And in other news

Lou Dobbs is a Blithering Idiot

This time I didn't say it... did. For a great debate on Friedman vs. Dobbs, check here.

The goddessly , meanwhile, continues to feed me fun tidbits. In France, we hear that it is NOT fair use to make a backup copy of a DVD. However, the real fun is still with Google. Apparently a porn site is suing Google over fair-use issues - Google displays this site's "intellectual property" (sorry) in its Google Image search. Why subscribe to the porn site if you can get the images for free? Google argues that it merely displays thumbnail images, but according to this article, "Perfect 10's lawyers argued that the thumbnails, which it notes are quite a bit larger than the average thumbnail, have value to the magazine because it sells small images to a British cell phone company.

Curiouser and curiouser. We like us a good IP rumble.

Well, maybe I don't want to play your stupid game anyway!

Ezra Klein is guesting on Wonkette today, with a fabulous story about Ford. (I'd link you directly to his own blog, but it seems to be down at the moment.) The closer: Welcome to the ?new? economy. It?s new because you?re not in it.

Indeed. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart will be opening up to 280 stores this year alone. (Where are they going to PUT them all?) Practically speaking, does this mean assembly-line workers will now become "greeters"? For a lot less money, no benefits, so that ultimately the only place where they can afford to buy anything is...Wal-Mart? - oooooh, they don't call it the dismal science for nothing.

I know Thomas Friedman can see what's at the end of this rainbow, and I think he's right, but meanwhile, the Yellow Brick Road has got some potholes in it. Wish we could take a long nap and wake up when it's over.

Heard it through the grapevine

Lord, oh lord, what a riotous Friday. It began Thursday night with my phone ringing off the hook. This one heard it from that one who heard it from this other one - Michael Cairns has resigned from Bowker and will, in the grand tradition of Bowker presidents, be staying on in a consultant capacity.

This was, of course, confirmed by Bowker at the BISAC meeting on Friday morning. I was going to give this scoop to Shelf Awareness, but John's taking Monday off. Thanks, John!

In other news...Stanley Greenfield's been busy. He's significantly expanding his business in China, which is positively thrilling, particularly in the STM market, as you might imagine. McGraw, Wiley, get in touch with . Waste no time.

Eyes on China

The AP (via MSNBC) reports today that China's economy grew 9.8% last year, largely in the service industry (which had gone under- or unreported in previous years).

MSNBC also reports, interestingly, that a Chinese court has upheld Starbucks' copyright claim to its own name and logo. "It will ... hearten the many other foreign companies in China that face competition from local companies imitating their brands, trademarks, logos or packaging."

It's the service industry precisely that has more copyright issues than manufacturing or mining. Keep your eyes peeled, mateys. Piracy's going down with the ship.

A great convergence

Stanley Greenfield is brilliant.

On Sunday, I came across this little gem about selling books by the chapter or passage, citing programs in development by Google and Amazon. Stanley, of course, has been doing this for YEARS - he began in the 1980s, with Dial-A-Book, where you could call up and hear the first chapter of a book. As the Internet took hold, Stanley digitized these chapters and distributed them to Amazon, B&N, Borders, Ingram, B&T, plus all the independent Internet bookshops.

There was a period during the bust, as these bookshops began collapsing like a house of cards, when a lot of us were wondering whether Stanley would be able to make it. The market for digitized chapters seemed to shrink drastically, and it seemed like he'd saturated it.

But he held on. Stanley is both wise and tenacious, and he knows a good thing when he's got it. He drove his own costs down - he was one of the first people I ever knew who outsourced to Asia. And lo and behold...now that Amazon is doing "", now that Google is contemplating a "book rental" program (hello? anyone ever hear of ebrary?), Stanley looks damn near prescient.

Then there's China.

In the 1970s, Stanley was doing a lot of business with China. Now that China's opened up again, Stanley's got a whole infrastructure of contacts there, already in place - he knows how to work the government, and the kinds of political/economic machinations that thwart a lot of US companies are a breeze to him because he knows the ropes already. Yesterday, Stanley sent me a press release which began thusly:

Xinhua China Ltd.., the majority shareholder of the largest book
distributor in the People?s People?s Republic of China, has signed an
agreement with Dial-A-Book Inc. to mount more than 25,000 Chapter One book
browsing excerpts of English language books on its dealer network in China.

Asian Pirates and Outsourcing, Oh My!

