Monthly Archives: July 2011

An Autopsy On Borders.

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Borders booksellers has declared bankruptcy. This is a blow for all readers, who are unhappy at the loss of any bookstore and delighted at the opening of any one any place, even if there are four already on the block, like Dunkin’ Donuts. It was far from a surprise. The chain had been on life support for a while and the company’s plan to get out of trouble boiled down to praying for a miracle. Or maybe a pilgrimage someplace. But, that didn’t happen and what once was a very hot property indeed suffered the final indignity of not receiving even one bid on the crucial make or break weekend. No Hollywood ending there. So, what happened? The Scholarly Kitchen has a post in which the medical examiner provides a plausible cause of death. It boils down to screw-ups by management. There, I said it and I’m glad. Yes, the people who draw the big salaries and are supposed to have all the business acumen, derived from a steady climb through the ranks in various industries were completely at sea and utterly let down the company and the 10,000 or so employees working for it. You won’t see any cover stories about this in Fortune or Business Week, since they only profile rising execs, like those in, oh, say Enron…remember Enron. That outfit won “most innovative” or some other stupid award several years in a row. Nobody could really figure out what they were doing, but it was innovative, and “my God, how the money rolls in!” as the old song put it. So, the SK analyst hangs the burden of failure right around management’s neck. They didn’t figure out what was going on in publishing until way, way too late. They didn’t get serious about offering an e-reader, they farmed out their online ordering business to, da dah! Amazon. So a customer figures, why am I dealing with these jokers if I have to go to Amazon? Amazon has ‘other’ stores it reps for…the second hand dealers, and Borders managed to get themselves ranked with them. And they opened too many stores. But, there’s something else that doesn’t come out in the SK story. The management which, justly, catches hell was itself under tremendous stress and strain. CEOs came and went pretty quickly. Maybe once they got on board and learned what was going on they figured they were dealing with a corpse and jumped as fast as they could. At any rate, add all these things up and you get one sick puppy. B&N seems to have weathered the blast, so far anyway. But I have to say that I’m finding myself disappointed when I go in there to buy something. The nearest store is pretty big, lotsa books, but, for me at least the subject distributions are all skewed. WAY,WAY too much “Self help” and “Inspiration”, only fair history, really lousy Lit-crit and serious essay. “We can order for you….” well, yeah. I can order for myself. The gift card works that way too. Or maybe I’ll just go to Amazon.

Autopsy

By the way, my wife and I stopped into the local Borders, which has big signs in the windows… Going Out of Busines…40% off.. Well, no, not really. SOME, FEW things are 40% off, but most are about 10% or maybe nothing off. Things may change as the clearance goes on and the need to vacate gets more urgent. I have to say, it left a little bad taste. Caveat emptor

Science As A Low-Yield Activity?

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There are more scientists around than there ever have been. Immense sums are being spent on it. So, what are all these people coming up with? What are they all doing? With so many resources and so many people, discoveries should be coming thick and fast, right? So, why aren’t they? Some people are asking that quite seriously. One investigator has some ideas and some charts that seem to show science heading southeast…that is, down a gradient and sliding to the right, to zero. One answer may be that all the easy stuff has been done. The bodies big organs have been found, the big planets discovered. That thing about the fruit, you know? From now on, it will be much tougher. Much. Science has now to concern itself increasingly with the teeny, the almost disappearing. Progress will be slow, major discoveries infrequent and probably not on the scale of the great successes of the past. So, what does that portend for all the bees buzzing in the science hive? Can you get along with a lot fewer bees and with a much smaller and less expensive hive? We have been experience less a growth in knowledge than a tremendous increase in publication. Or so says this group. I’m not convinced. It’s interesting to hear that view, though. Not so many years ago nobody would have dared say it. I’m not entirely happy with the assumptions in the article referred to below. There seems a kind of obvious, almost trite, character to saying that we’ve found all the big critters, existing and extinct, so now it’s on to microbes or nonobes or whatever. More equipment than a pick and shovel for that one.
Read the post and see what you think.

Low

A New Internet?

