Courtesy of....

If you ever wander over to HuPo, you may or may not have noticed that some of the content is... well...a bit lightweight? silly? lowbrow? Obviously the 'liberal elite's' idea of McDonald's-like entertainment. Not that there's anything wrong with that (actually there is, but we won't go there for the moment).

Now HuPo has proven over the last couple of years to be a reliable way of accessing media content that would otherwise be behind a user-pay wall. Quite whether this will continue after Rup's declared intent to make us pay, yes pay damn you, and having pointed his bony finger specifically at HuPo as a web parasite gaining advantage from his product, well that remains to be seen.

Most of the time, the silly item or photos involves a celebrity from Blue Springs, Nebraska caught eating in public or look, another twenty funny photos of losers trying to drive to work in the snow. To the point where you begin to wonder if the compilation of the funny things list is the province of the work experience kid. HuPo is not the threat to the American Way of Life as Rush Limbaugh would have us believe, but it does carry some damned odd items for a news & opinion site of its supposed reach.

Anyway today's funny list is comprised of about ten photos of fat animals. Some of which appear to the naked eye to not be any fatter than you imagine them to usually be but well as we can't laugh at fat people anymore, hey obviously the work experience kid thought let's laugh at fat animals. And then had trouble finding any images.

Except for the ubiquitous fat cat.

Which I LOL'd.




Apologies to Gary Larson.

The Lost

By sunset on February 8th, 2009, 173 people had died during the Black Saturday fires in Victoria. Another 420 or so were injured. Children were orphaned, people traumatised, communities demolished, and thousands upon thousands of acres burnt. The response from their fellow Australians saw millions of dollars of donations pour in, relief centres overwhelmed with supplies and offers of help and governments vowing to meet every recommendation to arise from the royal commission to follow.

It was a disaster, a natural disaster. Inevitable as the drought across Victoria ran on and on, year after year, and as the summer's pattern of high pressure cells wore on. It was also a man-made disaster as homes had been built with little thought about their vulnerability, lived in by people who did not have the skills, tools or support to 'stay and defend'. The disaster was also made by the response of those services given the task of protecting life and property over that weekend as Robert Manne's essay Why We Weren't Warned too eloquently relates.

But regardless of who did or didn't do what, 173 people died.

On the 19th of OCtober 2001, these children drowned. Along with 350 other people somewhere in waters to the north of Australia whilst attempting to gain asylum here on a boat later labelled by Australian authorities as SIEVX. The 353 people lost ranks as the second worst maritime disaster in Australian history. But most people who argue it wasn't really our disaster, wasn't really within our waters, just unfortunately within our border protection surveillance zone. Should a Bass Strait ferry sink, and search and rescue efforts were held up for 24 hours after the sinking, I strongly suspect the senior bureaucrat responsible for that decision would not some nine years later be a departmental secretary, having received the Public Service Medal in the year after the disaster.

Earlier today I received an email:

Subject: Call for assistance: Reconstructing a lost voyage

Dear all,

++++++++++++++++++
Reconstructing a lost voyage
++++++++++++++++++

==============================

=================
URGENT CALL: Please forward to your contacts in the Hazara community
===============================================

If you have any information about the issues outlined in this email, please let me know.

Contact: Jack H Smit - Project SafeCom - PO Box 364, Narrogin WA 6312
phone (08) 9881-5651 | mobile 0417 090 130

You may have seen our media release and subsequent media coverage of a lost boat that left Indonesia on October 2, 2009. At the end of this email is the media coverage thus far.

We now have independent confirmation - from an Australian family as well as from contacts in Afghanistan - from the family members of two passengers who have contacted their families before or on October 2 with the message that "they were now embarking" on a boat bound for Australia on 2 October with 105 passengers, all of them - or nearly all - Hazara asylum seekers from Afghanistan.

We do not as yet know from which Indonesian port the boat departed, but I have committed myself to reconstruct this voyage, a journey we never heard from again, and which now seems likely to have never reached Australian waters. One source has told us they had heard that the crew may had lost their orientation and had set off in the direction of Sri Lanka - but this is an unconfirmed story.

