I have a houseful of visitors here in the Keys. I don’t understand that. In our more than 30 years in Vermont, we can count our out-of-state visitors on our fingers. Here in Paradise, visitors are numbered like grains of sand. Anyway, our friend Missy noticed that I was “up bloody early” today (Biff was still snoring then).
“No,” I told Missy. “It is the clock that has changed. I’m up at the exact same [solar] time I get up every morning.”
Thanks to the visitors, I was actually late-ish getting to bed last night and therefore late-ish getting to sleep. Late-ish is defined as early-ish by Daylight Savings standards but later in terms of the hour at which I planned to arise. The alarm makes sure I rise correctly no matter how long the temptations of the night before seduce me.
Farmers have lived according to the sun for as long as there has been fixed base agriculture. Although my great-grandfather was a dairy farmer — I grew up on the last few acres of his farm, then made a home on the last few acres of a former Vermont dairy farm — I do not farm. I prefer sleeping in and generally like to roll out of bed about 30 seconds before I have to go to work. It also means I can see the sunset, the moonrise, and the clocks strike midnight.
Clock setting is arbitrary, all because somebody in “the dawn of time” jammed a stick in the ground and decided that getting his farm workers up at 4 ayem was a good idea. Some of us don’t agree. Russia’s 11 time zones are all an hour ahead of the corresponding standard time zones and double that during DST.
Ben Franklin wrote satirically that Parisians should go green and save candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. He didn’t seriously propose Savings Time, though, no matter what you read on the Internoodle. That honor falls to George Hudson, an amateur New Zealand entomologist who wanted to collect insects in after-work daylight.
I don’t understand why we don’t just choose a time we like permanently.
Arizona, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, most Indiana on Eastern Time, don’t switch their clocks. Arizona remains on Mountain Standard Time year round. They, along with India, China, and Japan are the major industrialized states that are constant UTC+something 12 months out of 12, while the rest of us spend seven months of the year with “extra” daylight and nearly five months without.
Not even all of Arizona is exempt. The Navajo Nation does observe. The Navaho have the largest land area of any Native American jurisdiction within the United States with 26,000 square miles that covers all of northeastern Arizona, the southeastern portion of Utah, and northwestern New Mexico.
Changing the clocks irritates me but I’m not rabid about sticking on solar time except I have a regular morning phone call with one of the non-mainstream states.
A friend who lives there “finds it irritating that we have to rearrange our meetings every time all y’all flip to another time, and irritating that I have to think “Is it two or three hours different when I call my dad? Is it one hour or the same when I call my daughter or mother?”
Exactly.
My choice is to synch my own schedule rather than force the others on that call to rearrange theirs.
It just seems bloody early to start the morning to Sally. And to me.
For the record, my European web host thought this post went up at 13:00.
“I have to switch back to my iPod, since my audio book is on that device,” Liza Arden told me. “I can listen to it in iTunes and on my iPod, but not on my Android phone because Audible dot com does not provide multiple versions when you purchase a la carte.”
Elizabeth “Liza” Arden is an engineering manager with a long commute, a gymnast, and no relation to the cosmetic maven.
She still likes print on paper but is more likely to read with her ears or on a device.
Liza may be one reason Dorchester Publishing has stopped printing its bread-and-butter “mass market” paperback books as it transitions to e-books and “trade” sized paperbacks.
The typical mass market paperback uses cheaper paper, has few illustrations, and smaller print, all to fit the story into the smaller (usually about 4″ x 7″) book. The larger trade paperback are usually printed on better paper and have font and line spacing similar to a hardcover book.
E-book revenue has gone from 0.5 per cent of publisher revenue about two years ago to nearly 10 per cent now. According to a recent Harris Interactive poll of 2,775 American readers, 8% of the reading population uses e-books already and those reading electronically are reading more books more often. Popular e-readers are available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and applications are available for computers, iPads, smartphones, and PDAs.
I have that gut feel as well although the numbers are probably closer than we think. Typical trade margin ranges between 37% discount and 50%. Most popular books cost the publisher half the cover but reference titles typically run 37%. Wholesalers work on low single digit spreads. Co-op is another 3-5 points at most publishers.
