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To be sung, lustily:
Most days are like all of the others,
Go to work, come back home, watch TV,
But, brother, if I had me druthers,
I’d chuck it and head out to sea,
For I dream of the skull and the crossbones,
I dream of the great day to come,
When I dump the mundane for the Old Spanish Main
And trade me computer for rum! ARRR!
Want more? go to Talk Like a Pirate Day Song lyrics
OK, so Barack Obama wants to deal with the economic crisis by introducing more regulation of the markets. John McCain is against more regulation. Instead, his solution to the crisis is to fire the SEC chair.
I’m not against firing the guy. It does appear that he missed something about his job in letting all this happen. But I think McCain’s approach sends mixed signals: he is trying to appear very dramatically concerned about the crisis (to match Obama’s own lashing of the government), but he’s sticking to his conservative guns at the same time, without actually proposing any new strategy. Just firing people, Palin-style, isn’t going to solve this problem. We clearly do need more regulation–or, if regulation for things like how much of a capital margin you have is already on the books–we need to enforce it more. We need to do more than just fire people. We can’t just take the emotional steps and leave off the smart, strategic ones because they’re less fun and cathartic.
I downloaded Google Chrome, and so far so good. It’s super intuitive and minimalist, and made the obvious leap from two separate text boxes (url vs. search) to one.
So I think it’s probably safe to bet t
When I hear of its sad state in the news, I think of Georgia strongly, because I had just recently been taken there by a book, one which in its very core decries Russian imperialism. Here is Georgia:
From Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Imperium, translated by Klara Glowczewska:
…One should see the museum in Tbilisi. It is located in the former seat of a theological seminary, where Stalin once studied. A marble plaque at the entrance commemorates this. The building is dark but spacious and stands in the center of town, at the edge of the old downtown district…The splendor and excellence of Georgia’s ancient art are overwhelming. The most fantastic are the icons! They are from a much earlier time than Russian icons; the best Georgian ones came into being long before Andrey Rublyov…their originality lies in their having been executed largely in metal: only the face is painted. The most glorious period of this work spans the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. The faces of the saints, dar, but radiant in the light, dwell immobile in extremely rich gold frames studded with precious stones…There is an icon here on which several generations of masters worked for three centuries…
…Then there are the frescoes in the Georgian churches. Such marvels, and yet so little is known about them outside of Georgia. Virtually nothing. The best frescoes, unfortunately, were destroyed. Thhey covered the interior of the largest church in Georgia–Sveti Tschoveli, built in 1010 in Georgia’s former capital, Meht, near Tbilisi. They were a masterpiece of the Middle Ages on a par with the stained glass of Chartres. They were painted over on the order of the czar’s governor, who wanted the church whitewashed ‘like our peasant women whitewash stoves.’ No restoration efforts can return these frescoes to the world. Their brilliance is extinguished forever…
…Niko Pirosmanashvili is all the rage in Paris these days. Niko died in 1916. He was a Georgian Rousseau…Niko lived in Nachalovce, the Tbilisi neighborhood of the lumpen and the poor…Niko painted suppers like Veronese. Only Niko’s suppers are Georgian and secular. Against a background of Georgian landscape, a richly laid table; at this table Georgians are drinking and eating…The culinary fascinated Niko…Niko’s Georgia is sated, always feasting, well nourished. The land flows with milk. Manna pours from the sky. All the days are fat. The residence of Nachalovce dreamed at night of such a Georgia…Over and over again he painted his feasts, with that table against a mountainous landscape…
I’ve been jarred a few times in the last day or two by someone using the male-gender-specific pronoun when referring to the presidential candidates. Somewhere along the way I just got very used to assuming that one of the candidates was a woman.
On company blogs, people talk most frequently about the results of what their company does. It’s very infrequent that people talk about how the company does it (that’s the trade secret, after all).
Are we ever going to get there? What would it take for us all to talk to each other about how we go about our business?
That is, to some extent, what the publisher O’Reilly’s doing with their Tools of Change for Publishing conference and blog. Maybe it’s because publishing as an industry’s beginning to feel a little too squeezed? Like we all have to be in this together? Like we’re all staring the beast in the face and think that throwing our lot together may be our last hope?
Well, maybe it’s not that dramatic. But it’s something that William Heinemann proposed in an Athanaeum article in 1892. Then it was shrinking profit margins due to exploding author advances and production costs. Now it’s exploding author advances and flat sales.