I have started building a database of presumed passengers and contact details of their family members.

Please contact me if you can help.

best regards,

Jack H Smit
Project SafeCom Inc.
http://www.facebook.com/l/124e2;www.safecom.org.au/
PO Box 364
Narrogin WA 6312

Australian media has begun to report the possible loss of this vessel since January 17th. Nor is it certain that it has been lost. But that asylum seekers, refugees are even willing to take this risk should speak so eloquently about their desperation that the bitter lies of sneaky queue-jumpers and sneakier terrorists should fade on the lips of the lie tellers. But they don't - from members of her majesty's opposition to the partly evolved life forms among the media, the demonisation of these people continues.

107 people may have drowned somewhere in the Triangle of the Lost in the last 12 weeks. We may never know where or when or how or even why. We may never know who they were. But while our troops are stationed on active duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our government like so many others, fails to press for a political solution to the current epidemic of Mad American Invaders Disease, these people are not someone else's problem. They are our missing, our children, our parents, our would-be neighbours and friends. Our lost.

Spilling Abbotts

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquistion.

Atom-smasher to help Liberals

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) says its Large Hadron Collider has "become the world's highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning".

A teraelectronvolt (TeV) is equivalent to the kinetik energy level of a flying mosquito, but the collider squeezes this energy into a much smaller space.

The successful attainment of reaching Mosquito Mach 1 will allow the device to be used during tomorrow morning's vote count in the Liberal Party room should a vote calling for a spill of leadership positions be successful.

CERN's physicists are unsure whether the device will be able to calculate voting in the Senate should the ETS legislation be put to the chamber. The massive experiment aims to resolve physics enigmas such as an explanation for "dark matter" and "dark energy" that account for 96 per cent of the cosmos, whether other dimensions exist parallel to our own and in which of these dimensions senior Liberal Party members reside.

The Holy Grail will be finding a theorised component called the Higgs Boson, which would explain how particles acquire mass, as well as the allegiances of all current Liberal MPs in the Federal Parliament. The elusive Higgs Boson has been dubbed the "Joe God particle Hockey".

Sending your camel to bed

In 1974, Maria Muldaur released Midnight at the Oasis. The lyrics were baffling and ridiculous. For years, I kept assuming I was mishearing it, as I frequently do with pop music. But as the lyrics below show, I probably wasn't.

Midnight at the oasis
Send your camel to bed
Shadows paintin' our faces
Traces of romance in our heads
Heaven's holdin' a half-moon
Shinin' just for us
Let's slip off to a sand dune, real soon
And kick up a little dust
Come on, Cactus is our friend
He'll point out the way
Come on, till the evenin' ends
Till the evenin' ends
You don't have to answer
There's no need to speak
I'll be your belly dancer, prancer
And you can be my sheik

The ongoing saga in the Liberal Party is making about as much sense as Maria Muldaur. I spent a good part of Thursday afternoon and evening following events on Twitter, various blogs and news sites with increasing astonishment. And I'm none the wiser as to whether the outrage sprouted by an increasing number of Liberal MPs is really about having ETS forced upon them in the party room, or Turnbull steamrolling them into it and obviously not saying pretty please.

Is all of this really a reflection of a flood of anxious voters burying their Liberal members under a torrent of emails, calls and letters, denouncing the decision to pass the legislation before Copenhagen? To pass ANY legislation which will attempt to ameliorate the likely impact of climate change by reducing emissions? Does it reflect the climate change denial temper of rank and file party members? Is it in part a reaction to seeing Turnbull pushing the party back toward a more centralist position after more than a decade of Howard's triumphant hard core conservatism?

Liberal Party internal polling was only a matter of weeks ago indicating that a failure to do something constructive on the issue of ETS would have painful electoral consequences. And yet the MPs who have resigned frontbench positions, who have called on Turnbull to renounce the party room vote on Tuesday and then politely resign and return to the backbench, are they all really responding to a tsunami of voter concern?

