collectedstoriesbookstore.com Blog

A dispute has broken out—not surprisingly—between Apple, Amazon and the U.S. government.  In squabbles like this (and the publishing industry is no exception) you can be sure that the final resolution will 1) take years and years to resolve and 2) the resolution will satisfy no one.

The dispute has to do with the pricing of e-books.  For Amazon’s Kindle, success is based on having lots of book titles available and at cheap prices.  A device without loads of inexpensive content is not going to sell very well.  For publishers, as e-book sales continue to increase and become a growing share of the book market, the price inequality between the printed book and its electronic form has the potential to dampen author royalties and depress the company’s bottom-line.  And more, publishers are actively undermining the sales of printed books by allowing for simultaneous releases of e-versions which, in most cases, are cheaper.

Currently, there is a pricing scenario that amounts to price-fixing; whereby the end-user is getting a great price on content for their reader because the makers of e-readers demand that publishers and authors establish the same low pricing strategy.  If publishers or authors balk, than their books will not be available on either the Kindle or on the iPad.

While e-books are a relatively recent development, the battle over what is a fair price for books goes back to the early days of Bobby Haft’s Crown Bookstores (remember the “You Pay Too Much for Books” proclamation?)

Selling consumers on the idea that books cost too much was, to me at the time, rather radical. But publishers, rather than answer the initial assertion that the prices they set for books were akin to price gouging, went along with the premise by setting terms and prices that were more advantageous for those who discounted.  For publishers, they could continue to set retail prices based on their own costs and bottom-line objectives while knowing that the bookseller would have to discount to be competitive; even though such ‘hits’ to a retailers’ margin would put these businesses in financial peril:  Crown went out of business in the 90s.

Enter the world of e-books.  Content, which drives the sales of the device, is being treated as a supporting player in the new electronic content world; and worse, it appears to be viewed as expendable.  And yes, this does mirror – in part – the music industry, but these similarities (and there are important dissimilarities) don’t require publishers and their authors to sing-along.

Clearly Apple and Amazon are demanding terms for e-content that will, in large measure, serve to make their devices more ubiquitous.  For volume sellers with a device, this price-fix model may work well, but for book retailers, large or small, the fix is a terrible deal since no matter how many e-readers there are in the world, retailing downloads at $10.00 (the average consumer price for an e-book) is not going to promote a healthy, sustainable business.   Especially with Amazon’s Kindle dominating.

But as a bookseller, I sit here and wonder why books must be cheap, electronic or otherwise.  We honor books, we respect authors, we deliver sermons on the power of the printed (or electronic) word; yet we still insist through our pricing models that “you pay too much for books.”  We have taken our product—books—and demonstrated day after day that they have a diminishing dollar value, while Apple ably manages to increase both the cost and market share of its products while refusing to allow their products to be discounted—anywhere by anyone.   Why is that?  Because Apple values their product; and insists that their retailers do the same.

It would be just as wise for publishers to demand a pricing model for e-books that reflects the value of the content; only in this way can publishers secure for themselves and their authors a financially viable model for the future.  Amazon has led the way in providing e-readers; and Apple continues to lead the way in personal computing; but there is no reason that either company should set the terms for the publishing industry now, or in the future.  For no matter how wonderful e-readers are, they are just 12oz of nothing without authors and publishers.

What a great time to be celebrating women!  March came in like a lion; all fury and sound because of the possibility that women may receive free contraception.  Heaven knows what would happen to us if we could avail ourselves of free reproductive healthcare—we might do something silly like forgo having children until we are really, really ready.

But let’s kick off Women’s History Month with Grace and Grit: the Story of Lilly Ledbetter; a book that has just been released.   Before we go too far, let me point out that for women, it’s OK to have Grit as long as you also have an equal amount of Grace.  Grit without Grace equals Rooster Cogburn.  (It’s like Ginger Rogers’ observation that she had to do the same thing that Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.  Lilly not only had to fight for her basic rights, but she had to be graceful too).

