You Think?

Headline on the New York Times' lead article Saturday morning (Kindle edition): "Failed North Korean Launching a Setback for Kim Jong-in."

Apple Loses. Amazon And Consumers Win.

A couple of years ago, we learned that Steve Jobs' Apple had colluded with publishers to undercut Amazon's bid for galactic domination of the e-book market, which it was quickly gaining by charging $10 for bestsellers and most every other title. Apple hoped to get a quick and dirty piece of the action for the iPad and its own bookstore. Instead it got the attention of the Justice Department, which sued Apple and five big publishers for blatant price-fixing.

Rather than celebrating this victory for the consumer, David Streitfeld of the New York Times is worried about Amazon's clout:

[P]ublishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one. Amazon, already the dominant force in the industry, will hold all the cards.

“Amazon must be unbelievably happy today,” said Michael Norris, a book publishing analyst with Simba Information. “Had they been puppeteering this whole play, it could not have worked out better for them.”

If Amazon's 60% of all e-book sales can really be called a monopoly, Amazon earned it by brilliantly parlaying its dominance of mail-order books sales into a launching pad for the Kindle. If it was willing to take a loss on a $10 e-book sale (based on what it was paying publishers for resale rights) to encourage readers to buy Kindles, that was literally its own business. But the media appear to be buying the publishers' complaints that they couldn't make money on $10 e-books and that the price undercut the perceived value of text. The oil companies need to find reporters this credulous. We need higher prices to spur our exploration efforts! Only by paying more for gas will people appreciate the preciousness of this scarce resource!

Besides, I agree with Matthew Yglesias, who wonders how you don't make money on a $10 file download. If publishers can't, they need to streamline their business, which began to happen with recorded music after Apple figured out how to sell $10 downloads to people who'd been paying $18 for CDs. Apple used its wits to help the consumer get more affordable music and to spur restructuring of an arteriosclerotic industry. Apple then turned around and tried to stop Amazon from making text more affordable in precisely the same way. This week both companies got what they deserved.

Dousing The Kindle Fire

Why the old-fashioned dedicated e-reader like my trusty Kindle 2 is a better reader's tool (and why I canceled my Kindle Fire order just in time):

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

Petit Fors And Againsts

I'm grateful for historian Jeremy Young's comments on my recent Rick Perlstein post. Young wrote here and here (at "Daily Kos," no less!). Perlstein's shown at left, Young at right. Young writes:

The strawman here is Perlstein's imagined claim that Nixon was responsible for the political polarization of the late 1960s and after, down to our own time. If this were actually Perlstein's argument, his book would be pure partisan hackery, not to mention boring and unoriginal. Plenty of people have blamed plenty of things on Nixon; nothing new in that.

Where Perlstein scores, and scores big, is in accepting that many of Nixon's basic assumptions about politics (at least those not rooted in paranoia) were accurate. There really was a silent majority; there really was a widespread belief among middle-class whites and white ethnics that elite liberalism and civil rights were succeeding on the backs of their own suffering. This sentiment led to class and racial warfare and left white middle-class Americans ready to drop liberal causes in exchange for security and the maintenance of the status quo. It also made them racist, in the way that petit-bourgeois people often become racist in times of economic strain: in a desperate desire to maintain their status above the people and races in the class below them.

I replied:

Thanks for your post and for linking to mine. It’s been a couple of years since I read Nixonland. I read it on Kindle, and I believe the author actually got the news from me that it had been Kindled. I mention this only because all my underlining is somewhere on Amazon’s server and therefore a little too difficult to get at. So my comments are impressionistic rather than specific, and I apologize in advance if I’ve forgotten something from Rick’s massive and entertaining narrative.

All that being said, I readily concede your basic point. I get that it wasn’t a Nixon biography and that Rick was saying that Nixon was superbly prepared by his upbringing and temperament to understand and exploit the fears and resentments of those you refer to as petit-bourgeois people. I’ll even go so far as to say that a better title would’ve been “Americaland,” seeing as — according to your own analysis — Rick was arguing that Nixon was the incarnation of our country at its worst.

Making Nixon seem like the target was the smarter move, since otherwise it would’ve been obvious that Rick was actually excoriating the tens of millions of fear-motivated, sometimes racist petit-bourgeois people who voted for him. Of course one person’s petit-bourgeois is another person’s indispensable GOP primary voter. That being said, as I recall, Rick showed that Nixon was exceedingly careful about what he said about so-called wedge issues during 1966-68. He eschewed the cheerful demagoguery of Gov. Reagan, for instance.

