Grub Street Printing Newsletter #56, December 2013

Buy a Book Saturday

The Saturday after Thanksgiving has been dubbed Small Business Saturday as a promotion to counter Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now authors have spread the word and will be working with local, independent booksellers to encourage readers to patronize local brick and mortar stores on that day. Book stores used to prosper in thriving communities.

Google Lawsuit Over

The eight year war is over and the final score is Google 1, Authors 0. Apparently scanning and selling copyrighted material is just “fair use”. Google has admitted that their “Do no evil” motto was just BS anyway.

Social Book Selling

BookShout was created to help authors and publishers stay in touch with readers and share information via Facebook...I think.

Magazines for iPhones

Scrunching down magazine pages designed for tablets to smart phone size seems to be a bad idea, albeit .one demanded by the marketplace

Adobe Guesses Way Low

Adobe reported it was hacked in October exposing account information for 3 million users. Adobe has now reported 38 million accounts were compromised.

Nautical Charts Will Be Available

As reported, the US Government will discontinue printing Nautical charts in April but the charts can be ordered online as “Print on Demand”from two certified printers The charts will be updated weekly by the NOAA (as needed) with new PDFs for the printers.

Amazon Hopes for “Stupid”

I happen to think bookstore owners are generally intelligent (chain stores excluded) so I'll be very surprised if this sugar-coated offer from Amazon to allow indies to commit commercial suicide picks up much new business for them. Vote now for America's most arrogant business: Google vs. Amazon.

The Problems With Ebooks

I doubt many of the first ebook adopters anticipated that reading ebooks would be a similar experience to reading conventional books, but to some of us its simply too different to be enjoyable.

3 Part Timers Too Expensive?

Two weeks after opening, the Twiggs County (GA) Library is closing. The $1.15 million edifice was built with state funds and an insurance settlement after the old library burned. However, the $48,000 operating budget has been deemed too expensive by county commissioners. The entire budget is payroll for its three part time employees.

Digital Revolution Claims Publishers

This is the first time I've seen anyone quantify the effects of the digital revolution on publishers. According to a study prepared by accountants, 98 publishers closed in the UK last year. Seven or eight years ago the U.S. was losing 1,000 printers each month.

Amazon to Rescue USPS?

Amazon's announcement that it will fill and ship orders on Sundays may be just the antidote for falling mail volumes by requiring drop-off, transport and sorting.

Word of the Year

The Oxford Dictionaries have proclaimed “selfie” the Word of the Year, no doubt due in some small part to its usage increasing 17,000% this year. Did you know there was a “Word of the Year”? Hey, at least it wasn't “twerk”.

Want to Sell Ebooks in Russia?

There is apparently a market for English language ebooks in Russia, but it's currently being met by unauthorized file sharing. Bookmate is trying to offer a traditional online retail service for these books but many US publishers have taken a wait-and-see attitude.

Letterpress Magazine Crowdsourced

A new British magazine calling itself The Luddite has begun publishing The Luddite features no-tech articles and stories. Ironically, the funding to start the magazine was crowdsourced on Kickstarter.

Final Thought

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”...Eleanor Roosevelt This and nine other quotes are deemed the best quotes ever on Reddit..

Grub Street Printing Newsletter # 55, November 2013

Survival in the book and publications industry has taken some unpredictable twists and turns over the years, but none more unusual than the announcement last month that Wisconsin based Quad Graphics (NYSE:QUAD) is also in the health care business (Quad/Med LLC) and has purchased Indiana based Novia CareClinics giving them ownership of 90 health care clinics in 18 states.

