As the article points out:

Just two weeks before announcing staff cuts and a substantial corporate restructuring in December, the publishing giant Macmillan gathered its sales and marketing staff at the historic Hotel del Coronado in San Diego —where Billy Wilder filmed Tony Curtis wooing , HarMarilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot” — to talk about titles on the spring lists. Between marathon meetings to discuss plans for new books, the sales reps were invited to take part in wine tastings and spa treatments.This year the meetings will be held via Webcam. In a memo to staff members announcing the layoffs on Dec. 15, John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, said the company would hold only one of its three annual sales conferences in person, and the other two would be conducted on the Web and by telephone.

It goes on:

Venerable houses including HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster have all announced salary freezes or layoffs, or both.

Nielsen has identified a 7 percent drop in sales compared with the same period the previous year, and signs that it’s only going to get worse.  But for all of the major or subtle changes in the industry, it appears some things will never change, such as the arrogance of agents: ”It’s not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.”

Ah, to own the wonderful works of “some poet.”  Isn’t it delightful that the same personalities who once were some of the strongest personalities and names in the industry are now, en masse, clumped together with a mass-market paperback sales maven?  But hey, sales dictate attitudes, so put down that company card, crack open that secondhand newspaper and read on to see what changes come next.  My guess is that curtailing cash advances for Mr. Patterson will do more to cut costs than cognizance of the effect of supply and demand on a now identified product niche market, but I’m not the one getting paid to lounge at a resort and talk shop.

I’m not going to weigh in on the societal effects created by product names, it’s not what I’m good at.  What I am good at, however, is finding books for you to check out if this kind of thing interests you.

It’s a little bit of a heady book at times, and don’t let it’s small stature fool you, it’s a bear, but “I and Thou” is also a fantastic philosophical look into the way our own language and understanding of it changes our feeling or tinges it.  Martin Buber navigates claustrophically narrow nuances of language and blows them into vast expanses of thought.  Whether it’s the difference between saying “I’m sorry” where you just free yourself or asking someone “forgive me” and putting the power to them to free you, this book endeavors to show that sometimes the Thesaurus is not more factual that a bad English translation.

Currently we have none in stock but we do have this excellent analysis:

In any event, the article is sharp and can be found here but the point of most note is the end:

Those concerned about the compression of our sped-up language are directed to “Linguistic Ruin? LOL! Instant Messaging and Teen Language,” by Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis, an article in the spring 2008 quarterly “American Speech” (dukeupress.edu). My choice for most influential and seminal language book of the year is “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World,” by Naomi S. Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in D.C. (Oxford University Press, $30). She’s a scholar who can write in real time with real words.

Make sure to read the March 21st article in the New York Times written by David Brooks, entitled “Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders”.  This is an excellent article on Social Entrepreneurship and there are many points from the article that connect directly with what we have built here at Better World Books.

Hey readers, I was just checking out the New York Times when I saw that their feature “Reading Room” was tackling Tom Wolfe’s great-text-cum-awful-movie, Bonfire of the Vanities.  “Reading Room” is an excellent discussion about a text.  In this case it begins with an hour long podcast with Wolfe, discussing everything from journalism to his thesis to his works and then moves forward with some really fascinating discussion about race and the book as a period piece (which I would say, and they would agree, that it is most certainly not).

Anyway, here’s the beginning and here’s the rest (N.B. like any blog, start at the bottom to sift through the lot).

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.

Reading this, (despite the overt and somewhat heavy handed Pushkin reference that flies in the face of Donadio’s later quip a la Burroghs about the guy holding Beckett’s “Proust”) I was intrigued. We’ve all had relationships that went one way or the other and education and taste in books (and movies) has definitely been an issue in the early stages. I remember a girl I dated who was rather offended when I referred to Grisham as “beach worthy kitsch” and another who could never understand my lack of appreciation of the perfection of Austen’s complete works.

Fundamentally though, it’s the boring, hipster-esque snarkiness that creeps into the article that begins to take over any agreement, mocking men’s reading as middlebrow should they briefly embrace Ayn Rand, John Irving or Virginia Woolf (heaven forbid we read something with feminist tones that is actually well written!  Stupid guys…).

The two quotes that really do it for me are “…Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”  The next time a girl is telling me about a life changing experience or a book she likes I’ll make sure to act like a total jerk, talking about how painfully quotidian her experiences are.  Geez.  If you can’t talk to me about the latest installation at MoMa (which is way overrated, I liked ______ better when people didn’t know his work as well) then you may as well embrace gender as social construct and pay your own bill and leave.

Then Donadio paints an altogether different picture, of someone not bored to tears, but actually amused by the banal baseness of a would be beau: “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.”  I will give Donadio this, can’t you just see this woman sitting across the table from a guy tittering about the clunky language of someone undertaking the task of 400+ pages of philosophic bildungsroman written in her non-native tongue?  Clearly Rand should’ve taken cues from Solzhenitisyn’s “First Circle!”

Donadio notes “Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony.”  Trouble is, in this article she can’t navigate her own advice, at once sounding disingenuous and flippantly certain.  I like the concept of the article but trying to wade through all the Big Apple affectations of over-education is as rewarding as wading through the garbage in the East River (people wonder why I couldn’t swim until I was 12 even though I grew up in the Bronx…)

Luckily I remembered it was a fluff piece just in time… “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.”

(that would be a deal breaker…)

Here’s an excerpt: “…Better World Books offers a different option. Started by some freshly minted Notre Dame graduates in 2002, it collects used books and textbooks from about 1,000 campuses and 700 libraries nationwide.

As an individual, you can donate if you pay for shipping yourself; but you can buy anything off its Web site and shipping is free anywhere in the country.” Click here to read the full article…

One of the pictures taken on our warehouse floor – the photographer even bought a book for his book club!