Turnbull sent McFarlane off to negotiate with Wong and an impressive raft of amendments was forthcoming. Presumably this was far more about Rudd & Labor being very careful to ensure that the Coalition or at the least the Liberals had some fingerprints at the scene and could share the pain if the proposed scheme turned into a dud (or worse still, it turns out that the warming of the planet is in fact being caused by a small colony of rebel Thetans holed up on Ganymede directing their heat ray lamps toward Earth) than about ensuring that the legislation is as tickety boo as it might be. It also neatly removed the need to negotiate with the Greens, Xenophon or Fielding - or attempt to.

Back the negotiated position came, the Gnats went berserk as one would expect and proceeded to speak in tongues which sound remarkably like the disembodied souls of coal producers. I have particularly enjoyed listening to numerous Gnats bemoaning the impact on farmers, ignoring the position of most farming bodies who are quite interested in being part of carbon trading as it is a good way to make money. Needless to say, the hairy chested Gnats must be delighted to see so many right thinking Liberals come to their senses since Tuesday.

Since Turnbull gave his Cesarean speech on Thursday evening, the stilettos have been circling. Will he stand aside? Will Hockey run? Will Abbott run? What about Kevin Andrews? The Liberals no longer have a leader in the Senate, and the much abused bill is due to be voted upon on Tuesday morning at 9.01am. The sheer utter bastardy of the timing by the government brings tears of joy to my eyes - how will the Liberal senators who for the most part seem to have sold their souls to Ol' Nick be in two places at once? The Senate chamber to vote on the bill, or the party room to vote for the next crash dummy to lead the Liberal Party to annihilation at the next election?

And should they succeed as they seem intent upon doing in waving Turnbull off the premises and installing Opposition Leader #3 since 2007, what consequences might be foreseen? Consequences of little importance apparently to the Liberal Party MPs. A Galaxy poll seems to indicate that there has been a shift among voters toward wishing for the ETS legislation to be held over til after Copenhagen. The Libs seem certain that this supports the groundswell of concern they claim is driving their actions. Australia should not act unilaterally and imperil its economic health by setting targets prejudicial to the primary industries upon which we are so reliant. So sayeth the few, brave and true. However this warm fuzzy assumption only holds if you can prove that it does not indicate voters' concern that the legislation may fail to meet targets set at Copenhagen, and that legislated targets such as Australia's may impede internationally negotiated reduction targets significantly more ambitious (and required) than those that will be achieved by the current bill.

Also unknown is the impact that the supposed scandal concerning the hacking & release of an awful lot of emails from Univ of East Anglia's CRU - sending shivers of delight down the vertebrae free back of persons such as Andrew Bolt. Trumpeting outtakes as proof of a conspiracy by climate scientists to do as mad scientists obviously must, which is to force mankind (gender specificity is intentional) back to the stone age. UAE has just announced that all data will be released, once publication releases have been sorted. I look forward to Mr Bolt's erudite and thorough analysis. To what degree this may have encouraged the deniers and skeptics among the Libs to cast off their cloaks of moderation is unclear. But as unpleasant as the view may be, at least we are now gazing upon all these would-be emperors in all their glorious naked splendour.

What will happen between now and Tuesday? I certainly have no idea. Presumably Dutton & Hockey have finished their soiree and as yet nothing has been announced. In some ways, it probably doesn't matter. The Liberal Party has by virtue of this astonishing mass temper tantrum ensured that they will not win the next Federal election even if they were led by Menzie's ghost. And I don't mean JWH. Whatever Turnbull's failings may be (and I do not think calling his Liberal playmates a bunch of dills a failing) he at least had the political nouce to accept that the Libs must battle the ALP for the centre. Their rusted on demographics are aging. For god's sake if their greatest living hero, JWH, could lose his own seat to a bloody ex-journalist, the penny should have dropped that perhaps the Australian voter does not share their interest in transplanted right wing political lunacies from the US.