But it really is the Grit part that makes all the difference, and it is Lilly Ledbetter’s Grit that is the reason she is so very, very important.  Lilly Ledbetter was at the center of discrimination case that resulted in the enactment of the Fair Employment Act—the first piece of legislation signed by the new president, Barack Obama.

This legislation was necessary to prevent women, like Lilly, to be paid substantially less than men.  When Lilly worked at Goodyear, she did the same job as her male counterparts, but received 40% less pay.  When Lilly found out about it 19 years later, she sued.  Her case kept moving up the courts until it reached the Supreme Court.  While there was never any doubt that Lilly did the same work for 40% less pay, the Court found that because Lilly did not sue within 180 days of her initial employment, there was nothing she could claim—even though she had no way of knowing she was being underpaid until, 19 years later, someone told her.

The new President rectified this with the enactment of the Fair Employment Act.  This is a big deal for women—and everyone else.  And had Lilly not had the Grit, this act would never have come to be.

As for the Grace, Lilly Ledbetter put up with decades of open sexism at her job.  But she bore it with the simple hope that eventually things would change.  She was born in the highly improbable town of Possum Trot, Alabama in what can be described as extreme economic impoverishment, yet she believe that by working hard every day, anyone could make something of themselves.

Three years after President Obama signed the legislation, we are discussing contraception.  Contraception is what has allowed women—women like Lilly who worked their way out of poverty—to pursue careers and to advance economically.

We owe a lot to Lilly Ledbetter and we owe it to her and so many others to push back against attempts to limit women’s rights to pursue economic parity.

Our confidence in government is tested during election season.  Amid the attacks, counterattacks, innuendos, confabulations and all around petty bickering, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that elections mean something: that voting is an act of faith, if not always in our politicians, than in our community, our future, our democracy.

When I was 16, my boyfriend and I walked door-to-door on election night cajoling those who had not yet voted to exercise that right, if not for their own self interest, than for ours.  We were amazed at the number of people who stopped what they were doing—eating dinner, helping their children with homework—and went out and voted so that we could have a voice.

As a parent, voting means representing the goals and dreams of my own 16-year old son; and it reflects my best hope for his, and his family’s future.

We can’t put an end to negativity in politics—at least not today—but staying home enables those who spend their time demeaning and defaming, to win.  Voting is an act of optimism in the future and the best way to honor the sacrifice of those who fought and won this right for all of us.

Voting turns the tables on bad government and only through full voter participation can open, civil government be possible.  The only way to counter what is bad about elections is to vote.

Vote November 8.

The Star Ship Enterprise began its 5 year mission with everything an intergalactic traveler needed:  state of the art communication, advanced computer systems, fully equipped recreation facilities, cavernous conference centers, and a fully functioning hospital.  What the Enterprise lacked, and no one seemed to miss, was a library.

In Gene Roddenberry’s future, books have disappeared, replaced by something that looks very similar to an iPad.  Futurists, like Roddenberry, imagined and designed a world for his crew that was easy, uncluttered and rational.

The future we saw growing up in the 60s, whether in comic books, novels or on television, was a place where the pesky inconveniences of everyday life had been done away with.  For story-tellers, removing day to day impediments enabled the hero to save the universe without first having to learn an alien language; and in today’s world, we go about the heroic work of every day life free from having to grope for quarters for the pay phone or needing to rely on strangers for directions to I95.

Charles F. Kettering, who invented, among a host of other things, the first aerial bomb, boldly stated that “Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.” By “our imaginations”, Kettering didn’t mean my imagination or yours, he meant the imaginations of people Like Steve Jobs, Johannes Guttenberg and Henry Ford.  It was Ford who pointed out that, initially, people didn’t want cars, what people really wanted was “faster horses.”  Yet, by translating our desires—our desire for comfort and speed—into objects, inventors took us to the future we wanted but couldn’t imagine.