These clinics are unusual in that they are run by QuadMed on a contractual basis. They are on-site at a number of organizations, a practice Quad originated to provide on site health care for its own employees.
It somehow reminds me of the opportunity presented some years ago when large organizations would close their in-house print shop to allow a larger printer to set-up shop on their premises offering more flexibility and generally saving the organization some money. There was no guarantee that said benefits would accrue, but it worked often enough to have become rather common a decade or so ago.
But healthcare? What the hell does healthcare have to do with a PMS book?
It turns out that twenty years ago the founder of Quad Graphics, Harry V. Quadracci, felt that he wasn't getting good value for the health insurance he purchased for his 9,000 employees. By starting on-site preventive based medical care at his plants he hoped to offer superior medical services while saving some money. It seems to have worked.
It reminded me of the beginnings of Kaiser Permanente ( the largest managed care organization in the United States) and the Kaiser Family Health Foundation, (focusing on the major health care issues facing the nation). It seems that in 1941, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser was in the same position Quadrucci found himself in: high medical insurance expenses for mediocre services and outcomes.

Kaiser owned four large shipyards on the West Coast and in the run-up to WWII had 20,000 employees building Liberty ships. Kaiser asked a Dr. Sidney R. Garfield, a proponent of managed care, to establish health facilities for his employees. Those first employee health care centers were the clinics that eventually became Kaiser Permanente.
After the war, Kaiser went on to build cars as well as forming Kaiser Aluminum and Kaiser Steel. Your grandfather may have owned a Kaiser, a Frazer, or even an economical little Henry J, built by Kaiser Motors. It's said that they were reliable middle class cars built for the the post war demand, pent up since the last new cars had been built in 1942 and scrap metal drives to make steel had depleted the used car inventory. But competition was fierce between automakers and the last Kaisers rolled off the assembly lines in 1955.
It's been over 55 years since Kaiser Motors made a car, and Kaiser Ventures is all that remains of Kaiser Steel, but the Kaiser Health System Henry J. Kaiser devised lives on and prospers.
Quadracci once famously said that Quad Graphics “Eats change for breakfast”. The changes that began a decade and a half ago continue to roil the print industry and one wonders if Quad Graphics will still be running presses in 55 years, or will QuadMed LLC be the surviving entity of its founder?
While other printers choose to merge and cling to each other for survival, Quad Graphics may have stumbled onto the most innovative diversification in the industry.
 

Adobe's Non-Security

It turns out that the company most identified with graphic design and production, whose software can require a second mortgage, has been hacked and your credit card numbers may be at risk. The disturbing element is Adobe's “meh” attitude about securing your information.

Government Printing

The NOAA has announced that it will cease production of nautical charts to save money, even though the survey research underlying the maps will continue and the sale of the maps covered their production costs. (?) Further, the U.S.Army has announced that print editions of Armor and Infantry magazines will be discontinued in favor of internet only access and ebooks.

Amazon Strike Spreads

Germany is Amazon's second largest market and served by eight distribution centers. A strike over wages and benefits at the Leipzig center has begun to spread to neighboring distribution centers.

Patent Trolls

The printing lobbyist organization (PIA) has endorsed legislation to control “patent troll” companies, ie. companies holding broad patents for products they don't intend to manufacture for the sole purpose of litigation for alleged patent infringement. Funny thing is that the government sometimes sides with the “trolls”.

The Strand

While reading a short piece on Five Bookstores to Plan a Trip Around, I was reminded of one of my favorite bookstores that generally doesn't make any of the “Best of...” lists, probably because it's quite unconventional. The Strand in NYC advertises its inventory as 18 miles of books and stocks titles that are marketed “by the foot” to assist those building their library. When I brought my children there ten years ago they were overwhelmed by the size and selection. I love it.

$15,000 Textbook

Medieval studies students at the University of British Columbia are amazed to study a recently acquired textbook from the 14^th century. This article reminds us of the decades-long task book production once was. Imagine 100 years to make a textbook while today one could be out of date by the time it hits the bookstore.

On Cover Design (and Smelling Books)

A book designer (and book lover) describes his job as deciding what a story looks like and how books smell better than tablets. (Video)

Who's Buying Books?

If you need detailed information on the current trends in bookselling, Bowker has this report for $999. Book Business magazine offers this brief summary.

Harder Than It Looks

After opening a publishing division forty some months ago, Amazon is replacing some of its key personnel amidst rumors that thus far the publishing arm has drastically underperformed. One of the reasons cited is that many, if not most, other book retailers decline to stock the Amazon titles.