The next 36 hours will be exciting, every political pundit and junkie's dream come true. The problem for the Liberal Party is that it will be the final act in assigning them to a self-induced oblivion. What will really matter is what is finally passed as our first national step in dealing with climate change.

Books for a pyrrhic burning

The decision last week of the Federal government to reject the recommendations of the Productivity Commission's report on parallel import restrictions re the Australian book industry has been hailed as a victory by many. The description of the decision as a pyrrhic victory on LP would seem to me more accurate.

Some of the arguments as to why PIRs should remain in place are creaky to say the least. The consequences are however much more worrying.

1. "The removal of PIRs will flood the Australian market with cheap imports which will kill the Australian publishing industry"

The failure to investigate this thoroughly raises both a failing in the PC report and within much of the debate that surrounded it. PIRs in and of themselves do not protect Australian publishing. They protect the territorial rights of editions within Australia - including those published in Australia but also editions published and printed overseas. Australian publishing and distribution are not the one and same thing.

Apart from the multinational-owned publisher/distributors and a very small number of independent publishers, most Australian publishers are not involved in the business of importing and distributing books other than their own. They do not derive any income in any way protected by PIRs. A common sentiment from this type of publisher was that the cheaper overseas titles would erode their market share. I struggle with this for two reasons - firstly, this seems to be based on the assumption that one book is replaceable in the customer's hand with any other. Books are not a generic consumer product - we buy a particular book for an infinite set of reasons, but it is not an indiscriminate purchase. And Australian book buyers are particularly attached to Australian content. Very little of which is published by anyone else other than Australian publishers. Secondly, it suggests that buyers are also motivated by price in a predictable manner, i.e that a cheaper edition of an overseas author's book will also lead to loss of market share, (a cheaper overseas book will replace a possible Australian purchase) I cannot disprove nor prove that assumption - neither can those arguing it - we simply cannot predict how a consumer will alter their buying patterns if PIRs were abolished. It is equally possible that a saving of $10 of an new title by say Arundhati Roy will see the book buyer purchase a second Australian published title.

As to the role that PIRs play in supporting the publishing programs of the multinationals, the report did not explore if and how the profits from closed market distribution ensure the continuance of those publishing programs. No commercial publisher will choose to publish any book unless it can be argued that a reasonable assumption of return on investment will occur for that particular title, or that a strategic advantage can be gained (such as fostering a new writer who editorial believe will meet the financial return expectation with subsequent books; nor should the importance of prestige as to a stable of authors be ignored - it helps ensure agents and authors will submit new manuscripts to a publisher seen to be significant). Nor did the PC report offer a thorough analysis of the number of new authors that the publishers benefiting from PIRs are supporting. Some such as Text, Allen & Unwin and Scribe are lights on the hill as regards this, but they are not the major beneficiaries of PIRs in the Australian market by percentage overall, and could I think be better supported by innovative funding regimes.

2. Australian book prices are comparable to overseas prices

'Comparable' covers a multitude of sins. The PC report clearly identified that:

For like editions in 2007-08, Australian prices are estimated, on average, to have exceeded UK prices for like editions by 9 per cent (on an RRP basis) and 18 per cent (on an ASP basis), and US prices (on an RRP basis) by 35 per cent. For 2008-09, the equivalent estimates are 12 per cent (RRP basis), 25 per cent (UK: ASP basis) and 12 per cent (US: RRP basis).

Taking into account the 10% GST, there is still a differential. But it is the 'like editions' that I find particularly interesting. Australian divisions of multinational publishers began a number of years ago to release new fiction titles from overseas authors in paperback in Australia, whilst they would be published in the UK & US as hardbacks only. Specifically Australian editions, though for the most part printed in Asia. (Most Australian authors also have their new releases published in same C format). Such as Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns or A S Byatt's The Children's Book.

