Amazon.com Widgets
'every driver every time it ever rains ever'
slate
via geekwire
Amazon wants to build a triple-globe shaped, five story thing, variously called a “biodome” and a “greenhouse,” as part of its three-block skyscraper project. It would be on Lenora Street east of Sixth Avenue.
First comment:
Any architectural thang with three segments, in which the two smaller segments are spherical, is bound to lead to a lifetime of snickering jokes.
Arrangements of one or more spherical objects at the bottom of a 50-story tower will engender the same responses.
Amazon’s either being brave, or clueless, or devil-may-care bombastic, or some combo of the above.
Second, slightly more serious, comment:
As gargantuan New Seattle monuments to world-class-osity go (and I wish a couple of them would go), this one looks at least somewhat friendlier than the planned central waterfront makeover, kitschier (in a good way) than the Sculpture Park, and not nearly as brutalistic as Chihuly Garden & Glass.
Depending on how it works out, and how tolerant its staff is toward civilian activity within, it could be a welcome addition to the cityscape. Or at least a place in which to hide out from the rain for a bit.
factmag.com
via wikipedia
Pay close attention to the above image.
It indirectly has to do with a topic that’s been going around here of late, including on this site.
The premise: Seattle has become the new nexus of the book industry.
Amazon now firmly pulls the strings of both print and e-book sales, at least in the realm of “trade books.”
Costco and Starbucks also hold huge influence over what the nation reads.
Nancy Pearl’s NPR book recommendations hold huge sway.
And we buy lots of books for local consumption, giving Seattle readers an outsized role in making bestsellers and cult classics.
See anything missing in the above?
How about actual “publishing” and “editing”?
•
Now to explain our little graphic.
Cincinnati companies once had an outsize influence in the TV production business.
Procter & Gamble owned six daytime soaps, which in turn owned weekday afternoons on the old “big three” networks.
Taft (later Great American) Broadcasting owned Hanna-Barbera, which in turn owned Saturday mornings on the networks.
But if you think of TV content actually shot in Cincinnati, you’ll probably remember only the credits to the L.A.-made WKRP In Cincinnati.
And maybe a similar title sequence on P&G’s N.Y.-made The Edge of Night.
We’re talking about one of America’s great “crossroads” places. A town literally on the border between the Rust Belt and the South, in a Presidential-election “swing state,” often overshadowed by cross-state rival Cleveland. A place with innumerable potential stories to tell.
But few of these potential stories have made either the small or big screens.
The last series set in Cincinnati was the short-lived Kathy Bates drama Harry’s Law.
The only TV fare made in Cincinnati has been a couple of obscure reality shows.
The lesson of the above: prominence in the business side of media content isn’t the same as prominence in the making of media content.
What of the latter, bookwise, is in Seattle?
Fantagraphics has tremendous market share and creative leadership in graphic novels and in comic-strip compilation volumes.
Amazon’s own nascent publishing ventures have, so far, aroused more media attention than sales.
Becker & Mayer packages and edits coffee-table tomes for other publishers, and now also provides books and “other paper-based entertainment… direct to retailers.”
The relative upstart Jaded Ibis Productions combines literature, art, and music in multimedia products for the digital era.
We’ve also got our share of university presses, “regional” presses, and mom-n’-pop presses.
Still, the UW’s English Department site admits that…
Seattle is not exactly a publishing hub… so job openings are very limited and most local presses are small and specialized.… In any location, those seeking jobs in editing and publishing far exceed the number of jobs available; competition is very vigorous.
And these are the sorts of jobs people relocate to get, or even to try to get.
Of course, Seattle also has many writers and cartoonists of greater and lesser renown. But that’s a topic for another day.
seattle dept. of transportation
…historically the stingiest, most fiscally conservative, most technologically resistant and investment-averse people ever, with the highest percentage of luddites per capita.
8tracks.com
As I’ve written here before (see category tag “books”), the book industry is not, repeat NOT, dying.
(That’s the newspaper industry, the music industry, and the non-cable TV industry.)
Book sales have held their own in this one-two punch era of economic blecch and Internet “disruption” better than most any other “old media” business, with the possible exception of movie theaters.
