Category: Big Business

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F-books

“The market for downloadable books will grow by 400 percent in each of the next two years, to over $25 billion by 2008,” predicted the keynote speaker at the 2001 Women’s National Book Association meeting. “Within a few years after the end of this decade, e-books will be the preponderant delivery format for book content.”

This NYTimes lede serves double duty: it sets up a review of Sony’s new e-book and provides more proof that women should never talk about technology.

(Sorry, Carly)

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You’re IT!

This conversation from BusinessWeek explores the question, “Does IT Matter?”

This article from BusinessWeek about the software problems leading to Airbus’ $6.1 billion wiring problem answers the question pretty handily, I think.

Both of our flights for this trip were on Boeings (767-200 and 757-200), and they were pretty smooth, except for the hydraulic problem I mentioned for yesterday’s flight home. When we touched down, I said to Amy, “Well, I guess the hydraulics worked, huh?” She joked that, when we looked back from the jetway, we’d notice that the plane had flat tires.

Followup: Airbus’ CEO quit after 100 days on the job, because he couldn’t get authority to make the sweeping changes. What’s BW say today?

The debacle has exposed a fundamental Airbus flaw. Far from the smooth-running pan-European group depicted in its public relations, its units in Germany, France, Britain, and Spain remain surprisingly balkanized, each clinging to traditional operating methods and cross-border jealousies. “It is still, in part, a juxtaposition of four companies,” Streiff [the departing CEO] told the French newspaper Le Figaro in the only interview he has given since resigning.

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Unrequired Reading

I promised some Unrequired Reading for a Friday morning, so here it is:

Jane Galt has a sad post about the economic destruction of Zimbabwae. There are some “interesting” comments after the post.

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Via Bookslut, a collection of covers from old Penguin and Pelican books.

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Ten YEARS of South Park?! Man, I’m getting old.

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It’s Ramadan. Don’t be a jerk.

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What’s organic?

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Mark Cuban talks balls.

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Ron Rosenbaum on William Kennedy, Hunter Thompson and the America’s Cup.

Bonus: Ron on the Dunkin Donuts Coffee Roll.

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Made it!

Maybe (?) it’s dweebish to take pride in being able to help put on a good pharmaceutical outsourcing conference, but it’s an awfully good feeling when an event works out as well this one has.

The first day of the event is the more stressful one: We had 130 companies at the one-day tabletop exhibition and more than 300 attendees in the house for the conference sessions (between sessions, we had events in the exhibit hall, so the attendees could learn about the exhibitors and do business). It’s basically a four-person operation, with some day-of-show help from some of our office staff.

The buildup is pretty harrowing for us, knowing that more than 500 people are on site because of the strength of the brand 0f our magazine. But the big day was a rousing success. The exhibitors were ecstatic with the quality of the leads they were getting from the attendees, while the attendees loved the presentations we put together (I take a little more pride in that part, since this was the first year I was largely responsible for organizing the presenters and topics).

Anyway, I know this is coming off as a rah-rah horn-self-tooting, but I feel awfully good about how well it all turned out. Exhibitors were seeking us out at the cocktail reception after the show, to tell us they wanted to sign up for next year’s event now. It takes months of preparation that still leaves plenty of last-minute stress, and it’s a great feeling when everyone else is happy with the results.

Now, on to Paris, for a conference about 9 bazillion times bigger than this one.

(I’ll try to post some Unrequired Reading this afternoon, when I’m home.)

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Unrequired Reading: party like it’s 5767

Happy Jewish New Year, dear readers! In honor of Rosh Hashanah, this week’s Unrequired Reading features a bunch of Jewish-connected links and others that have nothing to do with Judaism.

First, we have Michael Totten’s interview with Yaacov Lozowick, author of Right To Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars. He thinks neither of the Lebanon wars is defensible, and provides some good insights into the shifting emotional landscape of Israelis during the most recent war.

If the story about Israel’s use of cluster bombs in the war’s last days proves true, that oughtta get categorized as “really REALLY indefensible.”

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Johnny Knoxville isn’t Jewish , but he gets to celebrate our new year with his new movie’s debut. Here’s an interview with him and Jeff Tremaine, the director of Jackass Number Two.

On Howard Stern this week, Knoxville admitted that he got the idea for getting gored by a bull (watch the trailer) from watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon. We’ll probably see the movie tomorrow, along with a shopping expedition to the new Century 21 store in Paramus, and a White Manna run. Because we’re all about the gracious living.

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For its first season or two, The State was one of the funniest television shows ever (I seem to recall the last season completely melting down in attempts at absurdism that went nowhere, as it its wont). Even though every other series in the world has gone DVD, The State languishes in MTV vaults. Good news: the first season is getting released on iTunes’ video store!

