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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.
The 67-year-old Seattle artist was, even by the standards of the local alt-art scene, a an iconoclast and a lone wolf.  While best known for his conceptual works with discarded nuclear materials and his related residency at the Hanford cleanup megasite, Acord was also a sculptor and dimensional designer of the top rank.
That’s not to dismiss his nuclear related projects as mere publicity stunts. He developed his art as a practical philosophical reaction to The Bomb (that instrument of instant, mass death and potential planetary extinction) and radioactivity (that byproduct instrument of slow, deformative death and potential planetary extinction).
Seattle sports fans are used to the national media giving their teams no respect. This NY Times blog entry about the Seahawks, by the paper’s crack political-statistics nerd and poll watcher Nate Silver, is easily the harshest dis of them all.
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.
In typical DC Beltway pundit pomposity, the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber claims “Wikileaks Will Kill Big Business and Big Government.”
Scheiber’s claim: In an age when organizational secrets are porous commodities, big orgs shouldn’t have a lot of people around who know them. That, in turn, will require smaller, more cohesive orgs. Perhaps no bigger than 500 workers (the size of Obama’s campaign organization, which held great internal discipline).
“The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information.” Scheiber asserts. “It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.”
We’ve discussed this dream of de-consolidation in the past, with local author David C. Korten’s 1999 book The Post Corporate World. Where Korten saw utopian promise in small businesses and housing co-ops, Scheiber sees business (and government) as usual (or close to it) surviving by becoming smaller, nimbler and tighter.
At once, Scheiber’s and Korten’s visions contradict and support one another.
Scheiber sees big institutions going small to retain strict top-down control.
Korten sees grassroots people-power ventures offering an alternative to strict top-down control.
In reality, both could happen. And in some ways, they already are.
The Republican wins this past midterm election largely occurred in spite of the national Republican Party. They were the works of more decentralized big-money whores of all genders and many ethnicities, who’d directly solicited big campaign cash from corporations and billionaires.
And with so much of America’s personal wealth concentrated on the top one or two percent of the population, a lobbyist-lovin’ politician only has to successfully nab a few mega-donors to run a “friend of the little guy” campaign.
And as we’ve learned in the ecological and economic and workplace-abuse fields in recent years, an institution doesn’t have to be big to do bad things.
Still, decentralization is an interesting starting point for a conversation about the world and its future. Lots of folks these days despise the world of global business and its capacity for harm, but I’ve not met many people with well-thought-out alternatives to today’s capitalist system.
MTV.com has, today, finally posted all of $5 Cover Seattle.
Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton completed the “webisode” music/drama series over a year ago. But the MTV bureaucrats sat on it ’til now.
If only Shelton had had someone in her life who could have warned her about working with this company.
Oh, wait….
Mayor McGinn found places at Seattle Center to put both a for-profit Chihuly glass-art gallery and a new home for KEXP.
The latter, which will include a live-performance studio with viewing windows, will be built out with no city funds. Expect even-longer pledge drives on the station starting next year.
The space will be in the Northwest Court buildings. That’s where the Vera Project is now and SIFF Cinema will be soon.
Of course, this means all of the Northwest Court’s rental spaces will be taken over by permanent tenants. Hence, they are no longer available for Bumbershoot’s visual and literary arts exhibits. This will result in these programs either getting diminished, or relocated to other Center spots. Let’s hope it’s the latter.
I was in the UW Daily newsroom that Monday night when the first bulletins came in on the already-archaic AP teletype machine, reporting first that John Lennon had been shot, then that he had died.
Within minutes, every radio station that even half-claimed to play rock music, and many that didn’t (in commercial radio, remember, this was the nadir of the soft rock era), went to all Lennon/Beatles and stayed that way for the next day or longer. I remember going up two flights of stairs in the Communications Building to the studios of KCMU (KEXP’s precursor), to hand deliver copies of the wire reports to the DJ on duty.
This was one month after the election of Ronald Reagan, the moment many of us campus libs feared would bring the beginning of the end of progress and democracy in America. (Turns out the only thing my more cynical/fearful lefties had wrong about that was how slow the nation’s fall from middle-class economic security would be.)
