The Death of the Traditional Bookstore, Part 1

From a thread on a 'net board:

[I had posted that USED books were the way to go, because new books were crap. I expand on this here.]

Whatever. The last dozen paperbacks I bought new fell apart, a couple half way through the book.

Bindings on books today just ain't what they were, even 20 years ago. Textbooks have held up OK, but that's changing - publishers have figured out that if they make trade paperbacks of everything, or cheapen the hardback bindings, the books won't hold up the secondary market.

As for content, wow. So much of the newer stuff that I see at Borders is complete crap, even from known authors. I don't read it all the way through, of course, but a lot of the celebrated writing out there doesn't bear reading through. Junk.

So, to the extent that ebooks allow us to sort through the crap easier, they'll be more and more popular. Of course, ebooks and self-publishing create another noise issue, because any moron can publish whenever they want to. The aid of electronic tools to search, scan and focus on what we like may not be able to overtake the plunge in the signal-to-noise ratio that is ebooks. So far the Internet is gaining with respect to noise, too, so I'm not too hopeful about the ebook phenomenon taking off on its own merit. It will likely continue to be a supplement to printed books or a way for a small number of people to participate in something they already did. It has the potential to do so much more.

[this last paragraph is why I posted the exerpt -- the advantage of electronic tools must overcome the noise, or none of this stuff adds value. The same transaction cost economics applies to ebooks and the 'net as a whole.]

Mission focus, latest addition

From the latest Business Week, a story about an ad exec who decided to pull a Jerry Maguire.

Alex Bogusky probably doesn't believe in all the things I believe in, but he is surely a bright guy, and he obviously believes in hard work and professionalism. He must be very brave, too.

I applaud him, and hope that the youth of today would find him to be a role model.

From all appearances, he finally figured out that some things are more important than others.

He was just "selling pizzas," and finally realized it. He was helping other people sell things to kids that they didn't need.

He took the plunge and decided to get out at the top. That's happening a lot these days. Ayn Rand wrote a whole book about it. This may not BE that type of drop out, but who knows?

Some of us refuse to just "sell pizzas." Our lives mean more than that. In Mr. Bogusky's case, it was evident that his professional life was inconsistent with his evolving personal values.

That, or he got out because he felt he could afford to.

Rock bands do that all the time. But even then, they don't stop playing music all day, they just stop doing it for cash. The creative thing doesn't go away, the drive to achieve doesn't go away, but the need to support this huge glowworm of followers gets old in a hurry and they get out. Some can handle it, and some can't.

Let's hope Mr. Bogusky can find his Raison d'etre elsewhere. Good for him.

UPDATE

I've linked here to an adweek story/blog about the "midlife crisis" aspect of this, with some more "in" stuff.

August Surprise: Home Bailouts?

Maybe the administration has a new bailout program in store, for homeowners and the building industry.

Instead of an October Surprise, we might get an August Surprise.

Does this have anything to do with illegal immigration?

Scary stuff: State per capita borrowing

OK, so we all know about the NATIONAL debt, and Freddie and Fannie, etc. And we know that Medicare and Social Security are going to be on a pay-as-you-go basis any time now. Got that.

But NOW it's time to think about bailing out the states.

For all of you who've said "who cares" about how the folks in California or New Yawk decide to run their states, now is the time to start "caring."

CNN has an interactive map of state borrowings per capita. I think the map is instructional in several ways. Note that those with the highest numbers are also those states with the largest union representation in their employee ranks. Also, those states that are borrowing the most heavily are the most hostile to markets and business via taxes or regulations or whatever. Finally, those "in-the-red" blue states are the most generous and "inclusive" with social programs, environmental restrictions and often consider the most "progressive."

If "progressive" means that they're more like Europe, then maybe that's the right word to use.

Summer youth program trains protesters (nothing new, by the way)

Reports today of a summer youth employment racket that uses teens for protesting. Nice.

Our tax dollars paying for protesters so they can lobby for more of our tax dollars.

This is the kind of thing that De Tocqueville warned us about. Once the productive are out of the cycle of paying attention, it feeds on itself. ACORN is another good example.

NYT on Autism

An interesting piece on a different approach to helping kids with high-functioning autism. Good for them.

It's "different" because a lot of public schools just figure out ways to warehouse autistic children because they don't know what else to do with them.

Just so we're clear on plagiarism and intellectual property

NYT has another piece on cheating, this time it's plagiarism directly.

I'm really really tired of hearing about how this "new generation" doesn't have a frame of reference for citation and attribution, they just "don't understand" the whole idea of academic citation and why it's right & necessary.

You know what? It's our JOB to TEACH THEM ABOUT IT. I didn't have a frame of reference, either, until about the 6th grade or so. Then one of our teachers taught us about citations and how to do a bibliography. Then Su Harrington made us do bibliographies for our regional science fair stuff a couple of years later, etc.

Duh.

The implication from many in our field, and in library science, and in writing instruction, it seems, is that we're just supposed to accommodate students who don't know how to cite properly, or overlook those (worse) who don't know how to write without plagiarizing or take tests without cheating.

This implication is becoming more and more explicit every semester, especially with the move to "online" instruction. Taking precautions to make sure that students don't cheat or plagiarize gets tougher all the time. Thankfully, UHCL is always honing the system and making it easier to catch cheaters (through automatic Web scanning for papers, for example).

How about this:

If we think students are plagiarizing, we gig them and hold them accountable. Radical, huh? If we think students are cheating in our online classes, we take steps to stop them. Let's not pat them on the head and say it isn't THEIR fault, let's stop the behavior and show them different ways to do things.

Their souls are at stake, literally. How do cheaters FEEL about their cheating? How does cheating impact their self-image, now and later?

We know that these students can DO the work if motivated and monitored properly. We've all seen it.

I say let's give students reasons to be PROUD of their work and their ability, rather than having them do things that will compromise their values (even if they don't know it at the time). Don't let them cheat, don't make cheating OK by looking the other way, etc.

How about THAT for a philosophy of teaching?