Printing costs (meaning for a physical book) also include the cost of returns and warehousing. There is a non-negligible “warehousing” cost for the server farm and Internet infrastructure for an e-book. The biggest problem with trade publishing and the reason it is a single digit net margin business is returns which can run as high as 40%. These are good numbers:
by %
in $
Book List Price
100%
$6.99
to retailer
50%
3.50
printing
8%
0.56
inventory and obsolescence
10%
0.70
royalties
7%
0.49
sales and marketing
10%
0.70
overhead and warehousing
10%
0.70
co-op
2%
0.14
editorial
4%
0.28
If you noticed, the publisher’s cost adds up to more than the 50% “take.” The actuality is that some of the fixed costs (like printing) really is fixed based on run size and other constant costs (like , overhead, and editorial) probably are indeed fixed for any issue, meaning it costs, say, $1,000 to edit a book. That’s the reason a mass market paperback now costs $7.95-9.95 instead of $1.50-3.95. Ditto the $6.99 e-book cost.
Let’s consider that from the e-book side. These are made up numbers but pretty accurate:
by %
in $
Book List Price
100%
$6.99
to online retailer
50%
3.50
royalties
20%
1.40
sales and marketing
15%
1.05
overhead and warehousing
10%
0.70
editorial
4%
0.28
There’s the potential for actual profit in there.
Founded in 1971, Dorchester is the oldest independent mass-market publisher in the U.S. Their romance line has included Christine Feehan, Jayne Ann Krentz, Katie MacAlister, Lynsay Sands, and more. The private company specializes in mass-market paperback fiction in romance, horror, Westerns and thriller genres. They also distribute pulp mysteries of the Hard Case Crime line and the Family Doctor series.
Dorchester sees the market soaring as more devices, apps, and programs become available. They predict that e-reader and e-book sales will continue to increase. The company will also offer print-on-demand (paper) copies for selected titles through Ingram Publisher Service. Some e-books that sell well will also be released as P-O-D trade paperbacks.
Dorchester’s e-books are available at most major vendors and compatible with most platforms at an average price of $6.99. Trade paperbacks will be priced in the $12 to $15 range.
Romance novels. Science fiction. Textbooks. Mainstream fiction. Are newspapers next?
Four years ago, IFRA — the newspaper trade group in Germany — and The New York Times started looking at De Tijd “e-paper” devices.
What a lousy idea that is!
Let’s imagine, just for a moment, that I’m the typical book-or-newspaper reader today. I have a few minutes here, a few there to read. I might take a little downtime at my desk. I’ll poop at least once for a few uninterrupted minutes in the “reading room.” I’ll stand in line at the grocery store, do 40 flights on the stair climber, and commute to work.
I absolutely do not want yet another device just to read my newspaper on.
“My desk has a computer that I usually stare at; I want what I’m reading right there,” Liza said. She won’t take her laptop to the reading room, so “I want today’s tome on my (waterproof) smartphone for that or for standing in line. Sitting by the pool is a great place for a full size e-book. Drive time isn’t, but that is perfect for an audio book. So is going to the gym.”
Americans once had a love affair with multi-featured gadgets. I have a Shopsmith, for example, that my grandfather built furniture with in the fifties and my father cut two fingers off with in the sixties. I still have all my appendages. The Shopsmith is a lathe-based woodworking tool with a single motor that drives its lathe, tablesaw, drill press, horizontal boring mill, and disc sander. Like MS-DOS, you have to stop using one tool to mount, setup, and use the next.
Most of us today have individual tools, hence our pockets and purses crammed with smart phones, iPods, netbooks, and Kindles.
A monthly Audible contract would give Liza access to multiple versions of a file but even that offers Mac, Windows, or Linux computer and iPod files, but not for computers, iPod and any additional MP3 devices. Audible also offers a monthly subscription to The New York Times Audio Digest.
The book publishing and the newspaper industries can make both the Shopsmith owner and Liza happy.
Bundling.
Dear publisher:
I can nuke my TV dinner or cook it in the oven. Surely you can do the same.
