BilmBlog500

The Sunday NY Times carried an obituary for Jane Jarvis. She was the organist at Shea Stadium for fifteen years. Much more to her life than just that, according to the obit, but it's for that which I will remember her. According to the article, she left the Mets in the late '70s, only a few years after I first started going to Mets games (1977, I think, was my first), but in my memory she had to have been pounding her organ keys longer into my Mets attendance than that. It's a tribute to her that I feel as if she must have been part of my life longer than she actually could have been. Thinking of Jane Jarvis brings back memories of what is now a long distant age when you could go to a baseball game without being assaulted by loud non-stop music. Even after Jane left there was a certain civility to the soundtrack at a Mets game, like having Sunday in New York played before every Sunday home game. I must be getting old, to be getting sentimental about the quiet old da...

Um, no, not the Kafka one. Gail Collins has always been a favorite columnist of mine. Many years ago she was at New York Newsday. It was a great loss when she left for the NY Times where she was on the Editorial Board and thus having to submerge her voice, and a great pleasure when she returned to being a columnist. So it's no surprise that I liked her column on the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed trial , but I also think she's going at something very important without quite going deep enough. To keep this part of it brief, and for those not following the whole saga very closely, KSM is one of the Al Qaeda masterminds of 9/11. Several months ago, the Obama administration decided to try him in Manhattan at a courthouse in Lower Manhattan not far from the World Trade Center. A lot of people in NYC were "hip hip hooray, we're better than those wimps in Illinois who don't want no stinkin' Guantanamo inmates." Then, we get word of the NYPD plans to secure the trial...

This past Friday, I had a champagne toast with Jon Wood, the head of fiction at Orion Books in the UK, to celebrate the success of Charlaine Harris . I asked him how things had gone so bad so quickly at Borders UK, which had shut its doors right before Christmas. I'd mentioned in my post at the time that I'd noticed a huge gap in performance between their flagship locations and the retail park outliers and wondered if those bad real estate bets could be reason enough to put the company under. And I guess the answer is "yes," because Jon's immediate answer to this question was the real estate strategy of going into retail parks. A "retail park" in the UK is something like Potomac Yard in the US, one of those suburban centers with big box stores and big parking lots going on for a half mile. Though a book superstore here is moderately more likely to be in a center with a Bed Bath Beyond and other slightly more upscale retailers, it's not uncom...

I've been thinking on all of those auto insurance company ads. Customers who switched to this company saved an average of $x and to that company an average of $y and to the other company an average of $z. Wow! What's fascinating is how this is one of those statistics that is essentially meaningless, plenty of which float around in the world. Let's say 1,000 people look at switching from AllFarm Auto to ProGeico, or vice vera. Of that 100,000 people, 62 of them actually end up switching. Why do they switch? Well, probably because they'll save money, because otherwise you aren't going to switch. Lo and behold, you now have a statistic. Those 62 people saved an average of $629.39. If even 100 people thought of looking, that average savings becomes $390. 750 people it's all of $52, and how many people want to go to the hassle of switching companies to save $52/year? So all of these car insurance statistics are saying no more and no less than "people ...

A few quick things... The newspaper and book publishing industries have been eagerly salivating over the rumored Apple Tablet that gets unveiled tomorrow. I don't know what the Tablet will be like, but I'm loving what Doonesbury has to say on the subject! Most articles on publishing or profiles of major authors drive me a little bit crazy. One common beat-head-against-wall for me is to have them written by authors who don't understand that a book with an unearned advance can still be profitable to the publisher. Or they're full of sycophancy, or etc. Sunday's NY Times Magazine had an usually good profile of James Patterson, which was written by an author who seems to actually know what he's talking about when he talks publishing, and which provides some unusually good insight into some of what makes a James Patterson into James Patterson. I'd highly recommend giving this a read. There's another changing of the guard at Borders as CEO Ron Marshall ...

