The Puget Sound Business Journal has been running a reader poll to name “Seattle’s most respected brand.”

The finalists are Windermere Real Estate and Chateau Ste. Michelle.

Other contenders included Nordstrom, Canlis, Columbia Bank, the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, Starbucks, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Northwest Harvest.

But where were Dick’s Drive-Ins, Pyramid Ales, Fantagraphics, Big John’s PFI, Sub Pop, or Tim’s Cascade Chips?

Oh right. They’re not freakin’ upscale enough.

Then forget it.

from pulpcovers.com

• Teenage boys don’t read “young adult” fiction. Publishing industry people and school administrators want to change that, by supplying printed-word versions of video-game-esque adventures and sports-heroism sagas. It’s apparently not working. The answer, if you’re not a school administrator, is simple—pulp!
• OKCupid.com claims Portland and Seattle top the nation in personal ads from people “seeking casual sex.” It doesn’t say whether any of the advertisers actually attain their goal.
• From where you wouldn’t expect street theater, some 200 people dressed in Great Depression character costumes held a “soup line” vigil outside Rep. Dave Reichert’s Mercer Island office.
• Local directing wonderkind Lynn Shelton says she won’t be able to make any more movies in Washington until the state brings back filmmakers’ tax incentives.
• As new gambling opportunities have sprouted around the country, horse racing’s taken a nosedive. Fewer races are being staged, and fewer horses are being bred to run in them. One bright spot in the biz: Emerald Downs.
• Are Seafair and Daffodil Festival queens really insufficiently qualified to run for Miss America? And is this another example of our state falling behind in preparing its youth?
• As the Mitt Romney Presidential campaign ramps up, it’s time for a look back to the roots of anti-Mormon fervor. According to authors David Bigler and Will Bagley, it dates back to the initial spread of the LDS “tribe” across the inland west, back in the frontier days.
• Lame excuse dept: Hershey’s made money by having foreign students come to the U.S. for what the students thought would be an educational adventure but turned out to be sub-minimum-wage factory work. Hershey’s now tries to get away with it by saying it was really a subcontractor that did it.
• The latest fad in online fraud? “Review mills” churning out fake accolades for restaurants, books, or anything else you want accoladed.
• Financial analysts examined Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s cell phone division. Their conclusion: Google “bought a patent portfolio and got a mobile phone business thrown in for free.”
• And few seem to have noticed, but this month is the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC. And of the operating software running it, a little something called MS-DOS from a little company on the Eastside.

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.

• The rules of cricket.
• The real names of the Residents.
• Who the characters “really were” in any ’50s-’60s novel set in New York City.
• What’s under a kilt.
• What’s under a Utilikilt.
• What heroin use feels like.
• What (insert name of debilitating disease here) feels like.

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.)

from thelmagazine.com

There’s bad news today for the book snobs out there.

(You know, the droning turned-up-nose guys who love to whine that Nobody Reads Anymore, except of course for themselves and their own pure little subculture.)

Turns out, according to a study co-sponsored by two industry groups, book sales are actually up over the past three years!

Yes, even during this current economic blah-blah-blah!

Ebook sales have particularly exploded.

But regular dead-tree volumes are also up; except for mass market paperbacks (perhaps the most vulnerable category to the ebook revolution).

Adult fiction sales rose 8.8 percent from early ’08 to late ’10. Also doing well, according to the NYT story about the study: “Juvenile books, which include the current young-adult craze for paranormal and dystopian fiction….” (Good news for people who love bad news, to quote a Modest Mouse CD.)

Oh, as for that other commercial communications medium? You know, the medium that the book snobs call their sworn enemy?

The AP headline says it all: “Pay TV industry loses record number of subscribers.”

•

Has the above inspired you to get with the program, hop on the bandwagon, follow the fad, and start buying some more books for your very own?

I have a great little starter number, just for you.

• Our ol’ pal Wendi Dunlap has scanned and posted the first two issues of her vital ’80s Seattle pop-rock zine Yeah! Great work, then and now.
• Amy Rolph has an online slideshow of 15 iconic Seattle fashion statements. Not included: “Skinny white boy with exposed boxer shorts.”
• Our own U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who conveniently doesn’t run for re-election in ’12, was named one of the Dems on the deficit-cuttin’ “super congress.” Also named: John Kerry and frequent DINO (Democrat In Name Only) Max Baucus (drat).
• For the third consecutive year, all Seattle Public Library branches will be closed for a week later this month, with all staff on unpaid leave.
• Seattle Weekly has struck back at Mayor McGinn with all the editorial influence and rhetorical force it’s got these days.
• Now showing on the Seattle waterfront, the “world’s fastest sailing ship.” It’s Russian and it’s really big.
• Amazon UK: Profiting from the UK street riots as a seller of baseball bats and other “weapons”?
• Anybody shedding a tear for the fiscally ill Bank of America? No?
• Apple was, for a brief time Tuesday, America’s biggest company. If you measure the size of a company by the Almighty Stock Price. Which I don’t.
• The big recall in Wisconsin seems to have fallen one seat short of ending Republican control of that state’s senate. As one might have predicted, it all came down to the county with the GOP elections boss already known for questionable integrity and/or competence.

