1979 ad from vintagepaperads.com

• This list of (mostly dreadful) declining beer brands by the Big Two and a Half (that’s AB InBev, MillerCoors, and the Miller-produced Pabst brands) would seem like a ray of hope for true beer lovers—except that their place on the shelves has been usurped by other brands from the same companies.
• Microsoft is putting out a tablet computer next year. And this time, they hope to get it (and its marketing) right.
• A former Sea Gal (the Seahawks’ cheerleaders/dancers), who became a Price Is Right model, was named in a lawsuit by another Price Is Right model against that show’s producers.
• What’s behind the disembodied feet washing up in B.C. and Washington? As Spike Lee once famously asked, is it the shoes?
• The state Dept. of Employment Security is laying off almost 400 of its 2,500 employees. Alas, it’s not due to a lack of work.
• There’s going to be a graphic novel about the Green River killer. Or rather, about a detective who’d spent many years on the case, written by said detective’s son.
• Teamsters leader James Hoffa came to town. He reiterated what he’d said in Detroit about defeating the right wing. That is, he reiterated what he’d really said, not the right-wing media’s deliberate distortion of it.
• As I’ve written before, one of Seattle’s favorite activities is to proclaim “what this town needs.” Now there’s a whole site where you can leave your own ideas in that regard. It’s Changeby.us.
• SeattlePI.com has an intriguing list of local ’90s celebrities and where they are now. No, Rev. Bruce Howard isn’t mentioned. No, I don’t know what happened to him.
• French women don’t get fat, so the book says. But they do get sexually frustrated. And they sue over it.
• Update: A few days ago we linked to a guy who wished Apple would get around to charitable giving at last. It’s getting around to charitable giving at last.
• Half of Americans ages 16-24 are now unemployed.

• A victim of the war-on-terra hype some folks would like brought back: busking musicians on ferry boats.
• Here’s CNN’s take on the scandal of Border Patrol agents unfairly harassing Latino locals on the Olympic Peninsula. The headline: “Border agent says there’s nothing to do, says money being wasted.” In other words, if it weren’t for the war-on-terra hype, none of this would be happening.
• There’s a reason all the local media latched onto the aging Hall and Oates as this year’s big Bumbershoot stars. It’s because they were the only act this year both famous enough and old enough for media people to have heard of. (Apparently, the big name acts now want a cool half million per show. And you were wondering why you haven’t heard many recessionary protest songs by said big name acts.)
• The Neptune Theater’s official re-opening, later this month, will include a one-night nod to the U District house’s roots. I speak, of course, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which played midnight shows at the Neptune for more than a decade.
• Recession Sign #1: More parents are discovering public schools are just fine after all.
• Recession Sign #2: Realistic novels and stories about the socio-economically struggling are back in vogue.
• Adam Doree wants Steve Jobs to finally get around to donate a few buck to charity already.
• Sady Doyle really, really hates the Game of Thrones books. And Alyssa Rosenberg doesn’t particularly care for Doyle’s putdowns of the books. The point-O-contention: The novels depict women enduring some of the violent brutalities one might find in a violent, brutal fictional setting.
• Elsewhere in genderland, Hugo Schwyzer wants you to define the word “man” to mean not-boy, instead of not-woman.
• The Guardian, ever on the prowl for American weirdness with which to addle and astound its Brit readers, has discovered the “muscular Christianity” in evangelical-fringe books such as No More Christian Mr. Nice Guy. The writer seems to have never heard of the Church of the SubGenius and its “real FIGHTIN’ JESUS.”