This is an e-mail I got today: ******* Dear JOSHUA, From time to time Reed Exhibitions would like to send you information regarding upcoming events, products and offers via email from Reed as well as carefully screened companies offering products and services that may be of interest to you. Reed Exhibitions limits the number of emails sent to our customers each month, and never relinquishes control of email addresses to other businesses. If you would like to receive offers from our partners, you do not have to respond to this email. If you do not wish to receive these emails please click on the link below. Thank you very much for your time. http://tx3.Reedexpo-direct.com/track.aspx?1461813.17595930.430557309.5356.282801 ******************************************************************************* This message is brought to you from one of our valued business partners as an attendee of Reed Exhibitions. If you would no longer like to receive future mailings please click here. http://...

I incorporated my business to start the year, so now I can call myself President Bilmes. But even though the business is today what it was a month ago, so much changes. The new business needs a new number with the IRS. Then it needs a new number with New York State. And it needs a new bank account. And because all of these numbers are changing, the payroll service has to be set up anew. All the people who send us money need to update their records with our new IRS # and/or the new bank account numbers. There are the little things that need to be changed, like getting workman's comp and the NYS disability insurance re-done with the corporation. My new bank is the same as my old bank, but it's so intent on treating me like a new customer that I'm starting to think I should have gone to a new bank. At least that way, if I were getting all of the new customer hassles, I'd actually be a new customer. The day I open the new accounts, one of the checks I have to deposi...

I had a feeling the Supreme Court would go where it went on campaign finance, and I don't think I agree. I learned long long long ago that the law considers a corporation to be a person, but the corporation is still a legal construct of a person. As such, can't the people that say in the law that a corporation is just like a person do what they want to define the ways in which the corporate entity can and cannot act like a "person person?" That's an argument that doesn't carry a lot of weight with the current membership of the Supreme Court, which often tends to care more about the thoughts and feelings of legally constructed people than human people. But to me, we're starting to get a little into Westworld territory. Just like the designers of Delos created these robot people and watched them become minds of their own, the law has constructed the corporate person and ever so slowly it goes out of our control. And now Gunslinger has been unleashed on o...

Borders reported its holiday sales results and saw another large decrease in same store sales, around 10% excluding the large drop in media sales (the music/DVD footage was slashed at most stores from a year ag0), around twice the size of the same store sales drop at Barnes & Noble . The drop was similar at the Waldenbooks stores that are remaining open moving into 2010. Some of this is self-inflicted. I noticed over the course of the holiday season that I was getting fewer coupons as a Borders Rewards member, for smaller discounts. This meant that the gross margin on sales increased by 130 basis points (i.e., 1.3%), which means that the sales were more profitable. Fewer people dashing in just to redeem a big 40% off coupon and not much else. But it would have been nice to have seen a nicer hold in sales than we did.

This week's edition of The Onion introduces us to the version of the Kindle I'd like to buy, down a few paras in their highlights from the CES in Las Vegas.

Courtesy of the Publishers Weekly daily e-mail on Thursday we find ourselves at a study from Attributor regarding illegal downloading of published works. It's not certain that the study should be relied upon. Attributor is in the business of selling anti-piracy monitoring for content providers, and the more piracy they find the more they can justify their existence. Following on a series of assumptions laid out in great detail, they think piracy is a $3B threat right now. Well, that sounds a bit steep to me. But none of us really know, and I'll put it out there with the aforementioned caveats.

On the personal side of things... I've always been a big fan of dividend reinvestment, where you take that $6.82 and buy a quarter of a share of stock with it and then watch that compound and grow, instead of taking that $6.82 and ... well, what do you do with $6.82, really? A friend of mine always thought I was being kind of silly, because it's just such a chore to do the bookkeeping for all of this. Which isn't a issue if you never plan to sell your stock but just to watch that nest egg build for 30 years, and then you can eventually take the dividends in cash and they'll be so lucrative you've live off of them in your retirement. Good luck with that, the cynics might say. Over time, I've come to realize that my friend might have the better part of the argument. Or maybe not. Let's just say it's not a clear call. There are two problems with my approach. The first is that you sometimes don't have a choice what delightful extra added stock you m...