When I buy my next book, I want a printed book on actual paper. I want an e-book in the three major formats. An audiobook on CD, AAC, and mp3. And a cross-platform app for my computer and my PDA or smartphone. All in that one package.
I am pugnaciously pissed by parking pad pulverizers. They don’t have their pinkies on the pulse of passengers pressured and pushed to be pedestrians. In fact, their pundits want to punish by puncturing our pickups and sending them to perdition.
I think they’re just punks.
The Burlington Free Press reports that cars claim about 24 acres in Burlington, Vermont’s, municipal lots and spaces based on the area of a typical 10-foot by 20-foot parking space.
Burlington celebrated global “PARK(ing) Day” last week. The five-year-old secular holiday aims steal back automobile parking spaces and reallocate them as something else.
My mom always said, “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Science has shown that idiom to be factually wrong, at least for fruit flies; the tiny fruit fly likes sweet balsamic and apple cider vinegars better than honey, perhaps because the vinegar is easier to sip. Or because they like, well, fruit.
Anyway, Mom’s human relations rule proffers that we should not provoke the very people we want to persuade.
The PARK(ing) holiday began in 2005 when San Francisco art and design studio Rebar Group converted one nearby parking space into a mini park. They added a roll-in tree, a park bench, and laid sod atop the asphalt. Rebar maintained the “park” for just two hours. This year Burlington, Hangzhou, China, and Tehran held their first events.
It appears PARK(ing) organizers don’t care what we do with the “reclaimed” parking spaces as long as we don’t let cars use them.
One Burlington bright spot has occupied a “car-sized space” on Cherry Street for about a year. Outdoor Gear Exchange reduced the space for its truck loading zone, added a car parking space there, and installed a grand multi-bicycle “parking station” in front of their own store. It’s a bright spot because no one drives any farther to park and we have made room for additional green uses.
Want to persuade parkers? Pilfer a bit of pedestrian pathway next to the parking plot you want to point out and create your public park there. People will get the point. Particularly when they park right next to you.
Parkers have a sweet tooth (after all, there are never any empty spaces in front of Maple City Candies in St Albans), so my mom wasn’t wrong. Making me drive around burning gas to park somewhere else is more of a stick than a carrot cake and is unlikely to make me plug or praise your paradoxical-parking project.
Come to think of it, I am downright vexed. See, everywhere I look, people are trying to exasperate me and that just pisses me off.
BP, the company so many Americans have come to hate. They screwed up. The government screwed up. And the public got screwed. Meanwhile, 153 days of media coverage exacerbated the anger and fanned the flames. BP blamed the government which aggravated everybody. People on the ground blamed BP which antagonized BP but pleased pretty much everyone else. The media blitzed the scientists by offering conflicting reports, then blaming the experts for not knowing the answers. They took science down another notch which irks me. Lot of anger in that paragraph.
Anybody been to court lately? When our Visigoth neighbors decided some of our land was their land, they dragged us before the local zoning board, then sued us in both Vermont’s Superior and Environmental courts. They lied which inflamed me. I resisted which affronted them. Lot of anger in that paragraph.
“The only litigation more contentious than a divorce is a boundary line dispute,” our lawyer said. He, at least, was happy.
It goads people (“goad,” not “goat,” although it probably gets some goats, too) when I say this but Islam galls us. Some Muslims enrage us. One of the reasons they do, aside from claiming “religion of peace” status whilst trying to kill us, is simple: raving Muslim terrorists stir up embittered Muslim illiterates to blast unsuspecting Americans while ruffled rank-and-file Muslims stand idly by. Lot of anger in that paragraph.
Jealousy. There’s a biggie. In another arena gekko said “jealousy became more important than the relationships I craved.” Proverbs reminds us that Anger is cruel and destructive, but it is nothing compared to jealousy. Still, when Anthony Lozano threatened, bound, and tortured his girlfriend who eventually escaped the home they shared, all allegedly because he found a post on her Facebook page from another man, he certainly acted out his exasperation, irritation, and temper.