• Despite what Republican politicians would have you believe, Washington state actually leads the nation in new business creation these days.
• One of these new businesses will be a downtown JC Penney store, in the old Kress five-and-dime store building at Third and Pike. That’s just a block from the old (1930-82) Penney store (Target’s going in on that site later this year). It’s great news, but what will become of the loveable, and vitally needed, Kress IGA supermarket in the building’s lower level? Its operators insist they’ve got a long term lease and are staying no matter what.
• It’s not just the state civil payroll that’s ethnically un-diverse. The state legislature is only 6.8 percent nonwhite.
• Local theater blogger Jose Aguerra asks whether local troupes are being too coy and inoffensive, even in their depiction of female orgasms. (In my day, Seattle’s live theaters prided themselves on presenting edgy, daring material, even if the promise was grander than the product.)
• A UW Medical Center administrator got caught embezzling a quarter mil from the hospital. You’re only hearing about it now because the state auditor made a statement publicly praising the U for how it investigated and prosecuted the inside thief. A potential huge scandal was thus turned into a low-key moment of triumph for the administration. At least if you read the Seattle Times version of the story. KOMO offers a far more critical spin on the affair.
• Grist.org’s David Roberts ponders what the heck Friends of the Earth is doing getting involved with right-wing lobby groups in proposing a “green” federal budget slashing scheme.
• The link we ran last week about the electric-guitar company? The company that got raided by federal agents, who were supposedly looking for endangered imported wood? The company flatly denies all allegations. And the Murdoch Wall St. Journal, ever eager to bash anything environmentalist, claims the feds could next go after folks who own old vintage instruments that contain now-restricted components.
• Should any of us care about speculation about the new Apple CEO’s private life? Ars Technica says no.
• Birth rates are dropping in many countries, especially those where female fetuses are sometimes selectively aborted. The Economist calculates some countries, at their current rates of decline, could totally run out of people in 600-700 years. Of course, if you’re not a dystopian scifi fan you know trends don’t stay the same, at the same rate, forever.
• Sasha Brown-Worsham believes “we should parent more like they did in 1978.” More Boo Berry and daytime TV; less overprotectiveness and constant fear.

• Warren Buffet “saved” Bank of America with a $5 billion investment. So now what should he do with it? How about breaking it up? Sell Merrill Lynch to help pay for Countrywide’s involvement in the mortgage bubble and subsequent crash. Then turn the retail banking operation into regionalized spinoffs attuned to their local communities rather than to the Wall St. casino.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Seattle Bike Blog believes SW editor Mike Seely’s “ill-informed and widely off base” rant against the City’s “road diet” programs (re-laning schemes, sometimes including separate bike lanes) is part of a desperate agenda to bash Mayor McGinn for anything and everything, including programs actually started by the previous mayor.
• Media Matters parses, and debunks, the arguments made by media toadies in favor of Boeing’s union busting drives.
• Seattle’s new art mecca? The now sparsely occupied interior-decorator showrooms at Georgetown’s Seattle Design Center.
• James Altucher lists some little known facts about the recently retired Steve Jobs. These include several less than flattering things. None of those involve his role in the outsourcing of almost all North American consumer-electronics manufacturing.…
• …while Kelefa Sanneh believes the iPod phenom, with its penchant for mixing and mashing, has driven the music biz back toward flashy hit singles.
• The story we linked to yesterday, the one that was all aglow about Iceland flouting the global bankers? Seems it was somewhat exaggerated, alas.
• And for political point making combined with snarky laffs, explore the highly unauthorized by any campaign committee site, “What the Fuck Has Obama Done So Far?“

Steve Jobs had essentially retired from Apple Inc.’s day to day management back in January. On Wednesday he simply made this move official.

Thus ends the second (third, if you count the NExT/early Pixar years) era of Jobs’s involvement in, and leadership of, the digital gizmo industry.

I will leave it to others more laser-focused on that industry to give the big picture of Jobs’s work and legacy. But here are a few notes on it.

Jobs and Steve Wozniac did not, by themselves, “invent the personal computer.” Many individuals and companies had seen what the early mainframes could potentially do in the hands of smaller-than-corporate users. The early “hacker culture” was a tribe of programmers who worked in corporate, institutional, and particularly collegiate computing centers, who snuck in personal projects whenever and wherever they could get processor time.

As the first microprocessor chips came on the market, several outfits came up with primitive programmable computer-like devices built around them, initially offering them in kit form. One of those kit computers was Jobs and Wozniak’s Apple (posthumously renamed the Apple I).

That begat the pre-assembled (but still user-expandable) Apple II. It came out around the same time as Commodore and Radio Shack’s similar offerings. But unlike those two companies, the two Steves had nerd street cred. This carefully crafted brand image, that Apple was the microcomputer made by and for “real” computer enthusiasts, helped the company outlast the Eagles, Osbornes, Kaypros, Colecos, and Tandons.