So on Friday the 8th, I get a call from a company identified as Epiq Systems asking for my fax number so they can send over some documents related to a bankruptcy. Now, that's not the kind of call you get every day, and they won't tell me whose bankruptcy they have in mind. It turns out when papers start to come on Monday to be that of a company called Haights Cross Communication, which is the parent company of the prominent long-time audio publisher Recorded Books . Which publishes Charlaine Harris, Brandon Sanderson, Kat Richardson and Peter V. Brett from the JABberwocky list, and you can figure with authors like that, there are some royalties Recorded owes me. But the bankruptcy is actually a good thing. I think. Haights Cross took on too heavy a debt load four or five years ago, as many people and places did. Unlike many of them, they were able to enter negotiations with their major lendors and come to an agreement, announced in September, for a debt-for-equity swap inv...

In my review of Police, Adjective, I mentioned I might have liked it more than maybe otherwise because I'd taken a good nap during another movie right before. That movie was a preview screening of something called Fish Tank (seen Wed. Jan 6 2010 at the IFC Center Aud. #1). I went because I like to go to the screenings I get via Museum of Moving Image, because sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised, sometimes unpleasantly, this was unpleasant. I knew very quickly this wasn't my cup of tea. As with Sherlock Holmes , we're thrust right in to the main character's life without any context or development. And in this case, the character is doing stupid things. She tries to free a local horse. She's driven off. She goes back, and gets into a fight almost heading toward a rape with the people who live there. Which doesn't stop her from going back to get her stuff that was taken during the fight. Why does she want to free the horse? There's no real answer to t...

A few of the movies that are hoping for award attention this year... All of my comments about Police, Adjective can be duplicated for White Ribbon (Oct. 8, 2009, Landmark Sunshine, Aud, #1). White Ribbon is set in a small German village on the eve of WWI where mysterious bad things are happening. It's filmed beautifully but austerely. The director Michael Haneke has done at least two difficult if worthwhile films, The Piano Teacher (great performance by Isabelle Huppert) and Cache (Hidden). And I think the critical prize goes to Todd McCarthy, the chief film critic of Variety, who accurately warned me when he reviewed in May after it played Cannes that the film is entirely absorbing, longish, difficult to embrace, and medicinal. I did not fall asleep, but the movie really is very self-absorbed, with nothing at all to offer anyone outside of movie critics. It's better than Police, Adjective in that it doesn't devolve into parody, but it's so serious and full of its...

During the brief 14 months I spent working in the Arthur Klebanoff era Scott Meredith Literary Agency , he having taken over from Scott's widow, I took on a novel called The Kiss by Robert Knedlik. I loved it. It was an erotic vampire novel, and when I say erotic I mean "give a hard-on" erotic, but also erotic, and not porn. I really liked this book. Because Arthur was new on board and knew not Joshua, he wanted to get some other opinions, maybe read himself, on what this novel was that was wanting to sell, and he decided we should get behind it. During Scott's tenure at the agency, marketing was generally approached as a mail order business only. You sat at your desk and you sent manuscripts out. Arthur's approach was somewhat different and alien to me. If we were really behind, then I was supposed to call people and excite them. I even went to some editor to personally hand-deliver as as way of saying we were behind it. Can you guess what happened? Nobody...

The Shining is one of my favorite movies, so I quite enjoyed this Bing ad .

Once upon a time when I reviewed movies for the Michigan Daily, I sometimes speculated on the idea of becoming a movie reviewer or film critic as a career. These days, I wonder had I done so if I would've kept to some real-world sense were I doing so, or if I too would have drunk the critical Kool Aid that makes critics dump on movies that are not necessarily good but are nonetheless entertaining, jump on the bandwagon for books that no person who doesn't watch movies for a living would ever want to see, and pad a Ten Best list with at least four films that never saw a broader release than the Nuart and Film Forum and had they seen a wider release would still not have been of interest to anyone. Would I have become a Manohla Dargis, whose first " essential movie " of 2010 is Sweetgrass, a documentary about bringing sheep up to their summer pasture? Would I have become a J. Hoberman, whose top ten list includes all of three movies that were given a broad commercial ...