• Some guy who’s writing his own Seattle music-scene book has just listed me among the most “underrated Seattle music people.” Considering that the only public musical performing I’ve done is karaoke, I guess that’s an accomplishment.
• Today’s sermon against the deep bore tunnel comes from the Tacoma News Tribune, which chides the state Dept. of Transportation for refusing to make its tunnel-related records public.
• What they didn’t want to release, an internal memo about the tunnel project’s financial prospects, has been leaked online by tunnel opponents.
• R.I.P. Mark Hatfield, an actual sane Republican (back when there was such a thing) and one of the first national lawmakers to public acknowledge the Vietnam war was a huge mistake. The hereby-linked Oregonian obit claims Hatfield had been on the short list for the GOP VP nomination in ’68; but Richard Nixon chose the more “southern strategy” friendly (i.e., demagogue-like) Spiro Agnew.
• Obama insists that the Standard & Poor’s nonsense notwithstanding, America is still “a triple-A country.” So why don’t we try harder to break into the majors? (At least it’s better than the bush leagues, where we were when the seeds of this mess were planted.)
• Virginia Heffernan asks, and believes she has an answer, why grade-school students can write very lucid blog posts and lousy class papers. She calls for a move away from industrial-age rote learning and a return to “socratic learning.”
• Michael Wolff says he knows how to get the Rupert Murdoch empire out of the U.S.—sic ’em with the RICO Act.
• There’s panic on the streets of London, and spreading to other U.K. cities. It was originally inspired by protests against police brutality. Guardian commentator Nina Power offers another reason—increasing inequality in that land (still not as bad as it is here). The same paper also quotes academicians who see large parts of a whole young generation who believe they have no future. Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?

oh, NOW they get customers.

• SeattlePI.com is moving, away from what had been the Post-Intelligencer building on Elliott Ave. The new office space is said to be “larger” than the space the news site had been occupying. (Let’s hope that means the site’s going to add staff, to get at least slightly closer to a comprehensive local news source.) The P-I globe’s staying put, for now.
• The Seattle weekly that’s not Seattle Weekly gets the big fawning establishment treatment as it approaches its 20th anniversary in September.
• The alleged Norwegian mass murderer (mostly of teenagers) is shaping up to be a right wing “Christian,” a virulent racist and anti-Muslim, and a member of at least one nationalist cell group. None of this has stopped right wingers in other countries from falsely attributing the murders to Muslim terrorists.
• Looks like the ’04 Presidential election may have been just as rigged as the ’00 election may have been, though with operational differences.
• Fans descended on a low-key charity basketball event to proclaim their unflagging desire to see men’s pro b-ball back in town. I also want the Seattle Supersonics back, and I want them in Seattle.
• Amy Winehouse, R.I.P.: Let’s put this succinctly as possible. Drugs suck.

No matter what you think of big box retail chains, I always find it sad to see one go.

Especially when it’s in an industry for which I have particular fondness (and in which I’ve invested much of my life).

This is the case this week. Borders Books and Music, not too long ago one of the Big Two of bookselling, didn’t find a buyer and will probably shut down. Going out of business sales at the remaining 399 branches (down from 1,249 in 2003) may start Friday.

You can read exhaustive histories of the company elsewhere. If you do, you’ll learn how the Borders brothers of Ann Arbor, MI started a book superstore operation that was bought by Kmart, which merged it with the mall chains Waldenbooks and Brentano’s; then the whole “books group” was spun off into a separate company.

“My” Borders, the downtown Seattle location, opened circa 1994, during the Kmart ownership. At the time, it was considered a major vote of corporate confidence in a downtown that had lost the Frederick & Nelson department store  two years before.

It seemed a warm and friendly place despite its size. It had downtown’s best CD selection, including a healthy stock of local consignments. It had a children’s section that served as a play area for shoppers’ tots. It had in-store events nearly every weekend, ranging from readings to acoustic musical performances and chocolate tastings. Its charity gift wrap table helped many a bachelor such as myself every Christmas season.