Then the IBM PC came along—and with it MS-DOS, and the PC clones, and eventually Windows.

In response, Jobs and co. made the Apple III (a failure).

Then the Lisa (a failure, but with that vital Xerox-borrowed graphic interface).

Then came the original Macintosh.

A heavily stripped-down scion of the Lisa, it was originally capable of not much besides enthralling and inspiring tens of thousands into seeing “computers” for potential beyond the mere manipulation of text and data.

The Mac slowly began to fulfill this potential as it gained more memory, more software, and more peripherals, particularly the Apple laser printer that made “desktop publishing” a thing.

But Jobs would be gone by then. Driven out by his own associates, he left behind a company neither he nor anyone else could effectively run.

Jobs created the NExT computer (a failure, but the machine on which Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web), and bought Pixar (where my ol’ high school pal Brad Bird would direct The Incredibles and Ratatouille).

The Mac lived, but didn’t thrive, in the niche markets of schools and graphic design. But even there, the Windows platform, with its multiple hardware vendors under Microsoft’s OS control, threatened to finally smother its only remaining rival.

Back came Jobs, in a sequence of maneuvers even more complicated than those that had gotten him out of the company.

Out went the Newton, the Pippin, the rainbow logo hues. In came the candy colored iMac and OS X.

And in came a new business model, that of “digital media.”

There had been a number of computer audio and video formats; many of them Windows-only. For the Mac to survive, Apple had to have its own audio and video formats, and they had to become “industry standards” by being ported to Windows.

Thus, iTunes.

And, from there, the iTunes Store, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and an Apple that was less a computer company and more a media-player-making and media-selling company. The world’s “biggest” company, by stock value, for a few moments last week.

Jobs turned a strategy to survive into a means to thrive.

Along the way he helped to “disrupt” (to use a favorite Wired magazine cliche) the music, video, TV,  cell-phone, casual gaming, book publishing, and other industries.

We have all been affected by Jobs, his products, and the design and business creations devised under his helm.

He’s backing away for health reasons. But we’ve all been the subjects of his own experiments, his treatments for “conditions” the world didn’t know it had.

•

The post-Jobs Apple is led by operations chief Tim Cook, whom Gawker is already calling “the most powerful gay man in America.” That’s based on speculation and rumor. Cook hasn’t actually outed himself, keeping his private life private.

One of the Seattle attorneys suing Apple and five big book publishers for e-book “price fixing” explains why he did it (without saying whether or not Amazon’s involved in his move):

The new system was clearly not helpful to consumers, as it meant that they could no longer shop for a bargain amongst retailers. Instead, prices at each retailer would be identical. Alongside the elimination of competition between retailers over price, the agency model allowed, we believe, a 30 to 50 percent increase in the price of the ebooks.

Each publisher’s decision to sign an agreement with Apple was not illegal by itself. What would be illegal, however, would be the coordination of five of the largest publishers joining forces to thwart price competition. Given the nearly simultaneous timing of the actions of these five publishers, and the fact that their actions coincided with the launch of the iPad, we believe there was coordination.

original mac screen fonts, from folklore.org

There’s a battle going on in the e-book field, one of the few media businesses that’s truly booming these days.

At stake: what these non-thing purchases will cost you.

In one corner: Amazon. The Seattle e-commerce king and Kindle e-book machine seller wants to set its own e-book prices (with most mass-market titles at $9.99), no matter what publishers want.

(Amazon also wants to eliminate the “hardcover window,” the early months of publication in which only the high-priced deluxe version of a book can be bought. Specifically, Amazon wants to sell e-books of a title the same week as that title’s dead-tree version first comes out.)

In the other corner: Five of America’s six biggest publishers (HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster), plus Apple (in a third corner?). The publishers have publicly proposed a different pricing structure, which they call “the agency model.” Under this scheme, publishers would set e-book retail prices. The e-book selling sites (Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc.) would keep a 30 percent margin from this price.

Early last year, Macmillan threatened to withhold its titles from Amazon’s Kindle e-book platform until Amazon capitulated to the “agency model,” which it did; but only after Amazon threatened to withhold selling Macmillan’s physical books from the main Amazon site.