NaNoWriMo

When I first mentioned this (National Novel Writing Month) a few years ago I thought it was such an odd event that it would die a quick, painless death. Wow, was I wrong. Over 160,000 writers have signed up for this year's exercise. And there's a spinoff, 30C30D (30 Covers, 30 Days), for designers to create covers for 30 novelists. A blogger explains the allure of the challenge.

Print and Digital: A Symbiotic Relationship?

There were no arguments at the “Digital and Print: Friend or Foes?” seminar at Comic-Con last month as participants, from writers and artists to store owners and consumers, agreed that digital format comics simply recruit more purchasers into their market.

100 Year Old Paper Mill Imploded

If admiring destruction via explosives is your cup of tea, this video's for you.

Learning vs. $$$$$

It's amazing how some otherwise conservative people are jumping on the online education bandwagon...even though it has yet to prove itself equal to traditional book learning.

Final Thought

My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid.                                                              Joan Bauer 

Grub Street Printing Newsletter #54, October 2013

I think trying to understand our country's perplexing financial situation is “like trying to drink whiskey from a bottle of wine”. The economists can't even agree on a description of the current situation let alone how to rev things up again. With solutions ranging from re-introducing the gold standard to throwing cash out of a helicopter I don't feel confident that the actual problems are fully understood.


As someone with more than a passing interest in all businesses related to printing, I happened to be reading an article that contained a few paragraphs focused on International Paper and its CEO, John Faraci. Paper merchants that carried the IP lines that I dealt with back in the day spoke of Faraci with much enthusiasm, as if they'd seen him descend a mountain carrying two stone tablets with the 10 Commandments of the Paper Business on them.

The author of the article is Al Lewis, a financial writer that I follow in our newspaper and on the MarketWatch financial web site. The following segment is from a September 15, 2013 column entitled Zero Interest, Zero Jobs .



International Paper on Tuesday announced a $1.5 billion stock buyback as well as plans to raise its dividend by 17%. And do you know what it announced the very next day? Plans to lay off 1,100 people and shutter its Courtland, Ala., paper mill.
"These decisions are especially difficult because of the impact to long-serving and hardworking employees, their families and the surrounding communities," said International Paper Chief Executive John Faraci in a news release.
This is a company with underfunded pensions, $10 billion in debt and declining demand as consumers rely more upon electronic screens than printed paper. It couldn't have been too difficult a decision: Dump the employees, keep the investors happy, and live to collect that CEO pay.

Does anyone else feel like maybe the reasons that the economy is out of whack are written somewhere in those paragraphs?
The stock market is at record levels, yet only a few industries have fully recovered to pre-recession levels. The anointed poster children of the financial recovery are the Big 3 auto companies and they hope to reach 15.5 million cars sold this year which would still be fewer than the 16 million sold in 2007. But note Ford's stock price is 2x higher than it was in 2007 and remarkably it has a market capitalization nearly 4x higher than 2007. I know stock pricing is based on forward estimates, but as far as I know that was true in 2007 also.
If driving share price (like International Paper) is more important than building scalable world companies (like Toyota) is what defines American corporate governance in 2013, what happens when Toto pulls back the curtain?
And are we about to find out?

 Bitcoin to Save Online Publishers?

Arguing that consumers would prefer to purchase specific content at a low cost rather than an all-encompassing, pricier subscription, it's suggested that Bitcoin could easily handle the micropayments involved for a la carte content. In fact, there are two apps for that, Bitwall and BitMonet.

Google Suit Nearing Judgment?

In the ongoing lawsuit over Google scanning of copyrighted materials and freely making them available online, a judgment may be at hand (although the judge seemed highly skeptical of the closing arguments made by the Author's Guild attorney).

Patterson Pledges Cash for Indies

While I've never particularly been a fan of James Patterson's writing (or that of his ghost writers) I freely admit he has become one of my favorite authors. Patterson has announced that he will donate $1 million to independent book sellers this year, an endangered species that seems to be making a rebound.