Those pirates are still at it, of course, but some news came out of Hong Kong this week - Chan Nai-Ming was sentenced to 3 months in jail for sharing files of 3 movies - posting them on his computer and then advertising on newsgroups that the files were available for download for free. Don't know whether this is a genuine tip of the hat to Western business interests concerned with copyright law, in an attempt to get those business interests to invest more in Asia; or if it's just a gesture. It's interesting, nonetheless.

An interesting outsourcing tale - a friend of mine is overwhelmed with responses to her personal ad on Craigslist. She too is a client of the goddessly , our amazing assistant in Bangalore, and of course the obvious occurred to her - why not add "managing men" to Tess's (increasingly crowded) plate? What do you say, Tess? Can you respond to Elizabeth's legion of swains? Oh, the possibilities....

Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee

Next week's Fortune magazine appears with a - how shall we describe it - slavering hymn in praise of Thomas Friedman. Let me tell you, even God doesn't get it so good:

He dazzles crowds. He brews conventional wisdom. He charms CEOs. And he drives some people crazy. Meet Tom Friedman, the oracle of the Global Century.

And it goes on from there. The best part: the little drawing of Friedman as a rock star.

I went gaga over Friedman's book, and promptly used it to find the goddessly  and (and her programming guru of a husband, Hamid). I love the idea of a Bangalorean Craig's List. There are certainly many companies in India and China which are poised to do some wonderful things to speed up production (of just about everything) and productivity (of just about everyone).

This paean makes me wonder, though, about those 400,000 displaced Gulf Coast employees. Now that so many workplaces have been decimated, will folks embrace Friedman's outsourcing exuberance? Will labor become cheaper in the US as a result of the sudden glut of prospective workers on the market? Will Friedman be able to maintain his rock-star status or will his cred, like Ashlee's, suddenly plummet? (And in that case, will we get a Beautifully Broken?)

This is going to be interesting.

Raving Nutballs Occasionally Make Sense

A political burp: Lou Dobbs has adopted the party line about the Katrina refugees in New Orleans. Statistically, that's about right; nobody can be all whacked all the time. Now back to the nutshow.

Fortunately, Anderson Cooper is a tonic to everything - and I do mean everything - as he sticks it to the powers that be. Only a Dalton-educated, Vanderbilt-heir, prematurely grey, blue-eyed white CNN boy could do what he did. Wonkette calls him "Secretary of Take-No-Shit". Amen, sister. We love our Anderson.

All right - business as usual. Google - expanding to Europe. Horse out of barn, train out of station, cat out of bag, metaphor of your choice. Horse-train-cat not going back in again. What did I tell you.

Lou Dobbs is a Raving Nutball

The Dynamo and the Virgin

The big Reuters wire story being routed around on outsourcing these days is that China's really, really trying to position itself as the next India, and that it is hampered by the English problem and the intellectual property problem. (Those damnable Chinese pirates!)

I was reading the various iterations of this story and thinking about Henry Adams's reaction to the Paris Exposition in 1900 - where, as a medieval historian steeped in the mysteries of gorgeous cathedrals inspired by Virgin Mary, he is confronted with the shock of the dynamo, which bodes the harnessing of energy not fully understood even by the most sophisticated scientists of the day.

And he describes his shock as having "my historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new."

I think that is part of what we are experiencing in business - particularly a business so steeped in gentlemanly tradition (despite the reality that publishing really NEVER was that way, it certainly remains bound to the myth) - when we are confronted with outsourcing. Because it's not simply a matter of shipping work to another country to be done more cheaply. The very issue of sending work abroad has implications beyond the immediate payoff.

There's the 24-hour workday - where one's productivity is suddenly doubled (or more) by a doppelganger (or three or four) in other parts of the world, and the focus becomes how much work can be squeezed into a certain period. There's the continued segmentation and specialization of work itself - fewer generalists who see the big picture, in other words. There's the dilution of the American economy and the dilution of the American brand of worker - very, very difficult to get one's head around. The dilution of "work hard and you will be rewarded", where working hard is synonymous with virtue - that Puritan sense....As we more closely encounter different cultures, particularly ones so radically different such as Asian ones - well, in radical confrontations with the Other, we are forced into a confrontation with the Self.

And I really think that the world of business is not terribly cut out for that. So it's going to be a bumpy ride while we have our historical necks broken. But not only have we learned to live with the dynamo - now we can't live without it, and without technologies a hundred times more advanced. Ultimately, yes, the world gets smaller (flatter, as Thomas Friedman says), but there will come a point where we can't envision living any other way.

And Chinese pirates will be a thing of the past.

Some Vitriol With Your Morning Coffee?