Now, a Seattle law firm has filed a class action suit in a California U.S. District Court. The suit alleges the five publishing giants and Apple have conspired to drive up e-book prices. The law firm names two individual consumers, in California and Mississippi, as the case’s official plaintiffs.

•

With all this going on, William Skidelsky at the Guardian asks what’s the “true price” of a book as a written and edited document, rather than as a physical object.

Skidelsky quotes ex-Billboard editor Robert Levine, who’s written a forthcoming tract entitled Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. Levine, as you’d guess, takes the side of the intellectual-property industry, including the book publishers.

Levine (as quoted by Skidelsky) states that it only costs $3.50 to “print and distribute” a hardcover book.

Thus, the argument goes, e-books should be just that much cheaper than physical books, no more.

However, it’s not that simple.

First of all, the whole pricing structure of physical books is about the design, manufacture, shipping, warehousing, and retailing of the object; including big margins to the retailers and wholesalers (who still sometimes have trouble keeping afloat). When all that’s reduced to the storage of some megabytes on a server, that whole pricing model goes away.

And much of the publisher’s share of a book’s price includes an allowance for the industry’s tremendous physical waste. If a copy shipped to a bookstore doesn’t sell, it gets sent back. All those copies are either re-shipped at clearance prices (more likely for coffee-table picture books) or destroyed. With e-books, none of that happens.

•

You will note that, aside from Levine, we haven’t mentioned authors.

What would an e-book pricing structure look like if it were based on the people who actually make what’s being bought?

Take the current royalties for a book’s authors and illustrators.

Then at least double them.

Not only do the creators deserve it, but such a step would acknowledge that, since e-books are cheaper to get out, there will be more titles out there scrambling for readers’ bucks, and hence each individual title might not sell as much.

Then add in a budget item for the work-for-hire participants in a book’s making—the editors and designers and cover artists and licensors of agency photographs. Again, they’d be higher than for traditional paper books, to make up for lower expected total sales.

There’s still a role in the e-book realm for what we call “publishers.” They put up the money. They arrange promotion and advertising. They put authors, artists, and editors together. In many cases, they organize the transmutation of a vague idea into a saleable product.

Once these parties all have their pieces of the pie set into a fixed wholesale price, e-book sellers could charge as much or as little as they think they can get away with.

•

That’s one potential e-book pricing model. There are others.

One is that of Take Control Books, for which I’ve worked in the past. They sell their e-books directly on their own site. Half the retail take, minus a cut for the company’s e-commerce provider, goes directly to the authors. (Take Control sells its e-books as .pdf files, which can be transferred with greater or lesser ease to all e-book reading devices.)

Another is self publishing, that past and present refuge of the artiste with no perceived commercial potential. Only in the e-book age, some authors are actually succeeding this way.

Earlier this year, bestselling thriller writer Barry Eisler said he was walking out of his “handshake deal” with St. Martin’s Press. For the time being, all books written by Eisler will be published by Eisler.

Of course, Eisler has an established “brand” for his works; much like Radiohead had when they released a download-only album. And Eisler has experience in the Silicon Valley startup world.

A more realistic role model would be that of Amanda Hocking. She’s young. She’s photogenic. She writes in a popular commercial-fiction genre. She’s sold a million e-books without a corporate backer (she’s got one now, though).

•

The business side of book publishing, as I’ve carped here for years, has been a moribund, tradition-obsessed infrastructure of waste and lost opportunity.

E-books represent the biggest chance in decades (since the rise of the big-book bookstore chains) to fix this.

Let’s not blow it.

(Thanx and a hat tip to Michael Jacobs for suggesting added angles to this story.)