So a few more bits and pieces of e-book stuff this week as the Consumer Electronics show is in full throttle... There's the Que from Plastic Logic, which looks interesting except for the price. I never lost my Kindle (two broke, didn't lose one), I did lose an iPod Touch, I'm not eager to have a $650 or $800 gadget to lose. That being said, the device itself looks kind of nifty. There was talk of the Microsoft Courier, but the big intro from them was the HP Slate, which has some book-reading capability. I've chased a few different web sites with coverage of this intro, and it isn't making me froth in anticipation. Gawker says (link courtesy of PW) there are too many of these now, and they may be right. Gawker says E-ink is an interim technology and there's some back and forth on that in the comments. I do know for sure that I'm no E-ink fan unless it works as easily in a wide temperature range as printed sheets of paper do. After that, who knows? S...

Another interesting piece of news with a little more depth to it than you get from the press release . A company called Spring Design with a forthcoming e-book device called the Alex eReader will be featuring the forthcoming Borders.com e-book store as the default store for the Alex. What makes this interesting is that Spring Design sued B&N over the design of the Nook. Isn't it exciting to have lawsuits and bed-hopping in the e-book world entering the nice staid world of publishing!

I'd rather liked the coming attraction for Sherlock Holmes (seen Thu. evening Jan, 7, 2010 at the AMC Empire, Aud. #13). It struck me as a nifty Indiana Jones style re-working of the concept. From the reviews and word of mouth, I wasn't certain of greatness, but I had real expectations. No such luck. Within the first ten minutes I had a feeling I was going to be in for a long night in the movie seat, and this proved to be true. First warning sign was that the movie didn't set out to provide some independent cinematic life to the Holmes character. We're thrust into a scene a little bit reminiscent of Temple of Doom, with not so much as a parsec of time devoted to establishing anything about the characters or the background of what we're seeing. My plot bible is Writing To Sell by Scott Meredith, the first thing you're supposed to have is an identifiable lead character, and this movie required me to bring my identification in with me. The second thing you...

Eighteen months ago, I didn't care so much about what the Adult Fiction Boxed Set bestseller list looked like on Nielsen Bookscan. And then last year, the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse 7-copy boxed set became a stunning phenomenon, joined this year by an 8-copy version , and then by a boxed set of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy . So suffice to say I've suddenly become much more interested in that sub-category of the bestseller list. The Sookie sets again did very well, #1 on the adult boxed set chart. Not as big a thing as last year when True Blood went on the air in September, vs. this year when people have been buying Sookie in large quantity for a full year, but still a very very good holiday for the boxes. I wasn't quite sure what to expect with the Mistborn set, so I was very pleased to see it settle in as the #7 adult set for most of the holiday season, and then sneaking up higher in the final weeks. It's the sales trends in those final weeks ...

So Barnes & Noble reported a disappointing holiday season , with same store sales dropping 5.4%. Their expectation had been for a smaller drop of 1-3%, and as a result they have downgraded their earnings expectations. Nielsen Bookscan reported a 3% drop in unit sales at their reporting outlets, with most of the drop in adult non-fiction, and adult fiction down just 1%. In this environment I'll be curious to see what Borders reports, which I believe is scheduled for the latter half of next week. I did think Borders was better-positioned than B&N was, at least as far as my little JABberwocky corner of the world was concerned, but Borders also had a steeper uphill climb because of their challenges the past two years.

Wikipedia defines collective punishment as " the punishment of a group of people as a result of the behaviour of one or more other individuals or groups. " Which is the easy part. Because in some circumstances, collective punishment is a routine part of life. In football practice or boot camp, when everyone has to run suicides or do push-ups because another member of the group screwed up. And in other circumstances, it's a crime. Like if Israel demolishes a home because one member of the family committed a suicide bombing. And so where do we put the recent United States TSA directive that " every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. " To me, it's another tragic and bad example of a security system that's rotten to the core, which I've been big on ranting about the past ...

