Interesting Article From the NY Times/Yahoo News

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/booksellers-resisting-amazon-disruption-234833020.html

Maurice Sendak Dies at 83

Via yahoo.com
By Dylan Stableford
The Cutline

Maurice Sendak, the renowned children's author whose books captivated generations of kids and simultaneously scared their parents, has died. He was 83. Sendak passed away on Tuesday from complications caused by a recent stroke, his editor told the New York Times.

He lived in Ridgefield, Conn., and was hospitalized in nearby Danbury. According to the Associated Press, Sendak suffered the stroke on Friday. Sendak wrote and illustrated more than 50 children's books--including "Where the Wild Things Are," his most famous, published in 1963. The book--about a disobedient boy named Max who, after being sent to his room without supper, creates a surreal world inhabited by wild creatures--won Sendak the coveted Caldecott Medal, the equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize, in 1964. "Where The Wild Things Are" was adapted into a live-action film by Spike Jonze in 2009. "Where The Wild Things Are" was not only revolutionary--it was wildly profitable, selling more than 17 million copies, according to Bloomberg.com.

Sendak's other groundbreaking works include "In the Night Kitchen," "Outside Over There," "The Sign on Rosie's Door," "Higglety Pigglety Pop!" and "The Nutshell Library." "Bumble-Ardy," his first book in 30 years, was published by HarperCollins last year. A posthumous picture book, "My Brother's Book," is slated for 2012. Sendak "transformed children's literature from a gentle playscape into a medium to address the psychological intensity of growing up," the Washington Post said in an obituary. His "unsentimental approach to storytelling revolutionized the genre," the Los Angeles Times said. "In book after book," the New York Times wrote, "Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children's literature, in which young heroes and heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at the end in a neat, moralistic bow."

That's why, perhaps, Sendak could never break free from being labeled a children's book author, despite his exploration of darker themes. "I write books as an old man," Sendak said in a 2003 interview. "But in this country you have to be categorized, and I guess a little boy swimming in the nude in a bowl of milk can't be called an adult book. So I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think."

 In January, Sendak appeared on "The Colbert Report," giving Stephen Colbert some advice on how to make it as a children's book author. "You've started already by being an idiot," Sendak said. "I don't write for children," Sendak told Colbert. "I write, and then someone says, 'That's for children.'"

 "Sendak understood," Slate observed, "that kids need literature that makes adults uncomfortable. They need books that reflect their chaotic and dark worlds, in which sometimes children do have to feed their mothers." After Colbert pointed out that Newt Gingrich said American children don't have a great work ethic, Sendak said, "Newt Gingrich is an idiot of great renown. There is something so hopelessly gross and vile about him, it's hard to take him seriously."

President Barack Obama has made it something of a tradition to read from "Where The Wild Things Are" at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.

Sendak was heavily involved in Jonze's film adaptation. "He was involved in every aspect," Dave Eggers, who co-wrote the script, said. "Maurice really trusted Spike to do the book justice, and not to be afraid of the book and not to be too reverent."

Apple and Shady Business Tactics? No Way!

via yahoo.com news (Welcome to cheaper e-books!)

Apple, major publishers hit with federal antitrust lawsuit over e-book pricing

by Dylan Stableford - The Cutline

Apple and several of the nation's largest book publishers were hit with a federal antitrust lawsuit on Wednesday for allegedly colluding to fix e-book prices.

According to the complaint, filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, at least five publishers—Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin and Macmillan—conspired with Apple to fix prices for e-books ahead of the 2010 launch of the iPad tablet and iBookstore, forcing Amazon to raise prices for e-books on the rival Kindle.

Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Hachette have already settled with the Justice Department. According to Bloomberg, Apple and Macmillan "have refused to engage in settlement talks" and "deny they colluded to raise prices for digital books." Penguin plans to fight the lawsuit too, Bloomberg said.

Before the iPad came along, publishers had complained that Amazon's $9.99 price for e-books was too heavily discounted. When the iPad made its debut, most e-books sold by Apple were priced at $12.99, with the Cupertino, Calif.-based company allowing publishers to set their own prices—known as the "agency model." Amazon soon allowed publishers to set their own prices, too, driving up the prices of digital editions.

"Apple facilitated the [publishers'] collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their transition to an agency model across all retailers," the suit alleges.

A class action lawsuit filed in California District Court last summer by Kindle consumers was the first to allege a conspiracy, CNNMoney.com noted. According to that suit, "booksellers were 'terrified' by the discounted e-book price structure Amazon launched in 2007." The "spooked publishers" colluded with Apple to force Amazon's hand.

http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/28921250

What One Unemployed Irishman Did With 1.4 Billion Euros

via Yahoo News



What would you do with $1.82 billion worth of shredded money? In Ireland, people build houses out of it — at least that's what Dublin-based artist Frank Buckley did. The unemployed artist originally wanted to create a gallery for his series of mixed-media artworks called "Expressions of Recession," but he ended up building a house instead.