I can legitimately tie this into this week’s Jewy theme because of the great skit in which the cast members were all asked to introduce themselves and make a personal confession, as a way of becoming closer to the audience: “I’m Michael Ian Black. My real name is Schwartz, but I changed it because I’m ashamed of being Jewish.”

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My buddy Ian’s not Jewish, but he IS a chief petty officer! Congrats! Check out the pix from the ceremony!

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Cory Maye’s not Jewish either, but there are probably Jews at the law firm that helped get him off death row, pending a new sentencing hearing. Here’s hoping it’s the first step to springing Maye from prison!

Oh, and the “informant” whose tip led to the botched raid that landed Maye on death row probably doesn’t like Jews. He sure doesn’t like black people.

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Rich people don’t always stay rich. Larry Ellison is Jewish, and he spent a ton of money, but he managed to stay rich:

A raft of e-mail messages and financial documents introduced in a lawsuit that disgruntled shareholders filed against Mr. Ellison and other Oracle executives in 2001, give witness to some of Mr. Ellison’s budgeting practices. (The suit was settled last November and the judge in the matter subsequently unsealed financial documents submitted as exhibits in the case). The documents, first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year, also show how far Philip E. Simon, an adviser who described himself as Mr. Ellison’s “financial servant,” went in trying to persuade his boss to pay off about $1.2 billion in loans. (Neither Mr. Ellison nor Mr. Simon responded to interview requests for this article).

Mr. Ellison’s ledger around the end of 2000 included annual “lifestyle” spending of about $20 million, the purchase of a Japanese villa for $25 million, a proposed underwater archeology project earmarked for $12 million and his new yacht, budgeted at $194 million (news reports later said that the yacht’s final cost approached $300 million).

“I know you view me as a pessimist,” Mr. Simon wrote Mr. Ellison in an e-mail message in 2002, several months after banks began sounding alarms about Mr. Ellison’s debt. “Maybe you’re right, though I would disagree. Nonetheless, I think it’s imperative that we start to budget and plan. New purchases should be kept to a minimum. We need to establish and execute on a diversification plan to eliminate (yes, eliminate) all debt and build up a significant, conservatively structured, liquid investment portfolio.

“I know you don’t like to discuss this,” Mr. Simon added. “I know this e-mail may/will depress you. View this as a call to arms.”

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During my previous visit to Paris in 2002, I visited some of the monuments and shrines that commemorated the Jews that France shipped out for the camps. There’s plenty of other stuff for us to do this time around, as this BW slideshow sez.

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Sven Nykvist wasn’t Jewish, but he was the cinematographer on several Woody Allen flicks, including one of my favorite movies: Another Woman. (Also, he had an affair with Mia Farrow pre-Woody, which makes their subsequent collaborations just plain weird. On the other hand, Amy & I had exes perform the readings at our wedding, so hey.) He died last week after a long illness.

A few weeks ago, Amy was looking through our Netflix queue, and asked, “What is Light Keeps Me Company and why is it in our queue?”

Yes, she married someone who’s interested in seeing a documentary about a cinematographer. All I can say is, like Rembrandt, Nykvist’s work taught me new ways of seeing light. Rest in peace.

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Tiki culture: something that could bring all the world’s faiths together. Except the ones that prohibit drinking, I guess.

Yo-ho-ho and l’shana tova!

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Unrequited reading

Sorry to be writing less frequently, dear readers. I’m in the midst of a work-crunch of monumental proportions. Gotta finish a giant issue of the magazine by next Wednesday, then help put on our annual conference & exhibition Thursday and Friday, then get on a plane Saturday for a chemical ingredient conference. On the doubleplusgood side, said ingredient conference is in Paris, and my wife’s coming along for the trip.

On the down side, the book I just started, Witold Rybczynski’s City Life, is boring me silly, so I may have to drop it. I enjoy WR’s architecture articles on Slate, but the first 50 pages of this book have been pretty dull and pedantic, especially the second chapter’s extended take on how population size does not say much about the importance of a city. Again and again.

Fortunately, Amazon is about to deliver my copy of Shakespeare Wars, the new book from Ron Rosenbaum. Unfortunately, I don’t want to carry a 640-page hardcover with me overseas. So why don’t you suggest a book for me to read, already?

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Unrequired Reading

I’ve decided to make Unrequired Reading a regular post on Friday mornings. It’ll consist of the same stuff I was posting at random in the past few weeks. Which is to say, thanks to the miracle of RSS feeds, VM goofs around online so you don’t have to.

As my friend Mitch put it, “You know you’ve bottomed out when Bobby Brown says you’re an unfit mother to his children.”

(It’s Mother’s Day, not All Everybody Day!)