Armored, seen Saturday January 2, 2010 at the Regal E-Walk Aud. #7, was the Kraft mac&cheese of cinema, exactly what you'd expect and smooth going down and perfectly pleasant. Five years ago I'm sure I'd have seen this several weeks ago much closer to when it opened, because it has a solid cast including Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne. The holidays were just quiet enough or I was just willing enough to pretend the holidays were quiet enough that I found one of the few theatres the film's still playing at and caught it before it heads off to video. And I'm glad enough that I did. This is a heist/caper movie in the tradition of any number of movies about a heist gone bad. There's this armored car company, see, and a decorated war veteran just finishing up probation at said armored car company. Now, his parents died, and he and his younger brother fend for themselves in a house that's about to get foreclosed. And then Matt Dillon is playing...

Talk about your interesting news days! The Publishers Weekly Daily E-mail newsletter has this . (You'll have to click and see if you can get right at the article or need to register.) Forget about the Kindle and the Nook, soon we can also play with the Skiff Reader and the Apple Tablet and the Microsoft Courier and oh so much more. With screens that bend, or with 2 screens, or with really really big screens. Fasten your seatbelts, it promises to be an interesting ride... And then their roundup of other news of the day sends us all off to this Salon article about the effect of the Apple Tablet. I haven't clicked thru all of the many links in the Salon article, but I did read the David Carr piece in the NY Times that is also linked to at Salon. While all of this is happening, there are still physical bookstores selling physical books. This PW article is an abbreviated version of a fuller round-up of holiday stores. This is an annual tradition at PW. For all their redes...

When I was in school, I learned how to write something called the "five paragraph essay." A paragraph of introduction, three paragraphs or arguing by example, a concluding paragraph. This op-ed piece from Sunday's NY Times, by Farrar Straus Giroux president Jonathan Galassi, is not that. Galassi discusses and describes the TLC, editorial input, sales and marketing efforts, and etc. etc., that a major publisher invests in the work it publishes, using William Styron's relationship with long-time Random House editor Robert Loomis as an example. The choice of Styron is not, pun not entirely intended, random. Styron's work has been at the central point of the debate over whether old publishing agreements that do not specifically mention or grant e-book rights nonetheless include them. Several years ago this was litigated but ultimately settled out of court when Styron's estate sought to have e-book editions put out through Rosetta Books instead of via Random ...

David Brooks in the NY Times had a column on Friday about reactions to Qaeda Underpants that I also think is worth reading. And another thought on what he calls (as have others) "Security Theatre." As best as I know, we don't have a good track record for unraveling plots against air transportation by catching bad guys going thru security checkpoints. I say "best as I know" because I want to recognize the possibility that we've done so but that it's been put under lock and key and kept under wraps to protect intelligence sources or an ongoing investigation or something like that. I kind of doubt it; it's hard to keep that kind of thing wrapped up, and too tempting to leak for political points, but it's possible. But 9/11, the shoe bomber, Qaeda Underpants, let's forget about Lockerbie because that was so long ago when the Theatre was much shorter than it is today, it seems like the bad guys have a good track record for getting on board th...

So it's New Year's, college football bowl day. Time for more articles about why we need a college football playoff. Please! The basic argument for a playoff follows from a silly premise, that we must have a clear #1 team at the end of the season. Do we have to? Why? It's college football, it's a game, it's not waiting for white smoke to emerge in Vatican City. And then it says that we can't have a legitimate #1 when the game that determines the legitimate #1 might have participants that are chosen with any element of arbitrariness or doubt. It can only be by having 4 teams, or 8 teams, or some # of teams, in the playoff system. But, um, excuse me. We argue over the 2 top teams to play in a championship game. If we have a 4-team playoff then we can all agree on the top 2 teams. But why does anyone -- anyone -- believe that we won't just be moving the arbitrariness and the debates and the arguments and the lack of clarity down to determining which team ...