Publishers as Service Providers?

A European study of self publishers documents evolving trends. One thought is that the the role of the traditional publisher will become that of a service provider, mainly with access to distribution. There are also some counter intuitive ideas offered in the article.

Kodak Sued Over Inks

One of the few bright spots maintained by the reborn Kodak has been their Versamark Printing Systems. Now they are being sued by the ink manufacturer that has been selling the same ink under their own brand to Kodak customers during Kodak's bankruptcy.(Note the new Kodak logo in the second link.)

Kindle Fire Pricing

Some weeks ago the market analysts at the Motley Fool tried reading tea leaves to understand Amazon's Kindle Fire pricing, anticipating the imminent release of the new Fire. The new Fire has just been released with still lower pricing.

Preserving Old Fonts

The Type Heritage Project is attempting to find and identify display fonts used between 1800 and World War I to preserve and distribute them digitally.

Print Museum

I suspect that a lot of you have little interest in the nuts and bolts of printing, but fortunately there's now a print museum for those of us who are still fascinated by all the ways ink has been put on paper.

Publishing Bookstore

I'm familiar with at least one independent bookstore that successfully morphed into book publishing, but UK publisher Five Leaves Publications has just opened a brick and mortar store in an area that hasn't had an independent bookseller since 2000.

3D Printing?

Finally, a kindred soul has asked what the devil does 3D printing have to do with 2D printing. Even though the output device vaguely resembles an inkjet printer, no one calls it a printing press.

Printing Press Nonsense

Some months (#44) ago I wrote about an ad agency that had made a BMW promo using the Bimmer as a “printing press”. Not to be outdone, Nike's new Euro ad features athletes as "printing presses".

Self Published vs. Authors Who Have Books Printed

Is this just a snobbish way to advertise that you have been published by a traditional publisher or a valid distinction in the age of print on demand?

The Return of Harry Potter

Lost in the publicity that JK Rowling is penning a screenplay based on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, (a Hogwart's textbook) is the announcement that she intends to pen another Hogwarts title or two.

5 Banned Books

By examining book bannings throughout history, Forbes magazine recommends five titles that have been banned only to reappear again and again.

Final Thought

Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.”
Peter S. Jennison 

Past GrubStreetPrinting.com newsletters can be found at http://grubstreetnews.blogspot.com/

Grub Street Printing Newsletter #53, September, 2013

I'm sorry that I come off as a Luddite curmudgeon. I'm just a curmudgeon.
My Luddite defense is that my house has four working networked PCs, two smart phones, two digital cameras, a Netbook and a tablet. I'm not resisting life in the digital age.
But back when I had a regular old cell phone I remember reading about all the wonderful things you could do with a smart phone: read books and magazines, map your way to your destination, even watch television and movies.
Are you nuts? What kind of a masochist would put himself through all that? Reading a

