Unqualified Offerings

The cable went out Saturday afternoon, leaving us without TV or internet since that time, reducing our existence to that of animals, if animals passed the time with DVDs of the Complete Blackadder. Right now I am in the – OPEN – Borders in downtown Silver Spring, where the wifi works and it’s not even that crowded.

The snowfall tapered down in the early afternoon and stopped completely by 5pm. There was even some yellow and pink behind the western clouds as sunset came on. We got no more than two additional inches after yesterday’s blog post. NOAA says one of their spotters in Colesville, MD measured 40″ accumulation. That seems . . . excessive. Colesville is about three miles from our house, and Neighbor Q and I measured 24-28″. (Neighbor Q’s cable is also out, so he can’t dispute my claim!)

Main roads are mostly good, but turn lanes and parking-lot driveways are very rutted. Most of my neighbors lack cable too and are on different providers. I hope they rerun the Super Bowl sometime this week! There must also be a shared-tower problem nearby because a lot of us have no cell service on the block, across carriers.

In fact, you know the only thing I have that has connected successfully to the internet from my house in the last 24 hours? My Kindle. That’s right – Kindle!

With that I leave you until who knows when. Stay safe if you’re in the Snowpocalypse Zone. Stay comfortable and generally fulfilled otherwise.

Neighbor Q’s roof appears to have a foot and a half of snow on it this morning. I haven’t measured the walks yet. When the dogs go in the yard they have to porpoise from place to place, but not as much as they did after December’s pre-Christmas blizzard.

On the other hand, it’s still coming down.

Zach loves the snow, putting him in a tradition of snow-loving Henley dogs stretching back through Unqualified Dog to the First Smokey. TFS was our dog back in the hills and woods of Southwestern PA, a thick-coated cross of German Shepherd and Rough Collie (before they ruined rough collies by breeding them for skulls too narrow for a real brain). Smokey could handle lots of snow and did, coursing tirelessly through, over and under whatever the Alleghenies threw at us.

Kate, not so much. Kate actually has thicker fur than Zach, but thinner zeal. Let Zach out into the snow and he bolts for the far end of the yard, full of merry purpose. Kate one doesn’t “let out” into the snow so much as directs her. This is a great disappointment to her younger brother, who is convinced that snowtime means playtime, and playtime means hopping up and down on his big sister or playing tag among the drifts. But then, Zach is taller! And as I’ve mentioned before, he has the most athletic frame of any dog I’ve ever owned. He is a physical marvel. Kate, my beloved Kate, is a fifty-pound Bichon. As Patricia McConnell is fond of saying, she didn’t read the breed guide.

Oh, the snow! Once upon a time, every Washingtonian’s one-stop source for breaking weather was NBC4’s website. Now though, they’ve been left in the dust by other sites. The Post’s Capital Weather Gang and the independent Foot’s Forecast offer fresher and more comprehensive coverage. Even what passes for NBC4’s weather blog lacks pizzazz. It represents a total failure to rise to the occasion.

The tree out front has a foot of snow clinging to each major limb, and each limb overhangs a cable leading into our house. I despair of the branches lasting the weekend. I despair of the wires outlasting the branches. One wire out our side window is completely encased in snow. Can beauty and comfort – light, heat, connection to the outside world – maintain their provisional coexistence?

Looks like we have a fighting chance to get 30+ inches here in the DC Metro area. I sensibly did a first shift of shoveling starting shortly before 11pm. At that time, we had something like 6″ of new snow. By the time I finished an hour later, 1-2″ of new snow where I’d started shoveling.

By the way, those more-expensive shovels with the S-shaped handle and the deeper blade? Worth it. I would liveblog the weekend, but honestly, if we have power when we wake up tomorrow I’ll be pleasantly surprised. By which I mean, giddy.

Tell me how the Super Bowl went!