Take politics (sounds like a Henny Youngman joke). Here in Vermont, Demorat Peter Shumlin is riling his supporters (and the opposition) to a full boil over the Repuglican Brian Dubie’s hateful stand to renew the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant license. Mr. Dubie has maddened his supporters (and the opposition) by calling Mr. Shumlin a liar and a liberal. Lot of anger in that paragraph.
I’m a political junkie. I have chaired political committees, sat in political booths at field dayses, and walked the streets registering voters. I have run for office. I am now a “Librarian” but I started out as a Republican. I stuck it out until the party started to rant and rankle. I generally like the ideas individual Tea Party peeps discuss, but the Tea Party as a whole scares me because they monger anger. Their invective leverages agitation, outrage, and seething, steaming umbrage to whip voters into the mob frenzy independent of the thought process.
All extremists favor those tactics. The media who know that ifyoubleed, it leads. The lawyers who charge by the infuriating hour. The religious freaks who bristle over a Bris. The control freaks who flip over Facebook. And the politicians, whether they be home grown “officials,” terrorist fanatics, miffed militia men, or radical revolutionaries.
Provocation pays.
Here’s my plan for the 43 days until November 2 (and all the days in the future):
If you are in the media and you pump out lies designed to get on my nerves, you will succeed and I will not buy from your sponsors.
If you belong to an extremist religion and continue to support the people who want to kill me, it will offend me and I will ask that you lose your tax exempt status.
If you are a politician seeking my vote, stop. If you name your opponent it will anger me and I willwrite my own namein on the ballot.
Breaking News:
I am just sooooooooo tired of these airheads: The NYTimes reports that, “Democrats are deploying the fruits of a yearlong investigation into the business and personal histories of Republican candidates in an effort to plant doubts about them.” !@#$%^ing !@#$%^ers.
Monogamists and polyamorists agree that home cooking is marvelous but polyamorists also like to dine out with close friends.
“At least 95 percent of married and cohabitating Americans expect sexual exclusivity,” said Judy Treas, professor of sociology at UC-Irvine, told ABC News .
“If only we could all free ourselves from the cultural brainwashing — almost put cultural brainwishing, and now I think, yeah that too!” correspondent Becky Sue wrote.
Last week, I changed our correspondents’ names to protect their Internet anonymity. Many polyamorists do not publicize their relationship status and many monogamous folks do not want to publicize their comments online.
Also last week, Anne told us she has not accepted my relationship with Nancy although she, Anne, originally gave it her blessing. We all hoped that she, Anne, would see this as an opportunity for growth, a way deepen our marriage and our friendship and not simply a way to “go screw [somebody] and get her out of your system.”
1. But what if you’re not married? How can you have any stake in the outcome? Anne certainly has a stake in the outcome.
“When we became friends,” correspondent Jamie wrote, “we were both at points in our lives where we were on the precipice of major decisions.” Those choices included “whether to do marriage, kids, conventional careers.
“I think we both were doing something at the time that was completely counter to any of that,” she continued. “The research project was something just for us, something that fed us. The draw for both of us was that neither one of us would be directly affected no matter what we decided to do with our lives, so it was safe to dither about them to each other. It allowed us to relax, I think. It allowed us to let that part of our brains develop in a safe place.”
But there was no stake.
“For me, later, it also gave me a place internally to go when I feel like all that creativity and spark is gone and remind myself that it’s always there. That’s a powerful thing. And the fact that there’s a person out there who kind of has a stake in that, or had a part in helping me develop that, is helpful.”
That’s a stake in the creation but no ownership in the outcome.
That isn’t enough.
A stakeholder /n/ is a person who affects or can be affected by changes in a relationship.
2. Why should poly people marry?
I can answer that question only for a civil marriage, not the religious ceremony. If God expects you to marry to sanctify your relationship, do so. It will make you, your spouse, and God, happier. The fact is that marriage in and of itself has little or nothing to do with love.
Perhaps you want personal or spiritual growth, to stabilize a relationship, to conform to your religious or political beliefs, a sexual guarantee, or you simply fall in love. Those are pretty much the same reasons people offer to explain any marriage.