And then there’s the matter of what he did in office. The southern strategy is one thing, but telling George Shultz to get schools in the deep south desegregated is another. The law and order issue is one thing, but setting up methadone clinics in the big cities is another. I don’t recall that Rick seemed very interested in Nixon’s policy agenda. But his breathtaking foreign policy, and what Nixon library director Tim Naftali recently called his progressive domestic initiatives (from the EPA to national health insurance), would seem to have deserved at least equal mention alongside his political tactics.

If Nixon the politician was a reflection of America at its worst, what might we say about Nixon’s substance? Given that the petit-bourgeois masses gave the author of that relatively progressive agenda an historic landslide re-election victory, don’t both Nixon and all those angry, fearful Americans, thanks to his leadership, look like something far greater than the sum of their resentments?

I don’t say this to minimize Watergate. But as I assume Rick would be among the first to concede, Watergate’s biggest winner was the Goldwater-Reagan right. Did Nixon’s failure make RINOs an endangered species? It appears so, and I think that’s a devastating loss. You write that we need drastic action to solve our problems, whereas I, a committed incrementalist, get the willies just typing the words. I’m with Stephen Ambrose: When we lost Nixon, we lost more than we gained.

My principal beef with Rick’s book, having to do with the Ellsberg break-in, is here.

Thanks again. I tried to leave this at Daily Kos, but it wouldn’t let me sign up!

My Faith Has Been ReKindled

The initial New York Times announcement about charging for access to its web site dissed us Kindle subsKribers. This just in from Amazon:

As an active New York Times subscriber on Kindle, we are pleased to let you know that you will receive access (exclusive of premium crosswords, full archives, and other premium offers), at no additional charge, to The New York Times website, nytimes.com. While the date for this access has yet to be determined, Amazon and The New York Times are working together to enable this subscriber benefit as soon as possible. If you are an active subscriber, you will receive an email with instructions on how to activate your access to The New York Times website as soon as it’s available.

Two Timesers

I pay $20 a month to get the New York Times on my Kindle, but that won't be good enough to get me unlimited access to its web site. The sad, inexplicable truth is buried in the FAQ:

23. I have a subscription to The New York Times on my Kindle, Nook or other e-reader. Does this give me access to NYTimes.com?

No. At this time, we're not able to connect your e-reader subscription to an NYTimes.com subscription. Each must be purchased separately.

We plan to enhance our e-reader subscription options in the near future. Please make sure your e-mail address is up-to-date so you can receive the latest site news and announcements from NYTimes.com.

"In the near future"? How incredibly bush league. What's so complicated about working with Amazon, which sells plenty of Times subscriptions, and figuring this out now?

Kindled Kuriosity

Starting March 28, The New York Times will charge frequent visitors to its web site. That's good, since well-reported journalism can't survive in the post-print era without people paying for content. Print subscribers will get unlimited access. What's unclear is whether we Kindle subscribers (who pay $20 a month for daily downloads to our e-readers) will get the same benefits as dead tree readers. Today's announcement just says this:

All subscribers who receive the paper through home delivery will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook.

Which doesn't answer the question. This is the second time the Times has tried to charge web users. I hope it succeeds. Too bad it overlooked this detail.

Demarginalization

The only thing I don't like about digital reading is that Kindle notes and underlining are harder to find later than those in real books. And now scholars are worried about losing famous people's marginalia.

God Said, "I Sent You A Kindle, Nook, and iPad"

E-readers such as the Kindle are making reading books more fashionable with children. Too bad newspapers never figured out how to get on board.

iPadding The Books

Apple may understand the way people like to buy music these days, but it doesn't understand readers. When reading this excerpt from a recent New York Times article, remember that from Amazon you can get a monthly Kindle subscription to "The New Yorker" (four issues) for $2.99:

Many applications cost almost as much as a printed copy of a magazine, a difficult concept for consumers to get their heads around considering that a paper product is more expensive to assemble and distribute than an electronic version of a magazine. The New Yorker, for example, costs $4.99 an issue in Apple’s App Store but $5.99 on the newsstand. Esquire is also $4.99 an issue, the same as the cover price on the newsstand.

Subscriptions are another sticking point. A vast majority of magazines available on the iPad must be bought per copy. Customers cannot subscribe and have it delivered as they can with other publications available on the iPad like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal or The Daily, the News Corporation’s new iPad-only venture that is to begin within the next few weeks. That means if consumers want to receive the magazine regularly, they would have to pay far above normal subscription rates.

“Sheer highway robbery,” read one recent comment about The New Yorker in the App Store. “I’ll keep with my paper subscription. I will never pay $250 per year for an app."