 book on a 4 inch screen is not something a person with options would do. I downloaded Alice in Wonderland to my smart phone and thought I would try reading it again as I waited for my number to be called at the local Secretary of State office. Really? Some of you folks do that?
Watching Netflix on a smart phone reminded me of that ad with Shaquille O'Neal sitting in a Buick with the driver's seat leaned so far back it was almost flat. In the next camera shot he's towering over the front fender. I'd pay to see the video of him getting in to and out of that car. You can fit big things into small things but that doesn't mean that it's a great idea.
And I understand the Apple television ad with everyone in the big city desperately trying to drown out the world around them by having white earbuds surgically implanted in their head. I can understand wanting to block out the sounds of the city.
But I also like to eavesdrop on the subway, hear the hubbub of the restaurants, and listen to all the families and lovers stroll through Central Park. I mean, I have a large music collection, but dear lord, I don't need to listen to it 24/7.
I do have a few thousand .mp3s (compressed files) stored on various devices around the house. I know the quality of sound is determined by the quality of the recording and the ability of the output device to accurately deliver the sound. Earbuds are nice, very convenient, perfect for .mp3s. I have portable radios with CD players in my garage and basement. Mp3s sound as good on those implements as they're capable of sounding. But I also have my old component stereo system. Many, many years ago I assembled the best components I could afford, and I still like listening to vinyl records.
And I do love the convenience of always having a camera in hand as long as I have my smartphone with me. But I've probably shot over 1,000 rolls of 35mm over the past forty five years. I still have my old 35mm SLRs, a good collection of lenses and a few rolls of Fuji film around. I know that my smartphone camera has a bazillion mega pixels and 64 million colors. But film has infinite megapixels and color that falls outside the RGB and CMYK spectrums.
Add to that the lens on my phone camera is molded plastic and the images are saved as .jpg files (compressed images) and the attendant pictures are to film pictures as .mp3s are to vinyl.
And that means that they're just good enough.
And for many instances they are good enough. They're just not as good as possible. Carrying a book on your Kindle is not the same thing as carrying a book, at least to me. It's good enough. I often read the newspaper on our tablet, and that's good enough, but we still subscribe to three newspapers.
I have listened to Thelonious Monk's Blue Monk through earbuds while walking down the street and I've played it on my home stereo. The .mp3 was my only option while walking and that was good enough, but quality wise...
Smartphones, .mp3 players, digital cameras, and ereaders expand our ability to bring what we love along with us, to easily carry ten books on vacation, to quickly snap a picture in your yard of a deer grazing forty feet away from you, to dull the hum of the jet engines as you fly across country.
They're all handy and they each have their place. They're less expensive and generally more portable. But they don't represent the apex of anything except the technology that created them.
And I suppose that's just going to have to be good enough.
 

Google and Copyrights

In a bid to narrow the definition of piracy, Google claims that book scanning falls under the definition of fair use and so doesn't violate copyrights. Why didn't the guy who started Napster think of this?

What Kids Read

An interesting survey about what our children are reading has just been released. This graphic from the report shows the differences in required school reading over the past century.

Borders Renaissance (in Asia)

The question, “What's in a name?” has been answered by Popular Holdings purchase of all names and intellectual property of the bankrupt Borders Singapore for $100,000. Once the leading bookseller in Singapore, new Borders' stores hope to be open by 2014. Unfortunately, Amazon just announced free shipping to Singapore.

Paper & Ink College Textbooks Sales Collapse

Both of my children have graduated from college in the past 10 years so I learned first hand how bizarre textbook pricing has become and understand why students are hijacking the system. To my mind, it's the only group of publishers that deserve the pain they're experiencing.

Resurgent Indies

It seems every month there are news stories describing a resurgent independent bookstore marketplace. This story interviews some store owners who discovered that it takes more than espresso machines and sofas to build a profitable niche in the 21^st century.

...and Burying Indies

Acolyte of the ebook industry Seth Godin has declared that the death of independent bookstores at the hands of Amazon should make book lovers weep for joy.

Saving Bookstores in Quebec

While appreciating the experience of shopping in an independent bookstore is something many of us enjoy, I'm not sure Quebec's plan to raise book prices to save their indies is a very good idea...unless Amazon is also banned from their province.

Saving the Stacks on Manhattan

Plans to modernize and consolidate Manhattan's public libraries are on hold after prominent scholars objected to removing the stacks to an off-site storage facility. A short history of the library and the stacks can be found here.

A Downside to Printing Money

No matter what one prints or the process used, stuff happens, like the 30 million $100 bills rejected by the New York Fed for a “lack of crispness”. Disposal and reprinting costs are said to be around $3.75 million.

More Government Printing Woes

A phone number on the back of Oklahoma's lottery tickets carried a telephone number that now belongs to a sex fantasy hotline . Officials said they retired the telephone number some years ago but had preprinted it on rolls of paper that went unused and were thought to have been destroyed.

1,000 Best Public Domain Novels

The top 1,000 novels have been identified based on a formula using metadata, Project Gutenberg downloads and available Goodreads rankings.The top 100 from the list are shown here, sorted so that only an author's highest ranked book is included.