As Ophelia, the-little-hurricane-that-could, chugs its way up the East Coast, the morning pundits maintain a surprisingly consistent attention span - Friedman, Dowd, Wonkette, even Damon Wayans have nothing good to say about the administration. Now we seem to have discovered the cure for ADD - moral outrage.

So what does any of this have to do with publishing, content delivery, etc? It's more of an overall economy thing. Retail sales, according to the Department of Commerce, have sunk by 2.1% for August. Two more airlines are declaring bankruptcy. And while gas prices fell by two cents today, overall they are higher than they've ever been. Wal-Mart blames fuel prices for its performance issues.

The economic picture is looking pretty grim. And while the conventional wisdom is that when the economy sours, bookselling improves (because overall, books are cheap entertainment), the last few economic downturns haven't proved that out - where the economy went, so did the book sector.

In terms of online content, well, that's always been something of a luxury investment. If there are cutbacks to be had, it's generally in the world of content development. Trust me - I've been fired/laid off enough times after a downturn to know.

So what does that mean - it means that as an industry we have to be really smart about developments. I've been thinking a lot about Global Data Synchronization. (Oh, Bowker? Bowker??? Anyone home???) All the economic signposts point to getting book data into a mass-merchandising data pool, where stores can download the book data along with grocery data and clothing data and hardware data and salt-and-pepper-shaker data - and hone their sales, and be smart about selling and merchandising.

As consumers become more and more dependent on the big box stores (and even while fuel prices are hitting them, they're certainly hitting specialty stores harder) in tough economic times, the book industry is going to have to compete not just with other entertainment items such as movies and music as we have in the past, but also with groceries, clothing, office supplies, health and beauty products, and dog food. In other words, retail is flattening and books are just another commodity - and as the economy gets worse (and it will, there's very little doubt about that), efficiencies are going to continue, the big box stores will overtake the little guys, and it is seriously time to get smart about joining the rest of the retail world. Books do not occupy a privileged position in retail anymore.

Benign Girl

My youngest daughter came back from a birthday party yesterday with the requisite goody bag filled with party favors manufactured in China.

Among the toys was a little plastic cell phone. The packaging was all in pink (as was the phone itself). Bulleted on the side of the package were the selling points:

*BATTERY!
*OPERATED!
*CREATIVE!
*VARIOUS MUSIC!

The instructions were also on the package: "Beautiful girl, press any button!"

At the top, a (completely unlicensed, utterly pirated) image of Barbie. In the Barbie-esque pink font to the left, were the words "Benign Girl".

There's a role model for ya. Truth in translation.

This morning I had a call with the CEO of B2K, the BPO-outsourcing company covered (in great depth) by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat. They are located in Bangalore. What do they do...well, actually, a more appropriate question is what DON'T they do. They do tech support, customer care, software development, business analysis, and they have a virtual executive assistant team as well.

Shortly after that call ended, one of my clients called me and was discussing some product development for a particular product line that's been suffering from some neglect lately. He told me that he wasn't really happy with the IT infrastructure for this product.

I said, "How do you feel about India?"

He said, "I love India. They work cheap and they speak English."

Asia is a market much too huge to be ignored. It'd be nice if the images weren't pirated and the translations were better - Benign Girl really isn't going to play so well over here in the long run, probably because it's too truthful - and it'd be nice if we had a better understanding of what the market is for our services there. But that's just a matter of time. The genie's out of the bottle. Now it's time to see what it can do.

The Google Threat

10 years ago, Amazon was poised to take over the world...with a homepage that looked like . With content updated daily, an e-newsletter service, and a million titles for sale...everyone in the book world was wary. Who was this guy - the book industry is fairly incestuous and nobody had ever heard of this clown Bezos before. Where was he getting his money? And what was Amazon going to turn into?

That last question was the most disturbing of all. At B&N, trying not to outpace the competition but simply catch up, not knowing what Amazon would do next was unnerving, to say the least. But it wasn't simply about competition - what was Amazon selling, exactly? Books, yes. Information? Content? News? Was it a bookstore, or a magazine that sold books? What should B&N try to be?

Ultimately, the dust settled on these questions. Now Amazon is not the bogeyman it used to be. For that, we have Google.

Moby Live's guest essay this week is the garbled latest in "sky is falling - and it's all Google's fault" kvetching. As with the issue of outsourcing (Lou Dobbs, don't even get me started), the question is not whether gathering information about users and what they're searching on should happen. It is happening. The salient question is, how should that be handled?

Haven't seen too many essays about that. Anyone wants to send me one, you know where to reach . I'd be grateful to leave all the kvetching behind.

Piracy? What piracy?

BEA - the aftermath