We Have The Technology

An easy thing to fix about e-books: Their page numbers don't correspond to the print editions.

iRonic

Amazon sold almost all Kindle books for $9.99 until Apple, trying to leverage a share of e-book sales for its new iPad, goaded publishers into raising prices. They were afraid that text was being undervalued by Amazon, which wasn't making money at $10 but had quickly come to dominate the e-book market.

Ironically, Apple had driven a radical restructuring of recorded music prices by selling $10 albums for its iPod that had cost $15 or more on CD. Apple's interference with the analogous favor that Amazon did for readers was pretty hypocritical. It also didn't work. So far, the iBook store is a failure.

Awakening Hope For Text

Andrew Sullivan on the deep, not-techie roots of the word kindle, shrewdly chosen by Amazon for its revolutionary reading device. While we're at it, there's this, from the Book of Common Prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past. Be our companion in the Way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope that we may know you as you are revealed in scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love.

Newspapers' Latest Digital Savior

Apple's sizzling full-color Tablet could smother the once-smoking Kindle.

Digital Road To Nowhere

After experimenting with his new Kindle DX, rock star David Byrne (Talking Heads) identifies a problem I hadn't (but should've, given the amount of energy federal archivists have put into trying to solve the same problem as it pertains to other digitized documents):

Years from now, having gone through a few computers, your music collection is unplayable except for the files without DRM. Well, same with these books — if you migrate to a different tablet (the forthcoming Apple one we hear so much about, for example), you are [unlucky]. All the unread books in your Kindle library are stuck on what will eventually become antiquated technology.

And yet...As Kindle users know, the books you buy (though not the newspapers, magazines, and blog articles) are saved indefinitely on Amazon's servers. If the buyer retains the right to view the texts even after the Kindle is replaced by something else, maybe Amazon will end up with the responsibility for making sure the data is available to the users who purchased them.

Young Man Blues

George Will turns a nice phrase about Sen. Kennedy:

In the Senate, as elsewhere, 80 percent of the important work is done by a talented 20 percent. And 95 percent of the work is done off the floor, away from committees, out of sight, where strong convictions leavened by good humor are the currency of accomplishment. There Ted Kennedy, who had the politics of the Boston Irish in his chromosomes, flourished.

Since I read newspapers on-line (and on-Kindle, where I proudly pay for content), I rarely see the marvelous way great papers still express themselves in page layout and headlines. Here in a Starbucks in San Diego, I caught a glimpse of a grandiloquent banner headline in the New York Times: "Senator Kennedy, Battle Lost, Is Hailed as a Leader."

I wonder who wrote that: A baby boomer authentically mourning the end of an era, or a younger editor who had gotten himself or herself into the spirit of the moment. While the "battle lost" bit is elevating, it's a battle many of us will join as well. I'm in San Diego to conduct a committal service for a less-well-known man who battled cancer no less bravely, as millions do and shall. So perhaps that element could have been skipped, at least in the headline.

As for Kennedy as a great leader, all notable people should be given their due in the wake of their deaths, as the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby does. But Jacoby's summary of Kennedy's foreign policy legacy is startling:

Abroad, he failed to take seriously the stakes in the Cold War. “Today, with the exception of East Germany, Russia has no more satellites,’’ he wrote in 1968, the year Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. He hailed Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet dictator, as “a warm individual . . . completely committed to peace.’’ He fought to cut off aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975 - aid that might have prevented a communist bloodbath. In recent years he was willing to consign millions to Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, opposing not only the 2003 liberation of Iraq but even the 1991 campaign to undo the occupation of Kuwait.

On domestic affairs, Kennedy used most of his influence promoting ways to spend other people's money. While Kennedy has been hailed this week for his courage, in politics, being a big spender is courageous only to the extent of sometimes exposing one to being voted out of office, which would have caused no meals to be missed in Kennedy's household.

As for the issue with which he is most closely associated, in 1971 he missed a chance to provide health insurance to virtually all Americans when he opposed President Nixon's national health insurance plan. His subsequent efforts amounted to de facto acts of expiation for failing as a young man to exhibit the bipartisan temperament for which he being so fulsomely if selectively praised today. The thing is, 38 years ago, he actually could've pulled it off. So whose fault is it that 43 million Americans remain uninsured?

Newspaper Future

The Kindle DX

Amazon's Newspaper Industry Recycler

Newspapers will sell you the new, bigger Kindle at a discounted price if you buy a long-term subscription. Bingo!

Miniaturization Has Met Its Match

Amazon and other companies are racing to come out with a super-Kindle that really could save newspapers. The New York Times:

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

Plus He Came Up With Unlimited Free Shipping

Bill Gates compares Jeff Bezos to Gutenberg for kreating the Kindle.