2005 fremont solstice parade goers at the lenin statue

• The Lenin statue in Fremont is privately owned, and is for sale. But nobody apparently wants to buy it.
• Minorities: Bellevue’s got a lot more of ’em these days, sez the Census. Seattle’s got a lot fewer.
• Art Thiel wants you to know the big Husky Stadium rebuild, to begin this winter, involves no taxpayer funds. Just private donations and bond issues to be repaid out of UW Athletics income.
• Ex-State Rep Brendan Williams wants Washington state’s progressives to “get some backbone” about preserving vital services in the state budget.
• Starbucks boss and Sonics seller Howard Schultz’s latest big idea: Big election-campaign donors like him should vow to boycott funding election campaigns. Of course, if Democratic donors like Schultz are the only ones doing the boycotting….
• There’s a plan to create a “Jimi Hendrix Park,” next to the African American Museum at the old Coleman School. It would be the fifth Hendrix memorial of one type or another (not counting the Experience Music Project, which parted ways with the Hendrix heirs during its development). Cobain still has just that one unofficial park bench in Viretta Park and a city-limits sign in Aberdeen.
• Rolling Stone put out a reader poll declaring the top punk acts of all time. The list put Green Day on top and included not a single female. FlavorWire has come to the side of justice with its own in-house listing of “15 Essential Women Punk Icons.” The NW’s own Kathleen Hanna, Beth Ditto, and Sleater-Kinney are on it, as is onetime Seattleite Courtney Love.
• Many, many indie-label CDs were in a warehouse that burned during the London lootings. Some labels might not survive the blow.
• Mike Elgan at Cult of Mac sez Apple’s invented all the big things it’s going to invent for a while. We’ve heard this one before.
• And for those of you heading back into the working life (you lucky stiffs, you), take heed Peter Toohey’s thoughts (partly inspired by the late David Foster Wallace) on “the thrill of boredom:”

Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon.

illo from macgazette.net

Be restful this evening, fellow Mac users.

The newest version of Mac OS X, version 10.7 (code named Lion) isn’t out yet, despite rumor sites that claimed it would be out by now. You don’t need to clog Apple’s servers to download it yet.

And don’t wait in line outside an Apple Store. This OS update will be sold exclusively as a download.

Why are you supposed to want it? For the “250+ New Features,” of course. Documents that auto-save themselves. Instant full-screen mode. Updated apps for mail, web browsing, address-book, networking, chatting, video calling/conferencing, security, backups and more. A “Launchpad” interface that looks like the iOS (iPhone/iPod/iPad) menu screen. A Mac App Store, just as convenient (and as censored) as the iOS app store.

But take this waiting time to prepare yourself.

Back up everything, just in case.

And check your applications folder. Thoroughly.

You see, Lion not only runs only on Macs with Intel chips, but it only runs applications written to be run on Macs with Intel chips.

It won’t run apps written for the previous, PowerPC-based Macs.

If you’re still using any Mac software that you haven’t updated since 2005-2006, you’ve got something to fret about.

Christina Warren from Mashable has a handy guide for checking if you’ve got soon-to-be orphaned apps on your Mac. It involves the System Profile utility, found at the “About This Mac” menu item.

If you don’t replace those apps with fresher versions (or substitutes) before you dump the current Mac OS from your ‘puter, you’ll still have your documents. But if those documents are written in the proprietary formats of orphaned apps, you won’t be able to read or revise them.

Unless, of course you set aside a bootable external hard drive, or a partition on your Mac’s internal hard drive, with the current OS X on it.

According to my iTunes directory, you’re…

• A Lady
• A Target
• All I Need to Get By
• All I’ve Got Tonight
• Driving Me Crazy
• Getting to Be a Habit With Me
• Getting to Be a Rabbit With Me
• Gone Baby
• Gonna Miss Me
• Just a Baby
• Not Sick, You’re Just In Love
• Just the Right Size
• Just Too Good to Be True
• My Everything
• My Thrill
• My World
• Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You
• Not Easy To Forget
• Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)
• Sixteen
• So Fine
• So Square (Baby I Don’t Care)
• Still a Young Man Baby
• The Beautiful One
• The Cream In My Coffee
• The Devil In Disguise
• The One
• The Reason I’m Leaving
• The Storm
• The Top

After months in the making, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has finally issued forth its paid-subscription based (albeit free for the first two weeks) online “newspaper,” christened The Daily. It’s only available via an iPad app, though I suspect versions for other platforms will roll out in time.

First complaint: I am a veteran of, and remain loyal to, the Daily of the University of Washington. To me, no other enterprise will ever deserve the name “The Daily.”

Second complaint: After all this planning by one of the world’s biggest media companies, the thing’s a flimsy mess.