Byatt's title retails in Australia for $34.95 as a paperback. It was first released in the UK and the US as a hardback only; and a hardback I had to have. Ordered from an Australian bookshop, it arrived (and it's not your best printing job Clays Ltd of St Ives) at a RRP of $60. Printed on the fly of the jacket is the UK RRP - £18.99. Which converts from sterling to A$33 (ignoring the fact that I could have bought the hardback from The Book Depository for £7.99 converting to A$14.31 with no freight costs to Australia). I wouldn't, perhaps naively, expect to have paid the same for the paperback but it does raise the question of quite what "like edition" actually means. Yes, obviously the words are the same but the binding is quite different. And it is often suggested that Australian booksellers are being privileged by their access to a paperback edition in terms of making international internet-based sales. Whether anyone would order a copy from an Australian bookshop with a RRP of A$34.95 which would convert back to sterling at £19.53 and undoubtedly have to pay freight on top of that remains a mystery.

But it is not frontlist or best sellers that concern me most. It is the pricing differential for academic titles - access to which is a vital part of any country's knowledge economy and culture. These were not included in the analysis of price differentials in the PC report. This is a sector heavily dominated by the multinational publisher/distributors few of whom have editorial offices in Australia for academic publishing (Pearsons Ed, John Wiley, & McGraw Hill being among the exceptions who do - all of whom have large textbook divisions). I had previously made up a list of prices comparing Australian RRPs with The Book Depository which is quite astonishing, but I've since checked against UK RRP. It isn't much prettier (and nor does The Book Depository discount as much as I thought - looks like 10% on average - but the free freight policy is significant)

Essential Halliday - £24.99 converting to A$44.71 Australian RRP $74.95
Language of Evaluation - £19.99 converting to A$35.76 Australian RRP $64
Cambridge Guide to Second Language Teacher Education - £20.50 converting to A$36.68
Australian RRP $75
Infant & Toddler Mental Health - £48 converting to A$85.88 Australian RRP $134

There were two issues not explored adequately in the PC report which impact upon why these differentials may occur.

Firstly, the inefficiencies within distribution chains in Australia. Unlike the UK & US, many distributors have their own warehouse and separate inventory. Some distribute only their own imprints; some distribute other imprints apart from their own; some distribute only books and do not publish and some of these do not hold exclusive rights to the Australian market. There have been, apparently, attempts to set up some equivalent to Ingrams here but to no avail. For a market of our size, this is mind bogglingly stupid. I can only gather that it must be rather comfortably profitable with PIRs in place to protect such inefficiency in distribution.

Secondly, the PC report did not explore what impact having divisions of multinational publisher/distributors buying stock from their own parent or sibling companies in an environment with no competiton. Even if a bookshop decided to order stock from a UK or US wholesaler in exasperation at there being no stock kept in the Australian distributor's warehouse and at the Aust RRP they are expected to charge their customer, they would often discover that the book is short discounted - 10% or even nett pricings by the wholesaler ( the terms of which are set by the publisher). By the time a margin, currency conversion and freight is factored in, the book ends up being very close to the Aust RRP. I do not why this should be so. But I would like to know.

Publishers and distributors do not behave in any way differently from any other business desirious of making a profit, and making good a return on shareholders' investments. They will as all businesses do, utilise market conditions and the regulatory environment under which they operate to maximise profit. They will also attempt to influence both the market and governance to maintain and improve business performance. It is however naive to believe that they enter into a debate such as the pricing of knowledge and our cultural writings without that business focus as their primary responsibility.

3. If it aint broke, don't fix it

And given the bouyancy of the Australian book industry, even through the GFC, from most players' perspectives, things are going swimmingly. American visitors express surprise at the health of the independent retail book sector, and equal surprise at our RRPs. But is it healthy? or as healthy as it should be?

Do PIRs really benefit local Australian publishing? The small publishers who are the usual suspects when it comes to publishing both new writers in non-fiction, fiction, poetry and drama would be better supported by a grants program (perhaps funded by part of the GST revenue raised on books) perhaps a program that supports the writer during the research & writing process, funds editorial support and work on the manuscript (surely the most under-valued work in the Aust book industry), even perhaps funds indexing and rights permissions for illos.