If the worst happens and the roof caves in overnight, I expect to have time for one last thought: I wish I’d updated my Facebook status more often. Foot’s Forecast talks about the many ways this storm could prove genuinely disastrous for the Mid-Atlantic, even comparing the possible devastation to Hurricane Katrina. Which means the essential question becomes: Who is more to blame, Amazon or Macmillan?

Post your experience of the storm in comments! If you’ve got power and internet! I’ll read them, if I’ve got power and internet.

By Alternative Universe Thoreau in 2004 and This Universe Thoreau in 2010

What to say?  If nothing else, we finally know that the smoke monster is a malevolent and manipulative entity with an agenda.  However, the more we try to work this into the story that’s been established thus far, the less sense it makes.  For instance, the Others apparently followed Ben and revered Jacob, yet they also had a way to summon the smoke monster (recall what Ben did when the mercenaries came to his town and killed his daughter).  In the religious worldview of the Others, the smoke monster seemed to be some sort of figure who renders judgment on sinners (recall that Ben went back to the Island to be judged for his sins by the smoke monster in the Temple).    Yet we now know that the smoke monster is a malevolent creature who has plotted against Jacob, their revered spiritual figure.  This confuses me.  Perhaps the full nature of the smoke monster is something that Jacob has never revealed to his people, for whatever reason.  If so, it’s a pretty closely-held secret.

Why am I writing this blog post?  It’s 2004, and all I know about Lost is that it’s a pilot that was never picked up by ABC.  I think some of these actors have a lot of potential and interesting backstories, and I’d love to see some of them do stuff  together.  Harold Perrineau was good in the Matrix sequels, even though the last sequel had a bad storyline.  I hope he does a lot more sci-fi.

Moreover, when Hurley tells the boss at the Temple that Jacob is dead, everyone in the Temple seems to realize that this means that their enemy is coming.  Do they know it’s the smoke monster?  Do they know that the smoke monster is also the Man in Black?  On top of that, the boss dude at the Temple seems to have a pretty close relationship with Jacob, or at least he knows what to expect in messages from Jacob.  Ben, OTOH, was dangled on a string, getting Jacob’s messages through the intermediary of Richard Alpert.  Previous to this, the hierarchy seemed to be Jacob at the top, Richard as the intermediary, and Ben the leader in day-to-day life.  Now we have this leader at the Temple, somebody who seems closer to Jacob than Ben, but he also leads a group of Others that includes some Others that we’ve seen before (e.g. the abducted Cindy).  So, what gives?  Was Ben only the leader outside of the Temple?

Anyway, I hear that they’ve recently revived the old 1980’s TV series Battlestar Galactica.  Originally I wasn’t going to get into it, but maybe it’s worth checking out.  I’m getting kind of tired of 24.  Season 3 was a let-down, with a poorly-constructed storyline, and I hear rumors that season 4 is going to be very right-wing to jive with the upcoming election.  I’m tuning that out, and giving BSG a shot.  Well, gotta go to my Howard Dean meeting.  I still can’t believe they nominated him, but I think he has a shot.  Then, back to thesis writing.  I’m so glad I switched from theory to experiment.

1. As noted in comments downblog and elsewhere, Amazon has still not gotten Macmillan books back in its sale system, despite what I believed after some clicking around last night. On my agenda: a myth-vs-fact post trying to clear up misinformation on the dispute, not all of it propagated by me . . .

2. Clearly I need to retire “Weekend War” as a sobriquet for the dispute. So let’s open a naming contest.

3. Meanwhile, everybody in an official capacity at either Macmillan or Amazon seems to have gone very quiet. I can’t find any substantial formal or informal quotes on the situation from Amazon or Macmillan officers, spokespeople or employees since early yesterday. If you see any let me know. The silence makes me think it’s not just a database glitch at Amazon preventing things from getting back to “normal.” New theory: it ain’t over.

4. On the other hand, Rupert Murdoch is talking. His support for the “Books Cost Too Little!” position must be a comfort.

5. Telereads! I recommend them to you! It’s a group blog devoted to all things ebooks that I discovered during the weekend’s research. They’re providing pretty extensive coverage of the Rather Longer Than a Weekend War from an ereader’s perspective. You know, like here, only they’re supposed to be doing it.