Memorable Bookstores

I remember bookstores that I've visited in cities across the country and hope you get the chance to visit some of these community bookstores as you travel.

Punctuation and All That

There seems to be more spelling and grammar errors in our area's local papers now that bloggers are in and reporters are out. Here are the magazines with the fewest gaffes, including Playboy and GQ.

Banned Books

Each September, Banned Book Week is observed at the end of the month. Best selling author Judy Bloom helped one book stay on the library shelves.

Final Thought

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” Carlos Ruiz Zafón 

Grub Street Printing Newsletter # 52, August 2013

In the business world observers and pundits frequently struggle to make sense of corporate mergers. Acquisitions are generally fairly easy to understand; one company has technology, clients, facilities or profits that a larger company acquires rather than tries to emulate.
But in the Detroit area we learned years ago that there is no such thing as a merger of equals, famously declared by Mercedes Benz when it “merged” with Chrysler. It can all get so confusing that sometimes even the negotiators aren't sure what's happening, such as when the Stroh's Beer company thought they were buying or maybe merging with Milwaukee's Schlitz Beer only to find out that Schlitz was the “more equal” of the two after the deal was done.
Last year when Ann Arbor's two largest book manufacturers merged, a lot of industry observers were scratching their heads trying to figure out how the merger made sense and who was the “more equal”.
Today in the book industry, growth is the goal but stability is the key fallback position. The combined sales of Edwards Brothers and Malloy Litho isn't in a growth cycle. Edwards Brothers Malloy reported 2012 sales of $115 million compared to a pre-merger sales total of $125 million in 2008.
One of the unique features about the merger was each company had invested heavily in Timson Book Presses, to the point that the merged company had more of them than any one other company anywhere in the world.
And while these presses don't come cheap, they are fire breathing monsters devouring a ton of paper in minutes and spitting out baled signatures ready for binding. It was said they could be profitable printing as few as 300 copies, but that was before 300 copies could be produced cheaply using digital equipment. Realistically, the longer the run the better, because once these presses are wide open the crew is busy keeping a roll of paper in front of it and the signatures flowing to the bindery at the delivery end.
But those great long runs get scarcer every year. Edwards Brothers once produced Harry Potter books as one of many manufacturers who each got an order for Harry's production. Today, Edwards Brothers Malloy easily have the capacity to do all of the printing for each volume by itself. Trouble is, no one is asking them to.

So the announcement on July 31 that the newly merged company had decided that the Edwards Brothers company headquarters on State Street in Ann Arbor would be sold and the business consolidated into Malloy Litho's headquarters on Jackson Road shouldn't have come as a surprise, but it did.
As John Edwards, CEO of the merged companies says,, “But like most book printers, we’ve seen a decline in longer run offset business. At the same time, our digital operation is growing at a 20 percent clip .”
I think the two take-aways from this are: number one, all that press power has produced over-capacity in long runs for the new company and number two, digital printing is less expensive with commensurately lower margins.
The impact of this consolidation is far reaching with many unanswered questions lingering for further explanation. What's known is that the State Street facility has somewhere around 350 – 400 employees in a 185,000 square foot building situated on 16 acres.
Malloy's Jackson Road plant hosts around 250 employees in a similar 180,000 square foot facility, but here's the surprising difference. Over the years Malloy Litho has expanded, expanded, and expanded it's factory. An old picture in their lobby shows an aerial view taken years ago of the plant after just an addition or two had been added. Now, nearly any Malloy employee could point to the vacant land in the picture and describe which part of the modern plant it became. And that's the problem; they've used up all of that land. If another expansion was in the works they'd have to either plow-up the parking lot, figure out how to add a second and third story to most of the buildings or purchase some very expensive land adjoining their current plot.
So I don't think that an expansion of the physical plant is in the long term outlook.
The usual thing to say is that the company will try to retain as many employees as possible, but that's not really keeping with the spirit of downsizing is it? Edwards Brothers opened a smaller book manufacturing plant in North Carolina some years ago and had a semi-truck shuttling work back and forth from Ann Arbor every day. Perhaps some skill employees can relocate to the Lillington plant.
But even if Ann Arbor remains the short-run book manufacturing capitol of the world, there's no way the remaining four companies can absorb 300+ employees in the near future. There may be 300+ openings for people with book manufacturing experience in the entire country at the moment, but I doubt it.
Edwards Brothers began in Ann Arbor 120 years ago, mimeographing copies of law lectures for use at the University of Michigan School of Law. Malloy Litho was established on Jackson Road in 1960 by Jim Malloy.

