A Slice of Reality From Peter Cox's Diary... Would You Like Extra Topping With That?

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Back in London, it's May Day, and a dreadful sense of foreboding hangs over the city this morning... We're expecting to live under siege today... the anti-capitalist demonstrators are back in town, and for the past few days, the media's been predicting major rioting... shops are barricaded up, streets closed, thousands of riot police ready with tear gas and possibly rubber bullets... It's all either hugely over-hyped, or there will be blood spilled today...
posted by Peter Cox at 4:34 AM

Pounding the treadmill in a gym opposite the Waldorf Astoria, watching the great and the good arrive for a conference on the environment (at the Waldorf?) there pops up on television a besuited talking head... this smartly turned-out felow, the caption tells me, is the executive director of Greenpeace. I don't believe Dave Mctaggart ever even owned a tie... How times change...
posted by Peter Cox at 4:28 AM

NYPOST.COM National News: LAURA: I HELPED DUBYA PICK WHITE HOUSE STAFF By DEBORAH ORIN
Hold the presses! First Lady Laura Bush today reveals that she "may write a book about First Puppy Barney" her 7-month-old black Scots terrier. Remember, you read it here first...
posted by Peter Cox at 3:07 PM

From the LA Times one of the funniest, and potentially scariest, corrections I've recently read in a newspaper:

"The mushroom identified as an edible bolete in this picture that ran on Page H3 of the Food section Wednesday is actually an amanita, which can be poisonous. It is most easily identified by a small ring midway down the stem."

"Can be poisonous" is an understatement: the amanita family includes the death cap and fly agaric mushrooms, which are extremely toxic. If you're visiting LA in the next few weeks and plan on dining out, my advice is to avoid ordering the mushrooms...
posted by Peter Cox at 12:09 PM

I harbor growing suspicions about the intellectual powers of President Bush. I caught an interview a couple of days ago in which he seemed to be saying, "The recession will be over once we start drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge". I'm sorry, but I don't quite follow... Is there a connection? Perhaps I'm just being dim.
posted by Peter Cox at 3:57 AM

Could we please not have another recession?
"Why aren't investors becoming more upbeat about the economy?" asked Hugh Johnson, chief investment officer at the First Albany Corporation. "They should be." (NYT - 03-17-01)
In a recession, magazine publishers believe they benefit from the "escapism factor" - consumers want to escape from the grim realities of life, so they buy more magazines. Book publishers, by contrast, believe they suffer because people have less discretionary income to spend.
Sounds as if book publishers need to change their beliefs somewhat - especially within the marketing department - doesn't it?
As do we all, in fact, if we're to avoid a self-inflicted economic crisis of confidence.
posted by Peter Cox at 2:59 AM

The e-book.
Dontcha love it?
Sales figures, when you can find them, are truly microscopic. Nevertheless, it's causing ructions between agents and publishers, and in the process, generating a whole new breed of expert.
Of course, it's easy for anyone to be an expert in electronic publishing right now, because with a nascent medium, you can't be proved wrong. And the Internet is nothing if not a fertile nursery for hopes, hypes, delusions and obsessions.
The e-book is clunky, expensive, user-unfriendly, and you can't enjoy it in the bath or take it to the beach. Drop it or lose it, and you've just blown several hundred dollars. The memory is restricted, the virtual keyboard is rubbish, and getting software (that's the new word for what you and I still quaintly call manuscripts) is hard. The only people buying e-book hardware right now are, in marketing-speak, "early adopters" (you know: they pay over the odds for something that under-performs). Today's e-book is clearly a non-starter.
But it won't stay that way.
Several meta-factors will propel the inexorable rise of the e-book. One of them will be when the hardware cost is 90% subsidized. With home PCs now obtainable for a few hundred dollars, the right psychological price point for e-book hardware would be about $49.95. Throw in $100 worth of software, and you're effectively paying the consumer to adopt the technology: a powerful proposition indeed. And while you're at it, tell the consumer that if she dunks it in the bath within 12 months of purchase, you'll replace it for free. That should put many consumers' fears to rest. This, by itself, will enable the technology to become ubiquitous.
But there's something more: a critical meta-factor which, as far as I can see, has never been discussed before: and which will almost wholly predicate the success or failure of the e-book as a replacement to cellulose publishing.
I call it the Appropriateness Factor.
Since we're talking about the Internet, let me give you an example drawn from that diaphanous universe. If you've never bought an audio CD online, you should, for it is an object-lesson in Appropriateness of Medium. Walk through it with me. I open up my RealPlayer (http://www.real.com) and select the NetRadio Smooth Jazz channel (admitting that I listen to this is rather like owning up to taking Geritol, but then, I have no secrets from you). It plays a continuous stream of mostly ad-free, high quality stereo music. With no prattling DJs to rupture my concentration (the CD and track titles show discretely on screen) I can have this playing gently in the background all day long, or pump it through my hi-fi speakers if I prefer. Suppose I hear something I like. With literally one click, I'm taken to a web page all about that CD, which allows me to listen to further tracks, find out about the group, read reviews and, of course purchase it. With one more click, I've bought it: it'll be through my door in a couple of days (you can see that the option to download the entire CD will soon be with us). If I had wanted, the CD could have been gift wrapped (nice choice of wrapping papers) and sent to a friend.
The whole process is faultless, flowing, fundamentally simple, and so dangerously easy that it could become very addictive. Contrast this with the harrowing procedure of trying to find the right CD at dank, dark, zit-infested Virgin Megastore, and you'll wonder why anyone would ever visit a record store again. EMI predict that 10% of all music sales will be made via the Internet within five years; I'd say that's a conservative prediction. The point is: the Internet, as a medium, is highly appropriate for this kind of transaction.
But let's get back to books.
To sell a book to a reader, you have to meet very exacting threshold criteria of value. You have to persuade purchaser (more precisely, they have to be helped to persuade themselves) that the balance of the exchange of value is to their benefit. The cost of a book to a reader is measured, inter alia, by financial cost and time cost. The reader has to feel (yes, we're talking emotions here) that the value they will receive will enrich them far beyond the outlay of cash and time they are required to invest. Most of this equation happens at a subconscious level, but it is the fundamental and inexorable Cox's First Law of Bookselling. This explains why it is so extremely hard to sell books when compared to other competitive media: the perceived personal investment in, say, watching a TV program or reading a magazine is far, far lower.
So: how appropriate is the e-book?
I think I should have a fat consultancy fee before I tell you.
posted by Peter Cox at 9:55 AM

SETI@home: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home
This is such a cool project. All Litopia's machines run it in the wee small hours... we're ranked at 43,987th out of 2,830,952 total users, which means we've in the top 1.5% of all contributors. We sometimes worry that all that data we're crunching is, in fact, a manuscript submission from Out There... Heaven help the fate of the Earth if we reject it...
posted by Peter Cox at 4:55 AM

The New York Observer: Clinton Corruption Plays Us for Fools
Hillary's outlandish book deal is already starting to look increasingly sour; predicated not on good publishing business sense, but on partisanship.
posted by Peter Cox at 3:28 AM

Swiss women book into the man-free hotel
"After a hard day you want peace and quiet", says Clare Joy, a British banker who travels to Zurich every week, "but a hotel restaurant on your own can be intimidating. Those places are full of men and you're given a table facing everyone. It feels so exposed."

I have news for you, Clare. Hotel restaurants are pretty grotty places for men on their own, too. Me, I eat and run. But can you imagine the uproar if a London or New York hotel announced that it was exclusively male-only? Seems to be a clear case of double standards at work...
posted by Peter Cox at 12:06 PM