Buckley has been working roughly 12 hours a day every day since the beginning of December. During the early part of the construction process, he made bricks out of the decommissioned Euros Ireland's mint lent him. In all, around 50,000 money bricks went into building the house that consists of a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room. He plans to continue expanding the house that sits on an empty office building to include a kitchen, a shower, and a patio.

If you're wondering how it feels to live in a house made out of paper currency, he said that it's quite warm inside: "Whatever you say about the Euro, it's a great insulator." Frank is one of the countless people all over the globe affected by recession, and he built the house because he "wanted to create something from nothing." It will take around seven more weeks to complete building his new home, but Buckley (who's been living in the house since December) welcomes any visitor who wants to take a look at his billion-dollar masterpiece.

Irish Times via Treehugger

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

Kindle (under)Fire

via Yahoo News and The New York Times:

By DAVID STREITFELD

The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer.

A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.

All the individual grievances — recorded on Amazon’s own Web site — received a measure of confirmation last week when Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, denounced the Fire, saying it offered “a disappointingly poor” experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating to manipulate.

“I feel the Fire is going to be a failure,” Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said in an interview. “I can’t recommend buying it.”

All this would be enough to send some products directly to the graveyard where the Apple Newton, the Edsel, New Coke and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe languish. But as a range of retailers and tech firms could tell you, it would be foolish to underestimate Amazon.

Amazon sees the Kindle line of devices as critical for its future as a virtual store, and is willing to lose money on the sale of each one for the sake of market share. Once dominance is achieved, it plans to make money on the movies, books and music that users download directly from Amazon.

First, however, it needs to make the devices ubiquitous. Promoting them every day to its tens of millions of customers at the cheapest possible price will surely help. If Apple brought the notion of the tablet into the mainstream, Amazon is making it affordable.

The retailer says the Kindle Fire is the most successful product it has ever introduced, a measure of enthusiasm that reveals nothing; it has not specified how many Fires it has sold, nor how many Kindles it has ever sold. It also says it is building even more Fires to meet the strong demand. But, at the same time, it acknowledges that it is working on improvements.

“In less than two weeks, we’re rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,” said Drew Herdener, a company spokesman.

There will be improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.

Amazon declines to say, but soon — probably in the spring — there will be an improved version of the device itself. One more shot is all the retailer will get, Mr. Nielsen said. “If that’s a failure, then the Fire is doomed to the dust pile of history.”

Despite Amazon’s silence on the matter, analysts have been estimating the company will sell from three to five million Fires this quarter. They are neither raising their estimates nor lowering them.

Amazon’s devotion to this product line is such that it has stripped down the original Kindle e-reader, reduced its price and begun to sell it through other retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart for $79, as well as prominently on its Web site. If Amazon had Apple-like margins, analysts estimate that the basic Kindle might cost $180.

According to calculations by the research firm IHS iSuppli, the $79 Kindle costs Amazon $84 to make. That sum does not include research and development, shipping or, with a third-party retailer, the wholesale discount. Add these up, and Amazon might be losing as much as $20 on every $79 Kindle sold at, for example, Best Buy.

For most hardware makers, that would be a recipe for corporate suicide. But once the device is activated in a buyer’s home, the losses stop and the consumption begins.

“What else are you going to do on this Kindle?” asked Andrew Rassweiler, senior director of teardown services at iSuppli. “Nothing. It’s a useless device unless you’re planning on putting books, a lot of books, on it.”

The Fire is trying to do much more than be an e-book reader, a function some say it does not do as well as the original Kindle. Slightly more than a third of the 4,500 reviewers of the Fire on Amazon have given it mixed to negative reviews, three stars or fewer. Of Amazon reviewers of the iPad 2, 22 percent have given three stars or fewer; for the original Kindle, that number is 11 percent. (There are a few caveats. At least some of the iPad reviewers bought not from Apple but from resellers, the real target of their ire. As for the original Kindle, after four years it has both a huge number of reviews — over 34,000 — and the advantage of being a known quantity.)

Many of the initial customers of the Fire seem to have bought it on a mixture of faith and hype. The striking thing even about some of the one-star reviewers is that they are regretful rather than angry. One review, couched as an open letter to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, began: “I have spent thousands on your outstanding site. I own and love the original kindle. When asked about why I would buy a Fire when I had an ipad, I said that half of me wanted to just support your effort and that I believed amazon just did things right.” The reviewer is now recommending that friends skip lunch to buy an iPad.

Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, has been tracking the opinions as more reviews are posted on Amazon. Since Nov. 18, five-star reviews have fallen slightly, to 47 percent from 50 percent, he says. One-star reviews have held relatively steady at about 13 percent.

“I would have expected things to be even worse at this point,” Mr. Munster said, adding that initial buyers were usually the most critical. Pricing will save the Fire, he predicted. At $199 versus $500 for an iPad, “Amazon has a lot of air cover to have a B-level product.”

Mr. Nielsen, the consultant, disagreed.

The 7-inch Fire does a good job displaying sites optimized for smaller mobile devices, he said, but stumbles when it tries to show pages designed for 10-inch tablets. “Like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit,” Mr. Nielsen wrote in his report. “Not going to look good.” As for displaying desktop sites, forget it.

It is true that the device is only $199, but so what? “Look at your hand. Is it thin or fat?” he asked. “If it’s fat, you just know it’s going to be bad.”

The device does do one thing well, he said. Shopping on Amazon is a breeze. “If I were given to conspiracy theories, I’d say that Amazon deliberately designed a poor Web browsing user experience to keep Fire users from shopping on competing sites,” Mr. Nielsen said.

Rare Book Found in Utah

via yahoo news:

500-year-old book surfaces in Utah
By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press Brian Skoloff, Associated Press 27 mins ago

SALT LAKE CITY – Book dealer Ken Sanders has seen a lot of nothing in his decades appraising "rare" finds pulled from attics and basements, storage sheds and closets.

Sanders, who occasionally appraises items for PBS's Antiques Roadshow, often employs the "fine art of letting people down gently."

But on a recent Saturday while volunteering at a fundraiser for the small town museum in Sandy, Utah, just south of Salt Lake, Sanders got the surprise of a lifetime.

"Late in the afternoon, a man sat down and started unwrapping a book from a big plastic sack, informing me he had a really, really old book and he thought it might be worth some money," he said. "I kinda start, oh boy, I've heard this before."

Then he produced a tattered, partial copy of the 500-year-old Nuremberg Chronicle.

The German language edition printed by Anton Koberger and published in 1493 is a world history beginning in biblical times. It's considered one of the earliest and most lavishly illustrated books of the 15th century.

"I was just absolutely astounded. I was flabbergasted, particularly here in the interior West," Sanders said. "We might see a lot of rare Mormon books and other treasures, but you don't expect to see a five-centuries-old book. You don't expect to see one of the oldest printed books in the world pop up in Sandy, Utah."

The book's owner has declined to be identified, but Sanders said it was passed down to the man by his great uncle and had been gathering dust in his attic for decades.

Because of the cotton bond paper it was printed on, not wood pulp paper like most present-day works, Sanders said the remaining pages have been well-preserved albeit literally coming apart at the seams.


"Barring further calamity or disaster, it will last another 500 years," he said.

And Sanders is certain it's not a fake.

"It passes the smell test," he said. "I'm not sure there's ever been a forger born who is ambitious enough to hand-create a five-centuries-old book in a manner sufficient enough to fool people."

But what's it actually worth? Turns out, not much.

It is believed there are several hundred copies in circulation worldwide, making it not-so-rare of a find, and about two-thirds of its pages are missing.

Still, it's not the monetary value that excites Sanders.

"Just the opportunity to handle something from the very beginning of the printed word and the book itself, especially, ironically, in the 21st century with all this talk of the death of the book, and here we have a book that's survived 500-plus years," he said. "It's just exciting. ... The value of an artifact like this to me is the least interesting part of it all."

Sanders is displaying the copy at his rare book shop in Salt Lake City.

San Francisco-based antiquities book dealer John Windle said if this copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle were in mint condition and fully intact, it could be worth up to $1 million.

One in such shape sold last year at a London auction for about $850,000, Windle said, but not so much because it's such a rare find.

"The rarity of the book has almost nothing to do with its value," he said. "If you're collecting monuments of printing history, monuments of human history, if you're collecting achievements of the human spirit through the printed word, this is one of the foundation books. ... Every book collector wants a copy of that book or at least some pages from it."

Windle noted that while its worth to collectors is priceless, it is "probably the most common book from the 15th century making its way onto the market these days."

"We have a saying in the book trade: There's nothing as common as a rare book," he added.

Because of this book's tattered state, Windle said it's likely worth less than $50,000.

"It basically kills the value," he said. "If it turned up in perfect condition in Salt Lake City, now that would be amazing. That would be astounding."

Luise Poulton, curator and head of rare books at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library, called it an "exciting find," but largely just because of the way it surfaced.

"It's that classic story," said Poulton, who has several pages from another copy of a Nuremberg Chronicle on display. "You really never know what's in your attic."

Video of Story:
http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/first-person-buying-a-book-from-1493-25016254