It feels like an awkward mix of USA Today and the New York Daily News (archrival to Murdoch’s own New York Post). It’s full of stunning color wire-service photos, but its news stories are short and superficial; many are rehashes of stuff an online news geek would have already read.

Mitigating factors: It’s not as rabidly stupid as Murdoch’s Fixed Noise Channel, nor as puerile (or as fun) as his NY Post. The opinion section has a few intriguing, and eminently readable, guest essays. There’s no overt political agenda.

But overall, it’s an over-processed, over-formatted, over-packaged hunk of commercial middle-of-the-road blandness, being sent out into an online America that seems to not like that sort of thing.

Just before the end of the previous year, I wrote here that Seattle has become the home of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre.

Seattle had already been one of the two U.S. hubs of the video game industry, which had been America’s fastest growing media genre the previous decade.

This is a vital, though potentially only temporary, shift.

To explain it, let’s start by going back to the allegedly good old days of the U.S. lit biz.

Books were more of a cottage industry during the first half of the previous century. That’s because they were far less popular than they are now.

Yes, less popular.

The masses read slick magazines and pulp magazines (and, later on, mass market paperbacks). “Real” books, the hardcovers and the coffee table editions, were sold in boutiques or boutique-like settings within department stores, to a target audience of educated but careerless women. They were commissioned and curated by small offices of tweed-suited gentlemen in New York and Boston.

The smallness of the market ensured that the established publishers and distributors could maintain profitable market shares, so long as they kept issuing saleable works.

The few new authors who could break into the rarified world of “trade books” (usually from the fiction sections of the “better” magazines) knew they’d be promoted and nurtured by their publishers, as big fish in a very small pond.

This is the milieu that “people of the book” nostalgize about. I dunno ’bout you, but I’d have hated it. Too stifling, too restrictive, too frou-frou.

Then the industry got big.

The GI Bill fueled three decades of growth in college lit programs.

Trade paperbacks, and original (non-reprint) mass paperbacks, helped bring the book racket into supermarkets and discount stores.

Chains opened full-line bookstores in shopping malls, succeeded by bigger chains opening big-box bookstores in every town and suburb.

Global conglomerates bought, sold, and combined publishers, bringing in cadres of corporate bean-counters in the process.

Authors became in-demand guests on TV and radio talk shows; their facility with these appearances (or lack thereof) often greatly affected their career prospects. Even in

Then came Amazon.

Instead of the extremely inefficient bookstore world, whose crippling (for publishers) return policies became ever-more abused by ever-bigger big box chains, there was one massive retailer who bought to order, and who tracked every sale with a staggering array of useful statistics.

Within a decade (a mere trice in this traditionally snail-paced industry), Amazon became the big publishers’ best frenemy.

As the big chains had eased out many smaller booksellers, Amazon took market share from the chains. When the great recession struck all retail sectors, the book chains suffered more than most.

Then came Kindle.

After more than a decade of attempts, electronic books finally took off thanks to Amazon’s marketing clout.

With no physical product for publishers to have manufactured, Amazon has wound up with even more leverage in the delicate dance of supplier and seller.

Amazon doesn’t even have to sell all its own hardware, with Kindle-format ebooks playing on PCs, tablets, and smartphones as well as Amazon’s own branded devices.

I’m not the only observer to see Amazon having a clear upper hand in the industry, if not its fulcrum of clout.

It had subsumed some of the biggest media companies on earth (while imposing its will on more than a few smaller publishers along the way).

And now, Amazon’s put its valuable sales-metrics data on a handy online dashboard widget thang. It includes data about industry-wide sales of a publisher’s titles, not just those made through Amazon.

With this information at hand, and without the need to invest in print runs or suffer the bookstore chains’ consignment policies, the financial barrier to book publishing (on a serious commercial level) continues to plummet.

It’s easy to imagine more authors becoming self-publishers, hiring their own copy editors, publicists, etc. instead of working for corporate publishers who have those operations in-house. (Already, in the comics world, ebook sales favor indie titles more than comic-book-store sales do.)

Who needs a royalty-sucking edifice in Manhattan, when an author can deal with Amazon direct?

