Disrupting publishing

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Two interesting developments.

One is the launch of a UK venture called Unbound.

The other is the news that Amazon appears to be serious about getting into the publishing game.

In a series of public moves, Amazon.com has signaled its determination to enter the book publishing business, a move with broad implications for the online retailer as well as the traditional publishing industry.

Seattle-based Amazon in recent weeks has rolled out two new book imprints, announced a roster of best-selling authors whose books will be published under those imprints, and hired a prominent publishing executive to set up an office in New York.

The stakes are enormous. Amazon is moving more aggressively into a mature industry that posted $14 billion in sales for the United States alone in 2009, according to Simba Information, a market research firm based in Rockville, Md. The sector has been dominated for years by six publishing houses, mostly based in either New York or London.

Amazon is likely to encounter plenty of resistance, especially from established publishing houses. Many are owned by larger corporations with deep pockets. They have durable business relationships and strong brand identities that will make them difficult to dislodge.

But Amazon brings its own strengths to the table. The company is innovative and profitable, with an enormous amount of information about its customers and their preferences. Its online business model makes Amazon a tough competitor on price.

David Pogue and the perils of uxoriousness

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Interesting revelation by BusinessInsider (via The Daily Beast) about the NYT’s technology commentator.

Powerful New York Times tech reviewer David Pogue’s new romance with a key Silicon Valley PR executive has many buzzing about a possible conflict of interest.

David Pogue is an incredibly popular technology columnist and one of the most influential gadget gurus in the world. With a column in the New York Times, TV gigs on CNBC, CBS, and PBS, and 1.3 million Twitter followers, Pogue can drive sales of a new gizmo with a few exuberant words or crush a company’s dreams with a thumbs-down on a new product.

But Pogue in the past has landed in hot water for failing to disclose potential conflicts of interest. And he has recently attracted some notoriety after he and his wife, whom he’s divorcing, were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct following an alleged scuffle during a domestic dispute that some reports say involved him hitting his wife with an iPhone.

And now those two issues are converging: Pogue has been dating Nicki Dugan, a vice president at OutCast Agency, a San Francisco PR firm that represents top tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Cisco, Netflix, and Yahoo, since last year. (On April 24, things between them had grown serious enough that Dugan announced their relationship on her Facebook page.)

During the time they’ve been involved, Pogue has written articles about OutCast clients and their competitors without disclosing his personal connection to a senior staffer at the firm.

Hmmm… I enjoy David Pogue’s stuff and admire his video essays about new gadgets. The possiblity of conflicts of interest is, of course, worrying. But in a way what is more disturbing is the way Pogue has involved his soon-to-be-disrupted family in his work. His kids, for example, were sometimes co-opted as extras in his NYT videos, and I can think of at least one clip where his (ex?) wife also featured in a non-speaking role. I’ve always been suspicious of entertainers and authors who make a big deal of their uxoriousness and parade their happily-married status in public. (Think of Martin Amis, for example.) It makes one think that they doth protest too much, as Shakespeare would have put it. And all too often those niggling doubts have proved correct.

The clueless in pursuit of the unattainable

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This morning’s Observer column.

Oscar Wilde described foxhunting as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. If Wilde had been able to see the diminutive tyrant who is currently president of France going on last week about bringing the internet to heel, he might have updated his hunting metaphor to “the clueless in pursuit of the unattainable” perhaps.

Sarkozy was speaking at the eG8, a gathering of those whom the French government thinks are the important players in the online world. But in a way, he was just acting as a mouthpiece for the political, judicial, commercial and security establishments which are becoming increasingly hysterical about the way the internet is upending their respective applecarts. In that sense, Sarky was echoing the fulminations of England’s lord chief justice that “technology is out of control”, by which he meant, as Peter Preston has pointed out, is beyond his control.

Establishment panic about the net’s disruptiveness is matched by renewed outbreaks of an age-old neurosis – moral panic about the impact of new communications technology on young people…

Remembering Garret

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Today’s Irish Times feels strange: Garret Fitzgerald’s weekly column is missing. Noel Whelan has a nice tribute to him.

My favourite story, however, is one he used to tell against himself. It involved an occasion when he had to overnight in a Rosslare hotel either because he had just missed a ferry departure or because his ferry was delayed until the following morning. Unusually, he found himself in the hotel room with no reading material. Intellectually frustrated, he searched the bedside locker where, apart from the usual Gideon Bible, he could only find two telephone books. This was in the days when the entire Republic’s numbers were encompassed in two volumes.

Putting the Bible to one side, he sat and read one of the telephone books. However, there was an objective to his reading. He was anxious to prove to himself a theory he had that once people from the counties of Leinster gravitated to study or work in Dublin, very many stayed there. By cross-referencing his own detailed knowledge of the concentration of particular surnames in particular counties with a reading of the 01 phone book, he apparently confirmed his theory.

Garret’s addiction to statistics was legendary. When he worked for Aer Lingus, it was said that he knew the international airline timetable book by heart. At his funeral last Sunday, his son John addressed this remark to the staff of the Central Statistical Office:

For over half a century you have enthralled our father and provided much to stimulate him. He was your biggest fan and he probably drove you mad.

A Beginner’s Guide to the Middle East

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Any foreign power hoping to promote peace, stability, and democratic inclusion in the Middle East must account for the Israeli-Palestinian divide, the Sunni-Shia divide, the Muslim-Christian divide, widespread anti-Semitism, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the security of oil supplies pumped by weak regimes, Al Qaeda and related radicals, tribalism, corruption, and a picturesque lineup of despots. For half a century, the region has made outside idealists look like fools, turned realists into complicit cynics, and consigned local heroes—Yitzhak Rabin, Anwar Sadat—to martyrdom.

Steve Coll, writing in the New Yorker.

Education = civilisation?

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Here’s a depressing thought: two of the bloodiest current operators in the Middle East both had a good Western education. Saif Qadaffi went to the London School of Economics, and produced — or had produced for him — a respectable PhD dissertation (I’ve read some of it, and it looks academically respectable). And Bashar al-Assad, currently presiding over murder and torture in Syria, trained as a doctor in London (which means, among other things, that he subscribed to the Hippocratic Oath). So the belief that a good education civilises its recipient needs to be taken with a large helping of salt.