of independent booksellers and industry-types.
McGeary, relying heavily on his PowerPoint slides, struggled to articulate a coherent vision for a fair that nobody seemed to want, and was unable to substantially differentiate it from Word on the Street, the popular not-for-profit book festival taking place in downtown Toronto one week before the Reed event.
“We consider ourselves extremely different” was about the best McGeary could manage. “Yes”, a wag in the audience said, “Word on the Street is free and in Queen’s Park!” Touché .
The poor timing and location, combined with a breath-taking dearth of both imagination and logistical detail, makes it unsurprising that Random House and Penguin have already announced they will not be attending the new fair. And more publishers are sure to follow suit.
Reed — who are now, according to PW, reviewing all their dealings with the book industry in Canada — will no doubt blame the combined failure of BEC and the Toronto Book Fair on the crumbling economy and the mixed messages sent by fickle, selfish and duplicitous book industry players.
But Reed cannot entirely escape responsibility for their situation. They have consistently put the cart before the horse, planning events before they have identified a real need or purpose. This ‘build it and they will come’ attitude may have worked in the past, or perhaps elsewhere. Unfortunately Reed’s abortive attempt to make BEC more inclusive two years ago, the now infamous the Booked!, and the shortcomings of the trade show itself have seriously damaged their credibility in Toronto.
And Reed is guilty of simply trying too hard. Their efforts to be inclusive are laudable, and yet in trying please everyone, they inevitably please no one.
The book community in Toronto consists of authors, publishers, distributors, bookstores, libraries, readers, publicists, journalists, bloggers and more. Their interests conflict at least as often as they overlap, and one only needs to look at the finger-pointing and handbag-swinging caused by the high Canadian dollar last year to see that relations between publishers and booksellers, and booksellers and their customers, (not to mention the industry and the media), are fragile at best. People get upset. And they get over it. Reed has never quite seemed to grasp that to organise an effective event they will need to risk offending some people.
It is simply not fair to expect Reed to organise an event like BookCamp, or even Word on the Street. It would be impossible. But Reed could – and probably should – have organised an event like the Open House Festival. It should’ve been possible to work, initially at least, with one or all of the Big Four and a single retailer to kickstart something bigger and more inclusive. Random House’s understandable impatience has slammed that door in Reed’s face, and, to be honest, it is hard now to see where they have left to turn.
Comments closedThink, study, then post: David D. Perlmutter, author of Blogwars, discusses slow blogging on the Oxford University Press blog:
“many of the bloggers I interviewed talked about the need to feed the blog that is, if you don’t put up 2 to 3 new posts a day you lose your audience. But fast anything, unless you’re competing in the Olympics, is not necessarily the road either to author or audience fulfillment.”
I love this idea, I’m just not very good at it or, perhaps, just a bit too good judging by the number of posts in my ‘drafts’ folder! Must try harder… (via the excellent ReadySteadyBlog by the way)
The business elite still love print according to a Folio magazine survey:
“Top American business executives spend a lot of time worrying about the volatile economic climate—and a lot of time consuming media, with a vast majority of them clinging to print.”
The Best Illustrated Children’s Books 2008: a slide show of the New York Times picks (pictured). The NYT‘s Children’s Books Special Issue is here.
A bitter-sweet love: writer Ellen Jordan discusses her coffee addiction in a essay in The Age:
Comments closed“I wonder whether I’m afraid to write without coffee, afraid that every good sentence I’ve ever written came out of some mysterious alchemy of coffee and my mind. If I write with nothing, or with some pallid juice or herbal tea or decaf, will I discover that alone I have no talent?”