So do we get more cutthroat (as in many cases we are), or do we, in Heinemann’s words, and in O’Reilly’s footsteps, “form ourselves into a brotherly band, and stand together against the inroads that are being made on our common interests”?
The Wall Street Journal just came out with new rankings for most influential business leaders (here).
Obviously, this is a sparkly day for Gary Hamel (#1) and the rising stars just behind him.
But what does a piece like this do for Tom Davenport, the ranker himself? He may not be Gary Hamel, but his position as someone who we depend on to tell us who is isn’t too shabby either.
The U.S. News and World Report gets as much out of the annual college rankings as the top (“top”) schools. And is the Academy around for any other reason than to give us the Awards (I mean really)? These groups are powerful because we rely on them to get it right.
Point being, the guy who makes the lists–who tells you who to listen to, where to go to school, what to watch, what to read–may be just as important as the folks on the lists themselves.
And hence, the internet aggregators. Google makes its money by giving you authoritative lists (search results, feed reader). Digg.com does too. These companies aren’t in the content business; they’re in the list business.
We all know the content business in publishing is suffering these days. That brings up the question: Can, and should, you do both lists *and* content? Should the NYT list articles not in the NYT as “most emailed”? Would more people visit their site if they did? Should our company’s site list competitors’ books as “similar products” if that will make more people think of us as “the authority” in our field?
http://www.outincenterfield.com/blog/2008/04/manny_being_macys.html
I just watched the documentary film Helvetica and highly recommend it.
Yes, it’s a documentary about a font (which, let’s face it, you could have expected of me). But it’s also about visual design and art culture history more generally. And I guarantee it will make you look at type differently–type on your computer, type in a TV ad, type on the spines of your books as you walk by your bookshelf. You’ll start seeing things as if for the first time, which is one of my favorite hallmarks of a good film.
I’ve always turned my nose up at Helvetica as the most defaulty of default fonts. The film convinced me that it can and indeed should be considered in all thoughtful visual design, as it has been historically. I’m not sure that its argument that you could do absolutely anything with Helvetica was quite as successful. It’s not just that the display version carries with it the baggage of the 1960s modernist aesthetic, I think; it’s that I don’t buy the idea that a font can be completely devoid of all inherent expression. Can it?
I also liked the final question posed–whether there is something about Helvetica that makes it universally, unrelativistically a good font: whether it’s reached some sort of Platonic ideal of sans serifness. I think the answer is no (the lowercase a and g are too interesting for that). But it means something that the question is asked in the first place.
There were some shots of fonts which the film suggested were Helvetica but which I thought weren’t. Anyone else notice them too? Or am I wrong?
Yesterday HarperCollins announced that they are launching a new imprint (no name yet) with an experimental bent. For one, the imprint will offer little or no author royalties; instead, the author will be involved in a profit-share with the publisher. Furthermore the imprint will refuse returns from overstocked booksellers.
The pros and cons of this move are being debated all over publishing circles and in the mainstream media: in Publisher’s Weekly, in the Wall Street Journal, and in two separate articles in the NYT. And rightly so. Author royalties and returns are two archaic parts of the standard publishing model that are pecuniarily punishing for publishers. But doing away with them is fraught with risk–will the new imprint be able to sign big authors without the enticement of an advance? Will booksellers wave off the imprint rather than try to figure out more efficient ways to work with their inventory?
But what interests me here is *why* HC is trying these new models. The ideas have been batted around before, but I have a hunch that it’s the proliferation of online content (free content in particular) that has made New Corp. bold enough to take this step.
Obviously money is one important consideration. Traditional print publishers are losing revenue because of online content. This is only going to get worse, and publishers need to figure out new ways of cutting major expenses. If these methods work well, we could see other publishers following suit down the road (though it will take a while).
But not drowning is only one part of swimming. This new model isn’t just about cutting expenses; it’s about new ways of looking at publishing.
For one, it suggests that authors and publishers are partners. This sounds like the flat-worldy internet influence to me. If authors can self-publish, or put all their work on blogs and make all the money they want from AdSense, then it seems that publishers do have to offer them something new to stick with traditional print publishing. I wonder if the fact that profits are shared tells only part of the tale–will authors and publishers work more like a partnership throughout the process too?
And the predominance of online book sales (over 2/3 of our books, for instance, are sold online) is just begging for the more POD-like no-returns model. It’ll be harder for a bricks-and-mortar store than for Amazon, but it’s time for Amazon to start setting the rules, and not B&N.
Apocalyptic predictions of doom aside, what other changes will the digital movement have on print publishing models?
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