And the percentage of book sales held by indie bookstores has also held about even. Online and e-book sales ate disproportionately into the revenues of big chain bookstores, leading directly to Borders’ collapse.
For a more thorough look at the book biz—past, present, and future—check out “What Is the Business of Literature?,” an essay by Richard Nash for the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Nash believes, as do I, that the literary biz has been a hidebound, inefficient beast, and that the sooner it gets dragged kicken’-n’-screamin’ into the modern age, the better:
Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is. By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian. The business of literature is blowing shit up.
david rosen, west seattle herald
washington dept. of natural resources via kxly-tv spokane
via quietbabylon.com
There’s quite a story behind the controversial “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot” T-shirt.
Turns out none were ever sold or even made.
It was offered on Amazon as a print-on-demand item, along with several hundred other slogans. This was done by a company that used a software algorithm to create the phrases.
Tim Maly offers a very poetic account of the fiasco at his site Quiet Babylon. In it, Maly also offers this image of the e-tail realm:
Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.
via vintageseattle.org and capitolhillseattle.com
In 1964, Seattle voters soundly defeated an “open housing” ordinance that would have let anyone live anywhere. It lost by more than 2-to-1.
spoon-tamago.com via buzzfeed.com
ward sutton
‘Tis election day. The most infuriatingly nervous day of the year, or in this case of the quadrennium. (I believe that’s a word.)
The polls, even the progressive leaning polls, predict a tighter race than I want. I want Obama across the board over Mr. Lying One-Percenter Tax Cheat Hypocrite in previously “red” states, and all victorious long before the Pacific Time Zone results show up. If I can’t get that, I at least want an Obama victory big enough that even the partisan-hack dirty tricks in Ohio and Florida (and even here) can’t threaten it.
Back to randomosity:
aaron tung, via digitalbookworld.com
There are many differences between the book world and the music world.
For one thing, music-world people have long held a healthy disrespect for the weasels, hucksters, and corporate wolves running their industry.
Book-world people, in contrast, are often willfully supplicant toward their industry, its masters, and its most crippling business-as-usual tactics.
Until, perhaps, now.
Germany’s Bertelsmann and Britain’s Pearson Group announced they’re merging their respective English-language book publishing units, Random House and Penguin. Those firms, two of the Big Six in the U.S. book biz, have each absorbed other imprints over the years—Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Doubleday, Knopf, Pantheon, and many others.
Bertelsmann will control the merged entity, once the Feds approve (perhaps one year from now).
The official excuse, this time, is that big publishers need to become even bigger so they can “stand up to Amazon.”
But we know the real reason. Monopolistic greed and dreams of global conquest, as always.
Now, the publishing biz is too consolidated for its own good already. It has been since at least the mid-1990s.
But “people of the book” (authors, reviewers, editors, etc.) said or did little to challenge the takeovers.
They’d often complain about book selling falling into fewer hands, especially in the heyday of the Borders/Barnes & Noble duopoly. But these folks didn’t complain as much about publishers becoming ever fewer and ever bigger.
Book fans cold have used some of the music fans’ cynicism about the companies who claim to have their interests at heart.
And now, they might finally be developing some of that wise-assery.
Publishers don’t, and never really have, acted in the best interests of either authors or readers. They, like other businesses, are in it for themselves.
And in this case, their actions may lead (as an LA Times business writer puts it) to “higher prices and less diversity of book titles.”
Yet that piece, and other commentaries summarized by UK trade blog TheBookseller, repeat the seldom questioned presumption of a “diminished interest in books.”
Even though total print and e-book sales are rising, even soaring in some categories.
And even though print book sales have held their own in this economy, better than a lot of other media sectors.
Instead of ever mega-er mega publishers saving the book biz, perhaps the biz is renewing itself in spite of them.
amidst-the-everyday.com
“Amidst the Everyday,” a project by photographers-artists Aaron Asis and Dan Hawkins, aims to reveal “elements of the unseen urban environment.” You go to places around town, scan QR codes (etched in wood!) at various buildings, and receive images of their hidden treasures. (Above, one of the unoccupied-for-decades upper floors of the Eitel Building at Second and Pike.)