We move forward by pushing back against our shortcomings (memory and knowledge) and nature’s obstacles (gravity and time).  We desire a world that is easier; a world that responds in a nanosecond to our thoughts and impulses: Star Trek’s communications officer, Nyota Uhura’s 1960s version of Bluetooth may have been a story-teller’s quick fix to interstellar communication but it’s become something we’ve ‘made so’ because it makes our life more controllable and (theoretically) more actionable.

In our invented future there are no books—or at least books that are bound together by paper and glue.   The purveyors of books, like me, know the future because we’ve seen the past—we’ve seen record stores melt away taking all that vinyl with them.  And there is no one to blame for the fact that the future arrived, all sleek and shiny, just as predicted.

When Guttenberg’s printed Bible came off the press; not everyone was happy.  The Church feared—presciently it turned out—that people’s faith in the clergy would diminish once the Bible could be studied by anyone and, in fact, attendance fell off at religious services.  The 13^th Century’s version of the Luddites pounced on the mechanically printed book as an affront to the beauty of handmade, hand lettered books.  Victor Hugo, writing 400 years later blamed Guttenberg’s invention for destroying great architecture and inciting revolutions.  But, the printing press prevailed—bringing down the cost for books and making them easily available to almost everyone, including revolutionaries.

The printed book has had a long and, if you will, storied life; but while the fate of the physical book is finite, future possibilities remain, as ever, infinite.

A customer came to my store looking for a book by Gretchen Rubin called, The Happiness Project.  While we did not have the book, (we do now) the customer and I had a very enjoyable talk about Happiness and the possible reasons that so few of us apply the same rigor to being happy as we do to, say, exercising our bodies.  It intrigues me that while there are 100s of reasons to be happy most of us cling to 1 or 2 reasons to be un-happy.   For me, I have an inborn fear of contentment; a fear that I will lose proper motivation if I believe that lemons should always be turned into lemon-aid or that closed doors simply mean I should open more windows.

Yet, according to most books on the subject, including The Happiness Project, happiness is a choice; like choosing between having a hamburger with fries or without.  So why is it so hard to choose happiness?  One reason is that no one around us seems all that happy; in fact we are willingly and unwillingly confronted every day with anger and it is very easy to get caught up in someone else’s hissy-fit.  Newspapers and other media seem to love a good fight; so much so that the old journalism saw of “if it bleeds it leads”, has morphed into:  “if it yells, it sells”.

And, there is no end to yelling.  Every issue, no matter how small or how far removed from our own lives seems to invite rabid comment and personal vilification.  Political lawn signs can provoke as much vitriol as the jury’s verdict in the Casey Anthony case.  We attach monstrous rationales to people we don’t and cannot know, and are eager to engage in personal attacks that feed our own and others’ outrage.  We are also adept at moving blithely on to another, and another, and another ‘outrage’, while all the while being outraged at anyone who is not outraged.

A good part of being happy is about being fair and judicious.  Aristotle writes that no one can be “just and temperate – and therefore happy – merely by accident”. It takes effort and wisdom to be fair.  In the 5^th Century B.C., Socrates took time out from fighting in the Peloponnesian war to wonder about happiness: “Since all of us desire to be happy, and since we evidently become so on account of our use—that is our good use—of other things, and since knowledge is what provides this goodness of use and also good fortune, every man must, as seems plausible, prepare himself by every means for this: to be as wise as possible.”  (Plato, Crito).

One chooses to be fair and temperate just as one chooses to be extreme and outraged; as a practical matter, it is easier to find happiness knowing there are no demons out to get us than it is to do battle with all of the monsters we conjure.

Charles Schultz, the creator of Charlie Brown, defined happiness as a “warm puppy”.   Jerry Seinfeld evokes a box of kittens to rid his mind of unpleasant thoughts and my son intones “box of kittens, box of kittens” when he doesn’t want to discuss his grades.  Socrates, Aristotle, Charles Schultz, Jerry Seinfeld, and my son seem to know that no one will ever find happiness by imagining a box full of demons.