As for booksellers, I've been very aware of the continuing disappearance of academic titles from their bookshelves. I gather the general consensus is that academics were early adapters to internet supply of books and have largely disappeared as customers for academic titles. Given the price differentials, this is hardly surprising. This concerns me enormously but even more concerning is the continuing flight of sales to overseas providers. Distributors respond by reducing what they actively carry in their warehouses, with more and more titles on a 4-6 week supply indent basis; customers willing to buy from bookshops give up and go online; and inventory is reduced again in response to a further fall in sales. If the distributor is also owned by the publisher of the title, do they really care? - they're still getting the sale; people aren't buying another book, they're just buying it offshore and the publisher has still sold that particular book.

This has three consequences for booksellers - they appear to the average customer to be merrily price gouging, generating illwill. And the quality of bookshop stock is falling as the custom for those books is being withdrawn. They will be incredibly hard to win back. It also will mean that bookshops will become more homogeneous as the range of readily available sale or return stock shrinks. I suspect it will be the large affairs such as Borders who will struggle most - they are already reducing inventory following their buyout and Dymocks enthusiasm for the abolition of PIRs is their self-interested recognition that a diverse stock holding is increasingly difficult to finance. If Australian bookshops become less interesting and less visitored, the exposure for Australian published titles that authors and publishers so eagerly pursue has been diminished. Whatever dreams publishers may have about the internet giving them unmediated access to customers, bookshops with a faceout of their new releases still remains the best marketing exposure they can achieve. Particularly if you'd like to engage with the cultural elites.

It will also stymie innovation in both distribution and publishing. Lightning Source have been considering setting up here in 2010 - given a steady as she goes regulatory environment, few publishers will see the point in investing in new processes and models such as POD for overseas published books, which would have generated work for Aust printers, reduced the carbon footprint arising from shipping & air freight, reduced the need for warehousing and its current inefficiencies and finally, lowered the prices of those titles.

No one has any idea how large the purchase of books from offshore providers actually is. Attempting to get GST collected in other jurisdictions wont solve much - look at the price differentials. While the individual customer lives in a global bookshop, their local bookshop is prevented from sourcing imported titles at the best price and delivery time they are willing to pay for. And without a change in regulatory pressures, new technologies such as POD wont provide a possible solution to that inherent inequity. One rationale for the rejection of the recommendations was that Aust book industry requires support while it adjusts to the impact of digital forms. If the astonishingly ill-prepared announcement concerning Titlepage as an ebook delivery platform is anything to go by, it should be about 2055 by the time the industry gets its act together.

The question the government blithely failed to investigate in an evidence-based manner? Are the PIRs the best mechanism for protecting and developing Australian knowledge and cultural economies and Australian writing and publishing culture in general?

I don't think they are.


Addendum 18.11.09: If by chance you think I'm being harsh, Cassandra-like, or have been possessed by Ayn Rand, then don't read this post by Clay Shirky - Local Bookstores, Social Hubs and Mutualization.

Pssstt... wanna buy a book?

One of the stated concerns about the impact of an open market on the Australian book industry is that it will further weaken independent booksellers. A recent blog post by on HuPo by owners of an independent bookstore in the US outlines how dire things are in the States. In comparison, Australia has a far healthier independent bookshop culture, and though personally I'm extremely concerned about the continuing disappearance of academic titles from bookshop shelves, net-based resellers such as Amazon and even Barnes & Noble have not (yet) devastated Australian independent booksellers as US bookstores have been.

US bookstores work with even smaller margins than Australian booksellers which gives them less opportunity to compete with aggressive price cutting by the big players (who are doing a pretty good job of beating each other up at the moment - witness the price stoush between Amazon and Walmart). And it has also been acknowledged that many of the independents in large urban centres in the US had the sense to locate themselves in locales that were ripe for gentrification; post 'urban renewal', the subsequent steep rise in rents has been at least as responsible for businesses failing as falls in turnover.

But the article by Praveen Madan and Christin Evans is by no means all gloom and doom. Their optimism might seem typically American can-do but I'm inclined to agree with them in general if not to quibble over some of the finer points.