The Jet City, once thought of in lit circles as little more than a strong book buying market and a gateway to Montana, has become Book City U.S.A.

For now, at least.

Thing is, the brave new book world is a faster place. A much faster place.

Enter Google Ebooks.

And Google Ebooks’ strategic ties with local indie booksellers.

That’s something Amazon just isn’t set up to offer (though the fiscally troubled Barnes & Noble is)—a physical, real-world presence, with friendly neighborhood book-lovin’ experts guiding buyers’ individual reading pleasures.

Then there are the authors and publishers who claim not to need Amazon or Google. They just sell direct, from their own websites. These include the new OR Books and my own sometime ebook publisher Take Control Books.

It’s going to get messy and complicated. When and if the dust clears, I expect Amazon will remain a strong player in both “e” and non-“e” books.

But it won’t be the only one.

Seattleites, enjoy your collective symbolic stance as capital of the world of words while it lasts.

A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.

I know a LOT of people who are spending this day and upcoming night wishing a good riddance to this epic fail of a year we’ve had.

The economy in much of the world (for non-zillionaires) just continued to sluggishly sputter and cough. Thousands more lost jobs, homes, 401Ks, etc.

The implosion of the national Republican Party organization cleared the way (though not in this state) for a wave of pseudo-populist demagogue candidates who only appeared in right-wing media, because those were the only places where their nonsensical worldviews made pseudo-sense. Enough of these candidates made enough of a stir to take control of the US House of Reps., which they have already turned back over to their mega-corporate masters.

And we had the BP spill, continuing mideast/Afghan turmoils, violent drug-turf wars in several countries, floods in Pakistan, a bad quake in Haiti, the deaths of a lot of good people, and a hundred channels of stupid “reality” shows.

Locally, a number of ballot measures were introduced to at least stem the state’s horrid tax unfairness, while staving off the worst public-service budget cuts. They all failed.

And the South Park bridge was removed without a clear replacement schedule, the Deeply Boring Tunnel project continued apace, the Seattle Times got ever crankier (though it stopped getting thinner), and our major men’s sports teams were mediocre as ever. Seattle Center bosses chose to replace a populist for-profit concession (the Fun Forest) with an upscale-kitsch for-profit concession (Chihuly).

Alleviating factors: (Most) American troops are out of Iraq. Something approximating health care reform, and something approximating the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, both passed. Conan O’Brien resurfaced; Jon and Stephen worked to restore sanity and/or fear. The Storm won another title. The football Huskies had a triumphant last hurrah; the Seahawks might get the same. Cool thingamajigs like the iPad and Kinect showed up. Seattle has emerged as the fulcrum of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre. The Boeing 787’s continued hangups have proven some technologies just can’t be outsourced.

My personal resolution in 1/1/11 and days beyond: To find myself a post-freelance, post-journalism career.

One Craig Mod (apparently his real name), a Tokyo-based book editor and graphic designer, has plenty of detailed and well-expressed opinions about “Books in the Age of the iPad.”

His first proclamation: E-books mean the impending end in print of “disposable books,” the “throwaway paperbacks” with ephemeral interest and limited artistic achievement. Or so Mod believes.

I disagree, natch.

To me, commercial ephemera is America’s greatest art form. And it comes close to being Japan’s greatest art form.

What Mod disdains as the “dregs of the publishing world” are the darlings of eBay, the stuff of occasional legend. They include everything in between magazines and trade paperbacks. They are the literature of their specific times and places.

They include the beautiful Dell “map back” mysteries, teen fan books, fashion and hair guides, comics collections, pretty much all science fiction/fantasy, decades of progressively-more-sexual romance novels, giveaway cookbooks, Scholastic Book Club titles sold in schools, “adult reading” novels with “good girl art” covers, and pretty much any reading matter issued since 1930 that is or ever was popular.

Mod is wrong about this point. But I believe he’s right about some of his other points.

Like when he mentions that publications designed for the iPad or other ebook readers could be categorized as either “formless content” (straight text) or “definite content” (material that relies upon text/image juxtaposition or other design elements).

And when he notes that iPad books don’t have to conform to print-centric “page layout” design metaphors.

And especially when he chides both Apple and Amazon for leaving out essential typographic tools from their ebook software platforms.