There's the war, in plain sight: publishers on one side, retail companies on the other. What complicates things is that companies like Apple and Amazon are so huge, they don't actually need to sell books at all. "They'd be quite happy selling books for 50p," said Denny, "because they make their money from selling hardware. They can afford to make a loss on a few e-books while they're building their market share."

None of this will be apparent to the browser in the high street branch of Waterstone's this autumn. Bookshops will continue to stock thousands of print copies of old classics and modern bestsellers, the lovely mixum-gatherum of cookery and fitness and travel books alongside sober works of reference, biographies and misery memoirs. But out there in cyberspace, starting in the US and gathering strength, the digital revolution is under way.

The rise of online selling had for years threatened to put bookshops out of business. Now the e-book scramble threatens to do the same for publishers. And the agents, who own the destinies of the writers whose works we long to read, may also become redundant. All that's needed is for a bestselling novelist to publish a new book online, inviting readers to check it out – as Stephen King and Stephenie (Twilight) Meyer have done. In both cases, though, they did it for free.

Who'll be the first to charge for a money-based, author-reader relationship that dispenses with agent, publisher, retailer, editor, production department and glamorous publicity director?

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/is-the-publishing-industry-doomed-2099796.html

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By August 2009, they had chewed through their savings and had just under 100,000 unique visitors a month, a nice number that was rich with media insiders and hip twentysomethings, but not the kind of traffic that would make a living. When an anonymous donor sent in a few hundred dollars at one particularly stretched-thin moment, Mr. Sicha used it to buy food.

But a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity. A year later, that number had grown to almost a half a million, according to Google Analytics. Revenue for the year will surpass $200,000. The site has spawned a funny sibling site, Splitsider (splitsider.com), and on Monday, a sister site aimed at women, The Hairpin (thehairpin.com) joins the family, with its start-up financed by Ann Taylor, the women’s fashion brand.

Rather than hiring writers and building out various verticals that are then federated into a business, The Awl is finding specific writers it likes and then going into partnership with them. Splitsider is partly owned by Adam Frucci, who used to work at Gawker Media’s gadget blog, Gizmodo, and The Hairpin’s partner will be Edith Zimmerman, most recently of New York magazine’s Vulture blog.

The very idea of a little digital boutique flies in the face of all manner of conventional wisdom, chief of which is that scale is all that matters in an era of commoditized advertising sales. The Awl is attempting to tunnel under those efforts by building a low-cost site that delivers a certain kind of content for a certain kind of audience. And the owners don’t have to get rich — The Awl has no investors — they just have to eat.

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Gus: lucky me, I grow my own vegies... and the banks love my interest giving credit cards. Katzingggg!...

But one has to do what one has to do: plodding on about presenting ideas, old and new — most spot on, but most unpalatable for the illusion seekers and the merchants of porkies... "Points of views" "opinions" seem to be the expressions used to dilute the truth by "commentators" and we get caught on the same flypaper. But we stick at it, sometimes with prejudice, but often, with the bullshit detector at full blast, we can smell the trap that pollies and their media shock-jocking associates place in front of us and you... We do our best to expose the undemocratic crap, especially the sneaky one that "democratically" but erroneously educates or informs us...

If all of us had similar ideals and goals, we would not need to be here harping on about it...

I dream of becoming obsolete. Some of you might think I already am and I don't know it yet... Thank you.

Sales of reference books are sinking fast as we turn online for the answers to life's big – and small – questions. But our civilisation would be infinitely poorer if Roget's, Brewer's and Fowler's go out of print, argues John Walsh

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/no-we-shouldnrsquot-just-google-it-john-walsh-laments-the-death-of-the-reference-book-2347173.html

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Gus: we've trained our next batch of rap-monkeys (generation XYZ) to do everything from one fingertip... We now bomb people in Pakistan using a joystick like a dick for brains... What do we expect? None of them can use a tool that does not have a computer in it... Shovels, ice pics, cold chisels give images of pop music rather than hard work. Even though hardware chains prosper by selling obsolescence in electric bizos with crocked batteries, tool, including books, are becoming things for "special" people. Lucky I still have many reference books on scientific subject, pure maths and "literachur" but I must admit (I never confess I hope) that google helps a lot. The trick is to know what's bullshit and what's correct.

see toon at top...

