Local Bookstores Have A New Weapon In The Fight With Amazon

Books are time capsules. They store messages for a potentially endless period of time, and capture, like a photograph, the precise moment in time when they were created. And so, too, are they time machines. They wait upon the shelf for future generations to open them and receive the message. When they are opened, they transport the reader back to the time when they were created, as well as the time they depict.

Deep Bloggers: Writing Habit Mastery – How to Write 2,000 Words a Day and Forever Cure Writer’s Block

Someone Just Bought a $1 Million Macallan Without Leaving Their Laptop



Running out of things to read?  Do you ever have the sneaky feeling that books might be overrated?  Well, for some variation at the margin try reading art books.  That’s right, books about art.  Not “how to draw,” but books about the content and history of art.  Some of them you might call art history, but that term makes me a little nervous.  Just go into a good art museum, and look at what they are stocking in their bookstore.  Many of them will be picture books, rather than art history in the narrower, more scholarly sense of that word.
Art books offer the following advantages:
1. They are among the best ways to learn history, politics, and yes science too (advances in art often followed advances in science and technology).  Even economic history.  Since the main focus is the art, they will give you “straight talk” about the historical period in question, rather than trying to organize the narrative around some vague novelty that only the peer reviewers care about.
2. They are often very pretty to look at.  You also feel you can read them in small bites, or you can read only a single chapter or section.  The compulsion to finish is relatively weak, a good thing.  You can feel you have consumed them without reading them at all, a true liberation, which in turns means you will read them as you wish to.
3. They have passed through different filters than most other books, precisely because they are often “sold into the market” on the basis of their visuals, or copyright permissions, or connection with a museum exhibit, or whatever.  Thus they introduce variation into your reading life, compared to say traditional academic tomes or “trade books,” which increasingly are about gender, race, and DT in an ever-more homogenized fashion.
4. They are among the best ways of learning about the sociology of creativity and also “the small group theory” of history.
5. These books tend not to be politically contentious, or if they are it is in a superficial way that is easily brushed off.  (Note there is a whole subgenre of art books, from theory-laden, left-wing presses, with weird covers, displayed in small, funky Manhattan or Brooklyn bookstores where you can’t believe they can make the rent, where politics is all they are about.  Avoid those.)
6. A bookstore of art books is almost always excellent, no matter how small.  It’s not about comprehensiveness, rather you can always find numerous books there of interest.
7. Major reviewing outlets either do not cover too many art books, or they review them poorly and inaccurately.  That suggests your “marginal best book” in the art books category is really quite good, because you didn’t have an easy means to discover it.
8. You might even wish to learn about art.
9. This whole genre is not about assembling a reading list of “the best art books.”  Go to a good public library, or museum bookstore, and start grabbing titles.  The best museum bookstore I know of is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
10. It is also a very good introduction to the histories and cultures of locations such as China and India, where “straight up” political histories numb you with a succession of names, periods, and dynasties, only barely embedded in contexts that make any sense to you

The Biblio File - An Amazing Bookish Podcast!

The Biblio File, hosted by Nigel Beale, is one of the world's leading podcasts on all things book-nerdy! In Nigel's own words, his podcast "features wide-ranging conversations with authors, poets, book publishers, booksellers, book editors, book collectors, book makers, book scholars, book critics, book designers, book publicists, literary agents and other certified bibliophiles". Recently, he sat down with Leslie Hurtig and Jan Walter to discuss, among other things, their experiences over the years in the Canadian book industry and the lasting impact that Leslie's father, Mel Hurtig, had on the industry.

Check out Nigel's interview with Leslie Hurtig & Jan Walter here

 "For a writer, to change language is to write a love letter with a dictionary."

"Languages that are not our mother tongues are like cats"

Slavic languages, with the freedom proffered by their declensions, presented an added difficulty for the writer faced with a blank page, for if an Antarctic writer was met with innumerable possibilities, then a Polish writer came up against infinity

In Memoriam The way we read now | Spectator USA. 
The sad truth is that the novel now doesn’t occupy the same cultural high ground, and it doesn’t typically feel to readers like a practical device for addressing problems. The decline of the novel’s prestige reflects a new crisis born of our culture’s increasing failure of intellectual nerve and its terminal doubt about its own progress 

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Dutch Supermarket Implements “Chat Checkout” Where Cashiers Make Time To Chat To Lonely People.

Some Writers Are ‘Secretly’ Working With Fired Agents

And the Writers Guild is ready to crack down on their wayward members. The WGA president wrote, “‘For any writers breaking the rules there must and will be accountability.’ He added: ‘We know that some agents are harassing former clients to work with them in secret under the false premise that ‘everyone else has come back.’'” –Los Angeles Times

Local Bookstores Have A New Weapon In The Fight With Amazon - Fortune: “In the book industry, Amazon is Goliath, the giant who overshadows everyone else. But there’s a new David on the scene, Bookshop.org. It doesn’t expect to topple the giant, but it has launched a weapon that could make Amazon’s shadow a little smaller, and help local bookstores fight back. Bookshop.org, a website that went live at the end of January and is still in beta mode, is designed to be an alternative to Amazon, and to generate income for independent bookstores. And, perhaps more importantly, it seeks to give book reviewers, bloggers and publications who rely on affiliate income from “Buy now” links to Amazon a different option. Profit from books sold through Bookshop will be split three ways, with 10% of the sale price going into a pool that will be divided among participating bookstores, 10% going to the publication that triggered the sale by linking to Bookshop.org, and 10% going to Bookshop.org to support its operations. Bookshop’s 10% commission for affiliate publications is roughly twice Amazon’s 4.5% affiliate commission…”

Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet - Wired: “…Today, Wikipedia is the eighth-most-visited site in the world. The English-language version recently surpassed 6 million articles and 3.5 billion words; edits materialize at a rate of 1.8 per second. But perhaps more remarkable than Wikipedia’s success is how little its reputation has changed. It was criticized as it rose, and now makes its final ascent to … muted criticism. To confess that you’ve just repeated a fact you learned on Wikipedia is still to admit something mildly shameful. It’s as though all those questions that used to pepper think pieces in the mid-2000s—Will it work? Can it be trusted? Is it better than Encyclopedia Britannica?—are still rhetorical, when they have already been answered, time and again, in the affirmative. Of course, muted criticism is far better than what the other giants at the top of the internet are getting these days. Pick any inflection point you like from the past several years—the Trump election, Brexit, any one of a number of data breaches, alt-right feeding frenzies, or standoffish statements to Congress—and you’ll see the malign hand of platform monopolies. Not too long ago, techno-utopianism was the ambient vibe of the elite ideas industry; now it has become the ethos that dare not speak its name. Hardly anyone can talk abstractly about freedom and connection and collaboration, the blithe watchwords of the mid-2000s, without making a mental list of the internet’s more concrete negative externalities…Yet in an era when Silicon Valley’s promises look less gilded than before, Wikipedia shines by comparison. It is the only not-for-profit site in the top 10, and one of only a handful in the top 100. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?…”

The enduring ‘cultural cringe’ about teaching Australian literature

OF DROUGHTS AND FLOODING PLAINS: There are several reasons for the marginalisation of Australian texts within schools.
 

From the Mouse House to the All Blacks

I read three books around Winning, Leadership, Values, Beliefs and Success over the Christmas break in our home in Carefree, Arizona (a brilliantly named town!!).

The first was by Disney CEO Bob Iger – I wrote about this on January 7.  I was a fan of his predecessor Michael Eisner – a creative powerhouse who ultimately fell victim to his own insecurities, but his more balanced, more thoughtful and more open successor Bob Iger has delivered in spades.

‘The Ride of a Lifetime’ – is just that.  A captivating blockbuster of deals, characters, choices and stars – all written around leadership lessons he learned the hard way and all of which are relevant to businesses/companies no matter how big or how small everywhere.

I was recommended the second book by a Finnish TV Producer friend of mine who is driven by the transformation happening in his industry – TV – at every level.  It’s a dry delivery of a powerful story. ‘Transforming Nokia’ by their Chairman Risto Siilasmaa.  If you’re faced with Apple, Samsung and co and the Barbarians are at the gate, then this book is for you.  And even if you’re not today, you will be soon.  So this book is worth a look.

In 2008 Nokia owned 50% of the global smart-phone business.  In 2012 they had less than 10% and were virtually bankrupt.  Risto took the helm, re-imagined the Company through the power of ‘Paranoid Optimism’ and saved and reframed the Company into a sustainable, global leader in a new industry.

This is a reminder to all of us that in a VUCA world, leaders must constantly challenge assumptions, look for new opportunities and lead with an entrepreneurial mindset – no matter how successful the Company might be.

Who can resist chapter headings like:

·        On the Brink

·        Dazzled by the Sparkle

·        Reality Bites

·        Jumping off a Burning Platform

·        Plan B, and C and D

·        Can this marriage be saved

·        Hitting Restart – Again, Again

·        Creating your own luck.

And finally on to the third book.  ‘The Jersey: The Secrets Behind the World’s Most Successful Team’, written by Peter Bills.  Despite England’s well-deserved Semi-Final win in Japan, the All Blacks are the greatest sporting team on the planet.  They have a superior win record to any other team in any sport in history.  Bills was given unprecedented access to all the key figures in NZ Rugby as he set out to understand the secrets behind the AB’s sustained success.  I wrote about this in Peak Performance – Lessons from the World’s Greatest Sporting Teams 20 years ago in 2000, and James Kerr wrote about it in Legacy in 2013.  Peter’s book lays out the principles and values that drive winning and success in a way relevant to all of us.

If you have time to learn, time to invest in yourself, time to become a better leader, then take a look at whichever of these books takes your fancy.

 Just Dying for It: On Tolstoy’s “Lives and Deaths: Essential Stories” - Los Angeles Review of Books

There are only four tales in this concise, beautiful little volume, and there could be several other Tolstoy collections with the same title that would contain none of these. 

TOLSTOY HAD MORE vitality than anyone he knew. His friends and family thought of him as a dynamo. He occasionally set out on foot for a 120-mile journey from Moscow to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. Visitors who came from abroad to see the great man in his old age marveled at his energy and robustness. And yet he was also regularly debilitated by illness and depression.