Then, with the assassination of the man who’d done as much as anyone to “invent” rock n’ roll as people my age had known it, it seemed to some of us like the end of the world.
But life, as Lennon himself had sung, went on.
As it will after all of us have left its stage.
“The Funky Monkey 104.9,” one of the last commercial stations still playing new hard rock in the region, has flipped to “Gen X,” Â a 1990s nostalgia format. I’m not ready for this, let’s put it at that.
This day began for me by reading about the 90th anniversary of commercial radio.
It ends for me with thoughts about possibly this city’s greatest radio personality, Dave Niehaus, whose death was announced this evening.
He was the Mariners’ chief announcer for all of the team’s 34 seasons. He was heard on every game the team played with only 101 exceptions.
Most of those rare days off occurred in recent years. While his voice never lost its timbre, he’d become visibly shaky while seen holding his mic on FSN’s pregame telecasts. His quick wit and command of the game had begun to occasionally falter. Longtime listeners (including charter listeners like me) could tell he was in the twilight of his career.
Yet he held on to the very end, to the last regular season game of 2010.
Niehaus was the one thru-line from the Kingdome days to today, from the early years of Al Cowens and Funny Nose Glasses Night to this year’s half season of pitching ace Cliff Lee.
His voice, even when narrating tales of diamond futility, always held the promise of summer. And now it always will.
ARI UP OF THE SLITS: Some of the first-generation punk rock women copied, mocked, or expanded on the then-traditional bad-boy rocker tropes. Ari Up, with her bandmates, did something different. They created a sound that was neither “fuck me” nor “fuck you.” It was totally rocking, totally strong, and totally feminine. And it’s seldom been matched.
BOB GUCCIONE: His masterwork, the first two decades of Penthouse magazine, was not merely a “more explicit” imitation of Playboy, as some commentators have described it. It had its own aesthetic, its own fully formed identity.
And so did its originator. If Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was more like William Randolph Hearst (a hermit philosopher secluded on his private estate), Guccione was more like Charles Foster Kane (living with gusto, building and losing a fortune). A Rolling Stone profile, published just before Guccione reluctantly gave up control of what was left of the Penthouse empire, depicts the open-shirted, gold-chain-bearing mogul as a man who poured millions into “life extension” research, even while he smoked the five packs of cigarettes a day that took much of his mouth in 1999 and his life last week.
TOM BOSLEY: Now we may never know what happened to Richie’s older brother.
If you love political snark and the vilifying of easy big-boy targets as much as I do, you’ll love “Stop Spewman.” It’s a series of Web ads starring Jack Black as your ultimate astroturfy corporate shill (not that he has to exaggerate very much to make the shtick look ludicrous).
Last night, I attended the highly anticipated premiere of I Am Secretly an Important Man, the long in-the-making biopic about Seattle poet/author/musician/actor/performance artist Steven J. “Jesse” Bernstein.
Documentarian Peter Sillen had been collecting footage and reminiscences of Bernstein since the year after Bernstein’s 1991 suicide. Only now, after directing four other films and performing camera work on several others, has Sillen finally assembled this footage into an 85-minute feature.
He’s done a spectacular job.
The finished work captures, as well as any mere 85-minute feature can, the immense creative range, depth, and contradictions within Bernstein, which I won’t attempt to describe in this one blog entry.
(Of course, it helps that Bernstein recorded so much of his life and work in audio tape, video tape, and film, much of it taken by artists and collaborators from across the Northwest creative community.)
Suffice it to say you should see An Important Man during its engagement later this autumn at the Northwest Film Forum.
I thought this department was perhaps due for retirement. After all, the SeaTimes hasn’t run a 24- or 26-page minipaper in several weeks. Even Monday and Tuesday editions regularly run to 32-36 pages, with 8-12 pages of paid advertising.
However, as Goldy at HorsesAss points out, these looks can be deceiving.
The paper’s offering drastically discounted ad rates for in-state political advertisers.
And some of the SeaTimes‘ other ads, particularly in Mon.-Thurs. issues, seem to be for mail-order merchandisers of the type you’d normally see in late night TV infomercials. I don’t know what rates these firms are being charged, but I suspect they might also be less than they used to be.