But the local store, no matter how cool it was, could not escape the parent company’s troubles.

As local staff was cut back, the in-store events disappeared. The up-only escalator to the mezzanine level was removed. The music and DVD departments were severely shrunk. The various book genres were shuffled around, and a huge section of floor space was given over to long-shelf-life stationery items and even iPhone cases.

Now it will be a brief bargain store, then get gradually emptier, then go dark.

There will still be physical places to acquire physical books, including Barnes & Noble and Arundel Books downtown.

But what of the Borders downtown space?

It’s not like there are a lot of other big chain stores itching for a two story space like that. (Though if you’re listening, University Book Store? Powell’s? Even JC Penney?….)

•

A secondary loser in the Borders shutdown: Starbucks. Its Seattle’s Best Coffee subsidiary had dwindled in the past few years, mostly to a string of coffee stands inside Borders stores. Will the rest of SBC’s stores survive this?

• Where the state fails, the city steps up, today’s edition: With no more govt.-sponsored tourism promotion in Washington, Seattle might tax hotels for its own tourist ads.
• Tuesday’s County Council hearing on the scheme to impose a car-tab surtax to save Metro Transit: Stuffed to overflowing with citizens, sparse on County Council members.
• You know that deal for Electronic Arts to buy Seattle’s PopCap Games, the deal PopCap management emphatically denied? It’s real, and it’s on.
• Rupert Murdoch will stop trying to buy all of the satellite TV company BSkyB after all.
• So far, the Murdoch newspaper scandals in Britain haven’t been directly tied to his U.S. properties. Well, here’s a fresh, all-American scandal for you: Murdoch’s Stateside businesses not only pay no income taxes, but clever exploitation of every tax dodge on the books has let Murdoch get $1 billion or more in tax refunds each of the past four years.
• Re/Search Books cofounder V. Vale, seeing his industry falter against the winds of tech-induced change, proclaims “If I were an alien from Outer Space wanting to ruin life on Planet Earth, I think I’d invent the Internet.”
• RIP Sherwood Schwartz, 94, the radio and TV comedy writer who became the creator-producer of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Fun fact: Schwartz later admitted he’d named the S.S. Minnow after Newton Minow, the FCC commissioner who’d denounced most of primetime TV as “a vast wasteland.”
• Speaking of which, Joe Berkowitz has handy tips for those of us who refuse to live in televisual abstinence and who continually take gruff for it.
• While on the big screen, Carina Chocano sees all these “strong women” movie characters and hates ’em. She says they’re not identifiable as women, but just as a different set of stereotypes.
• New Lake City strip club owner: We’re really an “adult cabaret,” and a respectable business too.
• And there are many other stories out there, important stuff about the fate of humanity and all. But there’s only one topic on all online users’ minds this day. How dare Netflix raise its rates?

• The city’s looking into bringing back the soda tax, repealed in a state initiative last year.
• And our desperate-for-quarters city leaders have decided to extend paid-parking hours until 8 p.m. in just about all of greater downtown, including Belltown and the ID, plus the U District.
• But drivers in Seattle will get $3 million worth of pothole-fixin’, funded by the city selling a vacant lot on lower Aurora Avenue to the state.
• Another day, another 787 Dreamliner delay.
• AddictingInfo.com has a list of popular public services that anybody who claims to hate “socialism” should detest, in order not to be hypocritical—the post office, public schools, parks, etc. The thing is, some of the purist libertarians infiltrating the GOP do overtly hate these things.
• The Atlantic Monthly, that reliable source on all things rockin’, proclaims the new way for bands to become famous—remain as anonymous and obscure as possible.
• Michele Bachmann’s “doctor” hubby: He’s not an MD, just an unlicensed “therapist.”

In case you haven’t noticed, there are some lovely cover-art images on this page’s lower left. They depict books, CDs, and DVDs with at least a vague connection to Seattle and proximity, all of which are for sale.

The selection changes at random every time you load or reload any page on this site. So if you don’t see something you like, you probably will the next time.

I just added more than 100 additional titles to the database, so there’s plenty of variety.

Of course, if you really want to help support these verbal endeavors, you should buy one of our own lovely MISCmedia products.

At least two more of those will be up for your perusal and purchase within the next few months. Stay tuned.

…and Sherman Alexie defends writers’ right to depict these hells, both realistically and metaphorically.

The Honeymooners writer and Get Smart! producer would be worth a long obit just for his TV and film work. But he also created the Mad Libs books, and cofounded Price/Stern/Sloan Publishing to put them out. The company became a huge supplier of point-of-sale minibooks.

You may now tell your own jokes about fill-in-the-blanks obituary articles.