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It’s been the subject of discussion, a lot of discussion. Any number of project plans, maps, charts and schemes appeared, strutted their brief hour upon the stage and then were heard no more. But some really serious experimenting has been going on too and there is a short item in Technology Review that discusses at lest some aspects of this, and reveals some mouth-watering capabilities, if it all can be assembled. An test bed for experiments will be built out of dark fiber:optical cable that was laid back in the hot, hot, hot days of the Dot. Com and then had to be sold off cheap when the bubble burst. A good deal of concern centers on the performance of the transmission control protocols, which have to be able to function in an ultra-high bandwidth environment. So, it’s not all gloom and doom. Somebody is thinking ahead and actually doing something.

Internet2

Ziggy, Bill and the White Stuff.

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Sigmund Freud and William Halsted were contemporaries, physicians and very influential. They had one other thing in common: they were both cocaine addicts. At the beginning of the 20th century, cocaine had only recently been synthesized, and not much was known about it, especially about its side effects. The drug was the subject of medical musing and investigation, including a great deal of self-experimentation. Freud played with it as a stimulant, and Halsted, a surgeon, was interested in its anesthetic properties. Both became hooked in short order.After a number of years of dependency, Freud managed to get free,  by almost constant work and a tremendous exercise of self-discipline. Halsted almost ruined his  career and had the double misfortune to be treated for his addiction by some guy who substituted for it a dependency on opium. Great.  Halsted had to battle two addictions. His friend William Welch saved him from the trash heap and maybe worse, by bringing him down to Baltimore. Welch got him going again at Johns Hopkins, where he gradually revolutionized the practice of surgery from a process based on speed to one of careful planning and deliberate, almost plodding steps to reduce tissue damage and minimize blood loss. With the patient under anesthetics, there was less need for haste. Halsted remained a ‘high functioning’ addict and at times would go off on drug toots that lasted for days. Staffers covered for him, so the real story never came out.
A new book explores the careers, and the drug life, of both men. The author suggests that whatever they may have said or written, their previous addiction to cocaine continued to influence what they did and how they thought almost to the end of their lives. The fact that both men were abusers is not news. But the book seems to bring a different interpretation of the facts, and suggest that Snow White stayed with them much longer and more intimately than they recognized.

AN ANATOMY OF ADDICTION Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine
By Howard Markel Illus . 314 pages. Pantheon Books. $28.95.

Review

Sherwin Nuland

A Digital Drawing And Writing Pad? It’s Coming?

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So is Christmas, as the wise guy says, to express annoyance at the slow pace of some process or event. In this case the even is the availability of a device that will let people write,draw, doodle, sketch etc, the way they can now on paper. The current versions of e-paper have some serious limitations on this score, but the market research seems to show that quite a number of people would be pleased to have something like that handy, if the performance features were adequate and the price right. Whether you can but the reviewer’s prediction that people really want to digitize everything, and that a useful machine of this kind would mean the end of paper is another question. I’m not so sure, but then I’m an old coot and I kind of like paper. On the other hand, even reducing the amount of paper produced and used would be a great thing for our environment. Librarians, archivists and documentarians might not be quite so enthusiastic, but there could be niches and niches.

All early days, as I keep saying, but very much worth watching.

No Paper

Apple Offers New OS…Lion.

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Apple has a long lead on some of the other outfits in the computer biz. The success of the Ipad has been very great, but that hasn’t stopped product development. An updated OS, called Lion by the company, is now available and some of the reviews are coming in. Facing-both-ways would be be the best way to describe what I have seen so far. That hasn’t been many, admittedly. Wired has a long product evaluation, and the tech guy of the New York Timeshas one in today’s business section. Apple seems to be forcing the pace on a couple of counts: the push to ‘the Cloud’ (an inane phrase if ever there was one), and on touch-screen interfaces. Apparently the company believes that the convergence of the PC and the portable tablet type device can be speeded up. All very interesting.  Wired review

Times review

Open Access Activist Raids JSTOR.

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JSTOR is the online archive of electronic journal articles of scholarly character. It was set up as a non-profit company that would see to the preservation of and long-term access to important content in the academic record. Well, recently one Jason Schartzman, who has declared himself an Open Access crusader was pinched by the Feds for breaking into MIT’s computer network entering the Library’s subscription to JSTOR and downloading a very large number of articles. He did it as a protest against the lack of access to content that is behind pay walls. He thinks all these items should be freely accessible. The Feds disagree and a task-force of the US Constabulary arrested him and charged him with a laundry list of crimes. He pleaded not guilty and was released on 100K bail. There is a large segment of the academic community which agrees with him, but not with breaking into your school’s mainframe, or gathering a lot of material surreptitiously. The defendant has been in the spotlight before, with other internet exploits. It seems that this latest escapade was more of a PR stunt to dramatize the need for open access. But folks inclined to imitate should be aware that things like this can turn sour very quickly. Many campuses have armed police officers who are supposed to be checking up on things such as who’s on campus with burglar tools and a big satchel. All the downloaded material was returned to JSTOR. But, that’s not the only player. I think MIT might want to have a word to say here.