 

Obama Likes Amazon?

President Obama visited an Amazon warehouse calling it a fine example of an American success story. Are there any other companies that worked as zealously to avoid paying taxes? Attorney General Eric Holder even filed suit against Amazon's perceived competitors. I don't get it.

Amazon Not Predatory?

While Apple appeals the judgement that found it guilty of manipulating ebook pricing, the notion that Apple and its allies were simply fending off the monopolistic game plan of Amazon is debunked.

Finns Want Looser Copyright Laws

Suggestions to loosen some copyright laws (downloading an MP3 illegally would become a misdemeanor) were collected and edited via crowdsourcing and presented to the Finnish Parliament. The purported reason for crowdsourcing the proposal was to counterbalance the the power of lobbyists.

Karl Pohrt

The Shaman Drum bookstore was miniscule when compared to the two big chains that came to control book retailing a decade ago, but its impact far exceeded its size. Owner Karl Pohrt, who passed away July 10, was first a reader, but championed independent bookstores, downtown Ann Arbor's commercial revival, publishing, and the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center which he founded.

Books As Art

Books are appearing as a popular new medium for artistic creation. The works are ingenious (although the use of the word “fetishists” is a reach), practical and worthy of museum display.

Why You Need A Pseudonym

(and How to Create One)

Now that we know J.K.Rowling has published a novel of some import using a pseudonym, it's time to not only discuss the reasons for writing under a pseudonym, but also the ins and outs of choosing one.

South Korea's Grub Street?

An entire city devoted to book and magazine publishing and printing? Sounds a bit like 18^th century Grub Street. And I thought Ann Arbor was Book City!

Avoiding Digital Headaches

Are you tired of “spam” in your Inbox? Do you forget your passwords, or worse, fear that someone else could use them? Do you hate that even your own computer tracks your every move, let alone what the NSA may follow? Fear not. The Russian secret service's (FGA) solution is to abandon computers for typewriters after watching the havoc Edward Snowden has caused in US security circles. Next, a boom in shredders?

Books to Make You Smart?

Djanice asked for followers on Reddit to share the title of a book that “made them smarter”. The format is not a simple, straight forward list but suggestions with comments following. Links to read free samples of many of the titles are here.

                                        Why is a “Blurb” a “Blurb”?

For some reason I assumed the word “blurb” was an acronym, but for what? It actually began with a fictitious woman named Belinda Blurb in 1907.

Not Dead Yet Awards

Last year print-centric blog DeadTreeEdition asked its readers to name four print related companies most likely to go out of business in 2012. While some have written obits on file, all four continue to exist.

Twenty Years of Chicken Soup

Chicken Soup for the Soul debuted twenty years ago and has gone on to sell over 112 million copies in North America, not to mention being translated into forty languages, and spinning off an additional 250 titles. It also produces or licenses CDs, DVDs, pet food, greeting cards, and flowers. What a brand!

Fonts for Scientists (Not Scientific Fonts)

If scientists had tried to “brand” themselves over the centuries, what would their brand logo look like? Look here.

Final Thought

We have no Academy, thank Heaven, to tell what is real English and what isn’t. Our Grand Jury is that ubiquitous person, Usage, and we keep him pretty busy at his job. Gelett Burgess

*************************************** ***** Past GrubStreetPrinting.com newsletters can be found at http://grubstreetnews.blogspot.com/