While online book resellers can offer an enormous inventory, high discounts, door to door delivery, the Tower of Babelesque enormity of that offering can only work because you as a buyer know what you are after. I strongly suspect a minority of users of online providers make their selections on the basis of what is new and hot or whatever merchandising term the website might use to promote the recent or top selling release. You enter the site having a book or books in mind and begin from there. Perhaps selling strategies such as "what other people bought' works for you; I'm very very interested to know what impact that strategy actually has in terms of additional purchases. Somehow I don't think Amazon will be telling me anytime soon.

Why the success of those additional sales matters is because it is the only user-friendly strategy that the behemoths have developed to provide customers with a moderated selection of book titles that might be of interest to that particular buyer.

To apply a concept from the web, all bookshops and online resellers are ultimately aggregators. The scale of that aggregation obviously is wildly different between a small independent bookshop and Amazon or The Book Depository. But successful aggregation depends upon two key things. That the material being aggregated is of consistent quality and interest to the users, and that the materials are also intelligently moderated. Know thy market; know thy product.

And this is why the type of aggregation practiced by Amazon is reliant on maintaining a vast inventory. Their inability to intelligently moderate their content they attempt to overcome by insinuating that they have everything. (It is also why they have the customer review process - other customers become the de facto moderators of a book; given the rather less than riveting nature of most customer reviews, again I'd love to know how successful this is.) The problem is, you end up on relying on the customer knowing what they want in the first place. This is also why chain stores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble are running into problems; carrying inventory to compete with Amazon's promise of instant consumer gratification is expensive and lacks those vital elements of moderation of your aggregating process. In reality, chain stores are far more likely to buy front list titles on the basis of which books offer better margins and previous sales on authors. A not particularly intelligent form of moderation.

Which is where independent bookshops if canny enough have a great and glorious future. Aggregators yes, but highly moderated and intelligent aggregators if done well. In an information world whose vast oceans of data, and bytes and published materials are ever expanding, the user response to intelligent aggregators are already plain to see. And the failure of earlier models of aggregation to evolve as new technologies bring competitors into play is also plain to see in the decline and fall of newspapers.

One of the best bookshops I ever had the pleasure of visiting began as a small post-retirement occupation for two women in Maitland. It was small, and the books they sold were eclectic but highly moderated. Their stock purchases were based on their own very personal preferences. As they sold, they responded to their customers suggestions for additional titles. Had I lived closer, that bookshop would have bankrupted me. No dumpbins of best-sellers, no fear in explaining politely to customers that they didn't carry a particular book (but would order it), and yes it grew like topsy and consumed the two women's retirement.

Many Australian independent bookshops already have strong connections with local literary programs, schools, reading groups and the like. Aggregators for their local communities. What often seems to be missing is quite enough rigorous and intelligent moderation of the books. If we were to move to an open market, and with access to new printing and supply technologies such as Lightning Source, rather than doom, smart independent booksellers should be able to posit themselves as on the ground and responsive aggregators. Minimising their inventory, while vigorously moderating their selection in response to their clients. The blooming of a thousand flowers.

If I were an independent bookseller, I'd have two mantras pinned above the somewhat grubby sink in the back of shop kitchenette:

Think global - act local

Know thy market - know thy product

Web based strategies matter but they should be driven by the intelligence gathered from your customers face to face; a website should reflect what the shop does. Websites are never a matter of 'Build it and they will come". They should be for independent booksellers an adjunct to their retail spaces. Acting as a highly selective aggregator, a website offers a brilliant opportunity to showcase the skill and knowledge that supports the process of aggregation. They also should offer the ability to order titles they may not stock, but this is an additional service, not a replacement for intelligent moderation of stock selection. Combine this with use of social media, and a focus on gathering intelligence from your customers. And into all of this also slides the ebook. It should be viewed as simply another edition of the book, not the town crier wailing "Bring out your dead".

Oh and great coffee. Don't forget the coffee. But no teabags OK?

more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/praveen-madan/evolve-or-die-why-reinven_b_337322.html