In AlterNet's article "Is Amazon Evil?" (12/8/10)--reprinted from the Boston Review (11-12/10)--the description of the economics of e-books is seriously dubious. Reporter Onnesha Roychoudhuri writes:

If Amazon had asked publishers what they thought about locking in e-book prices at $9.99, it would have been subjected to a chorus of outrage. That’s because the math behind publishing is seldom in a publishers’ favor. The sale of a $20 hardcover nets a large publisher about $10. Royalties run the publisher about $3, and the costs of printing, binding, and paper are a further $2 (more for low-volume titles). Take $1.20 for distribution, $2 for marketing, and that leaves a publisher with roughly $1.80 to cover rent, editing, and any other costs. A smaller publisher might keep closer to a dollar per book.

The New York Times (3/1/10) did a similar exercise, basing its analysis on a $26 hardcover rather than $20--out of which the publisher keeps $13 instead of $10. (The Times' reporter, Motoko Rich, sources these figures to "interviews with executives at several major houses''; she's by no means anti-publisher--see FAIR Blog, 3/2/10, 3/18/10.) The costs cited by the Times are similar--$3.90 for the author's royalty, $3.25 for printing, storage and shipping (vs. the Review's $3.20 for printing plus distribution), $1 (rather than $2) for marketing. The Times breaks out editing, design and typesetting as its own item, listing it as 80 cents. This leaves $4.05 for the publisher as profit before overhead--math that is considerably more in the publisher's favor.

When it comes to contrasting the hardcover economics with ebooks, the Review piece becomes very vague:

E-books reduce the cost of printing, binding and paper, but royalties tend to run higher, and all other costs are largely unchanged. Publishers account for these costs when they slap a price tag on a book, so Amazon's decision to set the price irrespective of them set off a wave of anxiety.

Actually, according to the Times, royalties run lower in electronic publishing--$1.75-2.50 on a $9.99 ebook. Books published electronically, of course, eliminate rather than "reduce" the costs of printing. Other costs go down, because your sales volume goes up when you reduce the price to the consumer by more than 60 percent. And the retailer--the evil Amazon--gets less of a take from each sale, so the publisher winds up--according to the Times, which, again, is quite sympathetic to the publishing industry--with about as much profit on each copy sold: $3.51 to $4.26, depending on how the author's royalty is calculated.

What actually set the big publishers off was not worry that they could not make as much money selling electronic books at Amazon's price, but worry that they would lose out on the opportunity for windfall profits that comes with a new technology (FAIR Blog, 7/23/10).  Is that evil? No, that's capitalism. Or, if you prefer, "Yes, that's capitalism." There's certainly not a lot to prefer about the publishers' business model, either from the reader's or the writer's point of view.

The Review's website blurbs the piece, "What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?" That's what's most misleading about the article: the suggestion that corporate publishers are not profit-maximizing enterprises in the same way that Amazon is. This would surely come as news to News Corporation (i.e., HarperCollins), CBS (Simon & Schuster), Bertelsmann (Random House), Reed Elsevier (Houghton Mifflin) et al.

P.S. Daniel Ellsberg makes a stronger case for the evil of Amazon here.

William Bennett at the Values Voter Summit (AlterNet, 9/22/09):

I don't know why more of the African American leadership doesn't talk about Frederick Douglass.... Probably because of his deep devotion to Lincoln, and his deep devotion to this country.

Frederick Douglass at the dedication of the Freedman's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (4/14/1876):

It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought and in his prejudices, he was a white man.

He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the government. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration.

Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.

AlterNet's Liliana Segura has traced (7/28/09) the "nasty little rumor" that "Barack Hussein Obama is not a legitimate president because he is not really an American citizen" from "the early days of the presidential race" to its current status as "a full-blown conspiracy theory" that does "nonetheless enjoy increasingly high-profile political support, and media coverage '9/11 truthers' could only dream of":

Last week the "birthers" became big news again, after a video emerged showing Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., confronted at a town hall meeting by a woman who angrily accused him of being complicit in the coverup of Obama's true origins. Castle, who is commonly labeled a "moderate Republican"... seemed genuinely perplexed.

"Well, I don't know what comment that invites," he said, to a chorus of boos. "If you're referring to the president, then he is a citizen of the United States."

The video of Castle's unfortunate run-in with the birthers hit YouTube and went viral. MSNBC put the clip on heavy rotation; Hardball host Chris Matthews devoted multiple segments to the topic; on CNN and on his radio show, sneering nativist Lou Dobbs fanned the flames with such remarks as, "What is the deal here? I'm starting to think we have … a document issue," and on Larry King, Dick Cheney's increasingly vocal daughter, Liz, shared her highly unempirical view that "one of the reasons you see people so concerned about this" is that "people are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever … a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas."

Note how all the airtime given to these crackpots comes despite the fact that, in Segura words, the "conspiracy theory--which holds that Obama was born in Kenya, despite all evidence to the contrary--has long been debunked. The Obama camp released a copy of his birth certificate as early as June 2008, although that only seemed to fan the flames."

Bringing us the news that "the North Carolina legislature just sent a bill to study committee (a.k.a shelved it at least until next year) that would have crippled municipal broadband projects in the state," AlterNet's Tana Ganeva (5/6/09) tells "why that's a really, really good (albeit temporary) thing":

According to a recent study, America ranks 15th in the world in broadband access. This is partly because we have a very large population spread over a very large amount of space. But it is also because private companies don't care about poor people and refuse to build broadband infrastructure in rural areas and many low-income city neighborhoods.

This is where municipal broadband plans come in. Local governments set up networks providing fast Internet access to underserved or totally ignored areas, for free or at significantly lower prices than would private providers.

Which sounds great--to everyone except giant telecommunications companies "distressed by the prospect of actual competition in an otherwise monopolized industry." Their general response "is to lobby for deeply unpopular legislation that would effectively kill local government broadband projects"--as has been their strategy for quite some time; see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Strings Attached: Telecom Industry's Spin Machine Casts Net Over Community Broadband" (9-10/05) by Michelle Chen.