6. One thing I see a fair amount in comment threads on a lot of places either covering or, really, fighting the battle is a large proportion of people declaiming their lack of interest in ever buying or reading digital books. My abreaction is, “Okay, grandma.” Problem is, my actual grandma loves her Kindle DX because it makes the print big enough that she can actually read, for the first time in a decade. So, um, “Okay, crotchety middle-aged person?”

By Thoreau

I have just discovered chocolate-dipped banana chips.  The level of pleasurable decadence cannot be expressed in ordinary units of measurement.

By Thoreau

The Defense Secretary and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are asking Congress to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly.  The biggest stumbling block at this point is a fear that if the draft is ever re-instated this policy would make Republican Congressmen and televangelists draft-eligible.

So apparently Amazon can’t even surrender right. It took until this evening for it to get the bulk of Macmillan titles back on sale on their website.

Meanwhile, I speak for all of us when I say that the thing to do after a long day of crunching profitability models for a living is to come home and do it some more for fun!

I keep flailing at the question of the gross-profit pickup for publishers from getting out of cellulose-wrangling. To recap, we’re concentrating on gross profit (revenue less cost-of-goods) in this series because I completely accept that marketing and design and sitting around the office caring really hard about the future of literature costs don’t go away in an ebook world. The things that go away are PP&B (paper, printing & binding) and freight-in, never-shipped stock and returns.

I previously floated $7 as the ebook windfall, combining the above, with the proviso that it was an estimate based on such data as I could come across. Now I’m thinking it might be closer to $5.

One reason $7 may be too high is that I was working off gross units with a reserve for returns. It may make more sense to look at the net-unit model. (The spreadsheet available at the Andrea M. Rotondo link doesn’t have a unit model, but also doesn’t calculate a dollar value of returned stock.)

So, one more bite at the apple! We’re publishing a $28-list hotnewbesteller so that we can afford to provide readers with a wide variety of less-popular and more daring authors. We ourselves get about $14 for it. Printing costs are $2.80 per book printed. It’s an average book, so only 60% of copies sell. About a third come back; the rest never leave the warehouse.

So printing per net book sold is $2.80/0.60, which is $4.67. That’s the windfall. Only fuzzy it up some. I think there are additional gains to be realized in warehousing and other costs to the publisher of wrangling bricks of bleached leaves, plus cash-timing, but I expect that they would be at best a tenth of the manufacturing-cost savings.

Which puts me at around $5. Honestly, if someone knowledgeable said, “Jim, it’s four dollars, and here’s why,” I’d believe them. If someone with authority whispered, “$5 hell. Try six! Because . . . ” I’d believe them. If two different publishing experts started fighting over whether it was four or six, well, I’d just listen really hard. If someone told me it was three dollars, or eight, I’d want to do an audit. Because I’m a nerd. It’s when supposedly knowledgeable people make with the fog machine – “Well, printing doesn’t cost much, and please forget all those years when we blamed book prices on rising printing costs”; or, “Hey, we still have to buy ads and stuff, man” which is not something people dispute – that I reach for my . . . spreadsheet. (Or when less knowledgeable people confuse overhead with variable costs, and incremental revenue with, er, non-incremental revenue.)

Oddly enough, if I knock five bucks off of $14, I get $9. If I knock four bucks off I get $10. And sure enough, Macmillan’s agency deals with Apple and now Amazon will pay it between $9.10 and 10.50 per book.

Meanwhile, if I knock $5 off of the $15 discounted price of a hotnewbestseller hardcover bought online, I get – $10. What Amazon wants to be charging for frontlist ebooks. Fancy that.

While I eventually came down on Amazon’s side in the Weekend War and John Scalzi was always on the side of Macmillan, his consideration of “All the Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed This Weekend” seems like a good analysis of why things turned out the way they did.