Borders To Close.

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Borders Booksellers will close up shop after the failure of any buyers to emerge and save the troubled chain at the last minute. Previous efforts to save the company were rejected by the bankruptcy court as inadequate, and over the crucial days of last weekend, no further offers were received. So, probably starting on Friday, the stores will begin to liquidate, terminate and vacate. The entire operation should be wound up by September. The other big book retailer may come forward to buy certain locations, but that won’t save the company. Borders went a long way on its initial reputation as a kind of ‘third place’; not home, not work, but a comfortable space in which to hang out, play board games, have a snack, meet dates, and all in a very nice, quiet, non boozed-soaked atmosphere. You could even buy a few books. It was all very civilized and people loved it, so the chain expanded and expanded. Then came a series of events that were body-blows: books could be bought online much more cheaply, other retailers went for the calm, inviting, quiet thing and they started to expand too. There was a protracted period of management shake-ups and uncertainty and confusion. E-readers further drained the pool of potential customers. Add ‘em all up and you have trouble. I always liked Borders, and I tried to share my trade between them and B&N. The company didn’t help itself at all with all the changes in administration, and they clearly missed the digital wave almost entirely. It’s destructive capitalism, and there’s no point in being sentimental about it, although I am. About 400 stores will close and 11,000 people will lose their jobs.

Borders

Passing On The Big Deal.

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It had to happen, and it did. Academic libraries are working really hard to abandon what has become known in the trade ad the Big Deal. TBD is a package-purchase of all, or a large part of, a particular publisher’s titles in a particular area. TBD has been a feature of serials acquisition in academic libraries since the switch from print to digital publication formats began to gather steam. In TBD, a publisher offers a university library a large number of journals, bundled in a take-all agreement. The plus for the school is in getting a lot of content in e-format. TBD was usually accompanied by a price break, at least initially, and perhaps over several years. The drawback was that the school HAD to accept a number of titles it would not otherwise have purchased. Moreover, the price for the TBD would escalate as the agreement expired and was renewed. Publishers liked TBD because it gave a steady revenue stream, even for some or the weaker titles. Since the school couldn’t cancel unused or little-used journals, at least not without a penalty, libraries had to support these as well as those their constituents wanted. And the cost escalator was a real problem for the budget. But the recent hard times have led to a reappraisal of TBD. A couple of academic libraries have dumped it, because there was simply no way to sustain the drain on their budgets. And these pioneers won’t be alone for very long. Publishers are scrambling to come up with ways to defuse the flight from TBD, but the fiscal situation is really bad and many libraries are using it as the opportunity to undo a practice that many found was gradually eating up the resources budget. Libraries were apprehensive about faculty and student resistance, but in the places that have given up TBD, there seems to have been little of that. The so-called serials crisis has been shoving academic libraries into a corner for a long while now, and there isn’t too much real estate left to surrender. So, we’ll see. There is a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about this:

Deal

Thorough Review Of Google’s E-Reader.

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Recently I blogged about the release of yet another e-reader, and one with some real clout behind it. I’m talking about the device called Story launched by Google. Ars Techinca is a very good site and one that I don’t  work with enough, and I stumbled on a review there which is much more than a list of specifications copied from the manufacturer’s handout. This one is especially good because it’s a head-to-head between the Google product and the Kindle, which is still a potent contender for the crown in the reader-only market. It’s very odd to see Google moving to a one function device, while Amazon is planning, or is said to be planning, a movie in the other direction, toward a multi-purpose tablet. But, I digress. Get yourself a comfy chair and something pleasant to drink. Then take your time with this article and see what you think. I’ll enter a spoiler here; the reviewer likes some things and disliked others. Story got high grades for screen readability, but got marked down on the lack of some functions, such as adding notes and searching, both of which Kindle can do. Oh, the page turning routine in the new product is very good, with no flashing white screen. There’s something here for the other guys to think about.

Story