Readers might expect age-related answers. People of child-bearing/child-rearing years have certain needs. People our post-child age have some different needs but I was surprised by the similarity of their lists:
Commitment: This state of being obligated or emotionally impelled or pledged to a partner raises the stakes that each spouse will celebrate the bad times as well as the good with you and whatever family you create.
Continuity: Discontinuity is the Victorian standard (grow up, break away from your family, marry, have kids, divorce, marry again, perhaps divorce again, die alone). Most people crave continuity (stay connected to family, school friends, political systems, jobs, and lovers). A marriage contract offers the appearance of continuity. And the expectation of growing old together.
Financial Security: Two cannot live a cheaply as one but they can come close. My parents grew up “making do” in the Great Depression; I moved to a state, Vermont, where making do is the warp of the fabric of life. Sharing expenses is as natural as fixing a tractor here. The economy of scale, even a scale of two, ranges in everything from a single roof over two heads to buying better cuts of meat to sharing health insurance.
HIPAA: The Privacy Rule under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulates the disclosure of medical info held by health care clearinghouses and providers, health insurers, and the like. Protected Health Information (PHI) is interpreted very broadly and generally excludes non-family members from receiving any information about a critically ill loved one. Not to mention the fact that (“unrelated”) loved ones generally never get to see or help an ill partner.
Mandated sex: In marital law in some states, constructive desertion defines spousal misconduct so extensive that it makes marital relations impossible. The essential definition is one spouse leaving the marital relationship without leaving the marital home. The willful refusal of sex is often cited. Nagging is usually not legitimate misconduct.
If withholding of sex is grounds for divorce, the opposite argument must be true: the state mandates that sex must be part of a legal marriage.
Sharing: The marriage(s) in this example need not be group marriages where three or more adult partners live together in one household with more than one or two incomes going into keeping the home (the typical American struggle is a husband and wife fighting to pay the mortgage with one or two incomes, or with zero or one in this recession). The partnership adds playmates or supervisors for the kids and someone else to hold the ladder during home maintenance projects.
“In marriage you just have to learn the rules,” Jeff Foxworthy says. “Rule number one is, If she ain’t happy, you ain’t happy!”
Get married to be happy, not to be in love.
3. Why should poly people NOT marry?
“The other question I have [is] if you desire this lifestyle, why be married?” correspondent Charlie asked some time ago.
“You shouldn’t unless you want to,” Nancy said.
Some, like me, probably do want to. That and my innate desire to share the things that bring us great joy, to shout from the rooftops, “I love this person!”
Some, like Nancy, may not want to. That doesn’t negate her innate desire to share the things that bring us great joy, to shout from the rooftops, “I love this person!”
Economics may put the kibosh on marriage today.
The economics of retirement can force our elders away from marriage and the marital advantages. Matrimony can screw up retirement benefits, inheritances or wealth preservation, and interactions with adult children. And, while I approve of pre-nups and particularly Nancy’s proposal of a specific contract of financial and end-of-contract obligations, I suspect a marriage that needs the responsibilities for who pops the popcorn spelled out in triplicate is doomed.
The economics of state and Federal taxes means some couples actually send more money to their various governments when “married filing jointly” than as “single” filers.
Government policy drives living in sin. Imagine that.
4. Commitment issues: Should poly people have ‘civil unions’ or ‘domestic partnerships’ instead?
A civil partnership, civil union, or domestic partnership is a legal relationship between two individuals who live together and share a common domestic life but are joined by neither marriage nor a civil union. In California a Domestic Partnership possesses all of the rights and privileges of a Marriage.
Neither chicken dance nor birdseed required.
The advantage to a legal partnership is that it offers the commitment, continuity, financial security and medical benefits, and sharing of a legal marriage without some of the baggage. The disadvantage to a legal partnership is that not many states have it for heterosexual couples and no state allows “group partnerships.”
There is another, personal, reason for making a marriage or other partnership. While I don’t feel a sense of ownership in marriage, I do like the sense of belonging.
[Editors Note: gekko and I shared a four-part polylocution plus these Afterglow posts. Please visit her companion piece, In Jealousy There Is Self-Love, and use The Poly Posts index for the entire series and for other resources.]
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