Point 1 seems unassailable. Points 2 and 3 are true – Macmillan had the more organized and motivated internet partisans. Even I spent half the weekend figuring there had to be some commendable reason for their stance and flailing after financial reasons for it. I wonder if the Author’s League was a telling force in Macmillan’s victory or just something those of us who hang around the fannish internet notice? The blogs and Twitter feeds I read from outside fandom took zero notice of the Weekend War while it was going on. These blogs and feeds are largely political, mostly liberal/progressive with a leavening of libertarians, many of whom are SF and comics fans. None of them took any notice. Nor did my miscellany of Facebook friends.

Point 4 is funny to me because it was Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s open letter that turned me definitively against Macmillan. Nor was I alone. That said, Scalzi is surely correct that it’s best to get your spin out there first.

I think it’s too soon to evaluate the full truth of Scalzi’s Point 5. The Kindle users who populate the forum seem to be skewing heavily in Amazon’s favor. That’s an Amazon-friendly venue, just as the blogs of Scalzi, Stross, the Nielsen-Haydens and Doctorow are Macmillan-friendly venues. We all risk seeing the general run of sentiment in our own communities as the full story. On Making Light or Whatever, jibes about “Nabisco’s monopoly on the Oreo” strike denizens as the height of wit. That’s not a universal reaction.

Also, while it seems reasonable to argue that Amazon should have brought out the big guns for this fight, they might be reluctant to do that if they always knew they were going to lose. Or suspected as much.

Scalzi’s Point 6 is a restatement of 1 and therefore unassailble.

Point 7 – “People will just want an iPad more” – may be true, but going from People have hardly any interest in the iPad to People have slightly more, but hardly any, interest in the iPad is not a huge win for Apple or loss for Amazon.

Amazon caves! Macmillan wins! Here’s what they won.

Macmillan wanted less cash per book from Amazon than they’re already getting. You’d think that would be easy enough.

“Hey Amazon. You’re paying us $12-15 for each frontlist ebook sale. But we only want $9-10.50.”

“What an oddly good deal for us, Macmillan. What’s the catch?”

“We want you to charge your customers three to five dollars more per book.”

“Hubbafuckawha?”

“No, really. It’s crucial to us that consumers pay more per copy, even though we make less.”

“Um, why?”

“Never mind why. Just do it. Or we’ll take all our business to Apple.”

“Why don’t we keep paying you three to five dollars more than you’re demanding in these new terms, and keep pricing sales to the reader as we see fit, like retailers have always done? No skin off your nose.”

“No, sorry, it’s really important to us that readers pay 30-50% more per ebook than they do currently. It’s so important that we’re willing to make less money ourselves.”

“Oh. Is it because you’re assholes?”

“Honestly, we’re not so introspective as to think about it much.”

“Well, I can’t go along with it. Sorry.”

“Kay. That would be terrible for us, you see, because we’d continue making more money than we’re asking for and readers would continue paying less than we want them too. And we really want readers to pay more. So if you don’t go along we’re going to try to destroy your ebook business.”

“You fiends!”

“We just think of ourselves as people who want to make people pay more money than they’d otherwise have to, even if the money doesn’t come to us. >>For now.< <”

“What was that?”

“Er, nothing.”

“Well we’ll see about that! Watch what happens when we pull all your cellulose products from our website! Hahaha IN YOUR FACE MACMILLAN!”

(Macmillan pauses. Looks bored.)

“Okay, dammit, you win. We’ll do it your way. Don’t forget your promises about a ‘dynamic pricing model.’ ”

“Yeah, we’ve got a proven track record with dynamic pricing models.”

“I sure hope the other five major publishers don’t try this. I officially expect they will not, by the way.”

“Let me condescendingly pretend there’s any chance you’re right about that.”

“Oy. It’s obnoxious that you’re laughing just because we lost.”

“I’m not laughing because you lost. I’m laughing because we’re the ones who had the market power to make you cave, but on the internet they’re calling you the monopolist.”

“Bite me.”

“In your face, Amazon. IN YOUR FACE!”