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Here’s a slideshow about Jonathan Ive, the design guru at Apple.

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10 Highly Pretentious Musical Instruments

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You stay classy, Cleveland.

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You are your Netflix Queue.

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Visiting Kandor?

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Firing tons of people — even Japanese people — does not automatically make you a success. I can’t stress this enough. Restructuring by “cutting fat” is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily put a company in the position to succeed in the future. Carlos Ghosn is trying to stay ahead of the game by allying with an American automaker and firing a ton of people.

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A wide-ranging (by my lights) interview with U of Penn Architecture Department Chair Detlef Mertins, author of a book on Mies van der Rohe.

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Paul Wolfowitz is running into trouble as president of the World Bank, due to his policy of not lending money to corrupt regimes.

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Will on Wal

George Will on the Democrats’ strategy of attacking Wal-Mart:

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America’s political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce — yes, announce — that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.

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This week in Unrequired Reading

Stories that have been sitting in my RSS feed this week:

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine muses on the 40th anniversary of Star Trek:

And finally, [Star Trek is] a story of a powerful belief in what the franchise represents: the right of individuals, through machinery, weaponry, or barehanded intelligence, to live, be free, and pursue happiness, no matter how horrific the results (and we can all agree that Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture was as slow and agonizing as any torture devised on that evil Enterprise from the “Mirror, Mirror” episode in which Spock has a beard). Put all these ingredients together and it’s clear: Star Trek is the story of America.

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Mary Worth and Nothingness

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Tom Spurgeon interviews Sammy Harkham, the only “young” cartoonist whose work I’ve started to follow. I have an unfinished post from earlier this summer, about the MoCCA comics festival in NYC. The post was all about my realization that I’ve become a boring old fart, because I couldn’t think of any cartoonists whose work I discovered in the last five to eight years. Fortunately, I picked up one of Sammy’s comics then, and found a small book of his a few weeks later that impressed me.

Sammy edits an anthology called Kramer’s Ergot, and the interview discusses the process of putting the most recent edition together. As ever, I find this stuff fascinating, but you may not.

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George Will reviews a 9/11 novel that doesn’t sound very interesting to me, but that’s because the 9/11 novel I published tanked:

Messud’s Manhattan story revolves around two women and a gay man who met as classmates at Brown University and who, as they turn 30 in 2001, vaguely yearn to do something “important” and “serious.” Vagueness — lack of definition — is their defining characteristic. Which may be because — or perhaps why — all three are in the media. All are earnest auditors and aspiring improvers of the nation’s sensibility.

Uh, yeah.

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BLDGBLOG interviews author Jeff VanderMeer about the intersection of architecture and the novel.

As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating “reality” but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I’m creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don’t just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Of course, that kind of layering will work for some readers — and other readers will want continuity. Even if they live in a place like that — a baroque, layered, very busy, confused place — even if, say, they’re holding the novel as they walk down the street in London [laughter] — they just don’t get it.

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Times UK restaurant reviewer Giles Coren visited Croatia for a column:

The language is called Croatian these days, except in Serbia, where it is called Serbian, and it hasn’t got any easier. Chapter two of my Teach Yourself Croatian book was about counting to ten, and gently explained as follows: “The number one behaves like an adjective and its ending changes according to the word which follows. The number two has different forms when it refers to masculine and neuter nouns than when it refers to feminine nouns, and is followed always by words in the genitive singular, as are the words for ‘three’ and ‘four’. The numbers 5-20, however, are followed by words in the genitive plural. . .”

This is why you never see Croatians in groups of more than one or less than five in a bar. Because it isn’t actually possible to order the right number of beers.

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Official VM buddy Jecca reviews the second issue of Martha Stewart’s Blueprint (which, as I type it, sounds like something she came up with while she was in the joint, a la that Prison Break show).

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Gorgeous pictures of the world’s greatest libraries. There’s a book about it.

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What’s an interweb?

Big off-site sales meeting today, to discuss online sales strategies for the company. I’m not in sales, but they brought me in (along with our VP/editorial director) to give some perspective on how the editors can contribute good web-based content.

It was a critical meeting, in which we hammered out much of the plans for how we’re going to move this publishing company into the 21st century. People gave presentations on our digitial editions, webinars, and push e-mail systems, while discussing how to integrate online and print advertising packages. Thanks to the strategies we developed today, our salespeople are ready to go out and increase our online revenue fivefold in 2007.

Except maybe this guy:

Besides this moment, my favorite part of the meeting was when the sales consultant asked us, “How many of you go to YouTube.com?”

I raised my hand, as did our IT guy and our e-mail manager. That was it. I blurted out, “What the heck do you people do online all day?!”