Books will exist in 100 or 500 years, and not just in museums. How we as a society manage the online disruption to traditional forms of publishing will determine how we want to tell our own stories and how they should be remembered. Are we no more or less than what is recorded on a retrievable device? Memories fade. History has been traditionally written by the elite so I welcome the ability for anybody today to document their lives, every intimate detail, on equipment of their choosing. Books need to adapt to this changed reality or face being principally embraced as nostalgia.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/kindle-v-glass-apps-v-text-the-complicated-future-of-books 

See toon and story at top...

Amazon’s power over the publishing and bookselling industries is unrivaled in the modern era. Now it has started wielding that might in a more brazen way than ever before.

Seeking ever-higher payments from publishers to bolster its anemic bottom line, Amazon is holding books and authors hostage on two continents by delaying shipments and raising prices. The literary community is fearful and outraged — and practically begging for government intervention.

“How is this not extortion? You know, the thing that is illegal when the Mafia does it,” asked Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, echoing remarks being made across social media.

The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from purchasing titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette’s forthcoming books. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Publishing Group in Germany.

But the real prize is not the physical books. It is control of e-books, the future of publishing. Amazon is by far the dominant e-book company, and feels it deserves more of the digital proceeds than it is already getting. The publishers, contemplating a slide into irrelevance if not nonexistence, are trying to hold the line.

Late Friday afternoon, Hachette made by far its strongest comment on the conflict.

“We are determined to protect the value of our authors’ books and our own work in editing, distributing and marketing them,” said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette senior vice president. “We hope this difficult situation will not last a long time but we are sparing no effort and exploring all options.”

read more: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/amazon-escalates-its-battle-against-hachette/?_php=true&_type=blogs&hp&_r=0

See toon and story at top...

Sometimes it feels as if the world is divided into two classes: one very large class spurns difficulty, while the other very much smaller delights in it. There are readers who, when encountering an unfamiliar word, instead of reaching for a dictionary, choose to regard it as a sign of the author’s contempt or pretension, a deliberate refusal to speak in a language ordinary people can understand. Others, encountering the same word, happily seize on it as a chance to learn something new, to broaden their horizons. They eagerly seek a literature that upends assumptions, challenges prejudices, turns them inside out and forces them to see the world through new eyes.

The second group is an endangered species. One reason is that the ambitions of mainstream media that, however fitfully, once sought to expose them to the life of the mind and to the contest of ideas, have themselves shrunk. We have gone from the heyday of television intellection which boasted shows hosted by, among others, David Susskind and David Frost, men that, whatever their self-absorptions, were nonetheless possessed of an admirable highmindedness, to the pygmy sound-bite rants of Sean Hannity and the inanities of clowns like Stephen Colbert. Once upon a time, the ideal of seriousness may not have been a common one, but it was acknowledged as one worth striving for. It didn’t have to do what it has to today, that is, fight for respect, legitimate itself before asserting itself. The class that is allergic to difficulty now feels justified in condemning the other as “elitist” and anti-democratic. The exercise of cultural authority and artistic or literary or aesthetic discrimination is seen as evidence of snobbery, entitlement and privilege lording it over ordinary folks. A perverse populism increasingly deforms our culture, consigning some works of art to a realm somehow more rarified and less accessible to a broad public. Thus is choice constrained and the tyranny of mass appeal deepened in the name of democracy.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/in-defense-of-difficulty/

But but but...

"Never read a book, Johnnie, and you will be a rich man." said Sir Timothy Shelley to his young son, Percy, the famous poet...

And, of course, as the rich Louis XIV said: "I see no point in reading".

But then: "Roman literature is Greek literature written in Latin..." Heinrich von Treitschke

See article at top...