Spain crisis fuels Catalan separatist sentiment

FILE - Demonstrators wave Catalan flags during a protest rally in Barcelona , Spain, in this Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012 file photo. Thousands of people demonstrated in Barcelona on Tuesday demanding independence for Catalonia, on the Catalonia region's 'National Day". On Thursday, regional lawmakers voted to hold a referendum for Catalonia's seven million citizens to decide whether they want to break away from Spain. The Spanish government says that the referendum would be unconstitutional. And it's unclear if the "Yes" vote would win ? even in these restless times. But it looks more likely than ever that Catalonia may ask to go its own way. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti, File)

FILE - Demonstrators wave Catalan flags during a protest rally in Barcelona , Spain, in this Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012 file photo. Thousands of people demonstrated in Barcelona on Tuesday demanding independence for Catalonia, on the Catalonia region's 'National Day". On Thursday, regional lawmakers voted to hold a referendum for Catalonia's seven million citizens to decide whether they want to break away from Spain. The Spanish government says that the referendum would be unconstitutional. And it's unclear if the "Yes" vote would win ? even in these restless times. But it looks more likely than ever that Catalonia may ask to go its own way. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti, File)

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) ? Three weeks after a massive Catalan separatist march in Barcelona ? the biggest since the 1970s ? the independence flags still flutter from balconies across Spain's second largest city.

Spain's crushing recession has had this divisive consequence: soaring popular sentiment in Catalonia that the affluent region would be better off as a separate nation.

On Thursday, regional lawmakers voted to hold a referendum for Catalonia's seven million citizens to decide whether they want to break away from Spain. The Spanish government says that the referendum would be unconstitutional. And it's unclear if the "Yes" vote would win ? even in these restless times.

But it looks more likely than ever that Catalonia may ask to go its own way.

"I have a big Catalan flag on the balcony. I put it up a week before the demonstration on Sept. 11 and it is still hanging there," said Gemma Mondon, 46, a mother of two. "I think we would be better off if we can manage our money. I think we would do much better."

Catalonia, a northeastern region that is historically one of Spain's wealthiest and most industrialized, has always harbored a strong nationalist streak. Separatism is especially entrenched in the rural towns and villages outside its more cosmopolitan capital Barcelona, where people switch between speaking Spanish and Catalan with ease and at times without even noticing.

In the peaceful transition from the Franco dictatorship to prosperous democracy, Catalans were content just to recover the freedom to openly speak, teach and publish in their own Catalan language, a right denied under Franco for over 30 years.

But now, generations-old grievances for more self-government and recognition of their culture are rising to the surface as the economic downturn bites.

Many Catalans feel their quest for a sense for nationhood has been frustrated by the intransigence of the central government in Madrid. The most recent of these clashes came in 2010 when Spain's Constitutional Court weakened the Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia, a sweeping package of laws that devolved more power to the region and would have recognized Catalonia as a nation, albeit one within Spain.

Spain's slump, which has led to a spike in unemployment and harsh austerity cuts, has proven to be the tipping point for many Catalans who used to be against or ambivalent about seeking their own state.

Mondon, who works for a family run real estate management firm, said that just over a year ago she voted "No" in a nonbinding referendum organized by pro-independence groups. Now, she says she has changed her mind.

"I always felt Spanish and Catalan and I never had the urge to be independent. A year ago I just wanted to be left alone to speak my language and raise my children in a Catalan school," said Mondon. "My attitude was 'don't bother me,' but now that has changed."

Catalonia will go to the polls on Nov. 25, with regional president Artur Mas' center-right nationalist party Convergencia i Unio expected to increase its hold of the regional parliament. Mas has said he will hold a referendum on Catalonia's self-determination, whether the Spanish government permits it or not. The date has yet to be set.

"If the Spanish government authorizes (the referendum), more the better," said Mas. "If the Spanish government turns its back on us and doesn't authorize a referendum or another type of vote, well, we will do it anyway."

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy insists the country's constitution doesn't allow a region to secede on its own, and experts say it would be virtually impossible for Catalan separatists to get it changed. Spain's Basque region, the other part of the country with a strong separatist movement, tried to get such a move approved in Parliament in 2005 but failed.

"It's not a scenario planned by the constitution," said Francisco Perez-Latre, a communications professor at the University of Navarra who has closely monitored the Catalan independence movement for years.

The new political uncertainty about the economically important region and major tourism destination is unsettling for investors already worried about Rajoy's ability to keep his country's shaky economy afloat, and within the euro currency club.

There are also doubts about how well-equipped Catalonia would be to go it alone.

Catalonia, sitting on its own mountain of debt, has in fact asked Spain for a ?5.9 billion bailout. But many Catalans argue that the region is only heavily indebted because it has to pay more than its fair due in taxes compared to services and funding it gets in return. Spain's other better-off regions also give more than they receive. Rajoy, however, has emboldened Catalan separatists by flatly rejecting demands for more power in levying tax revenues and deciding how it is spent, privileges granted to two other Spanish regions: the Basque Country and Navarra.

Rajoy's stance has combined with Spain's gloomy prospects to push Catalans who never wanted to break away from Spain before to conclude that the country itself is a failure.

"I put the Catalan flag on my balcony for the first time. Normally, I have been very discreet with my political ideas. But I think now I have to go a step further," said architect Albert Estanyol, 48, whose mother came from southern Spain. "Before, when asked about independence, I would say 'Why?' Now, I say, 'Why not?'"

Catalonia has over 800,000 unemployed, almost 22 percent of its population. That's slightly lower than Spain's national jobless rate, but the back-to-back recessions have been particularly hard on young workers in Catalonia. Since 2007, over 100,000 Catalans under 25 have lost their jobs, and the unemployment rate for workers under 25 has skyrocketed to over 50 percent, close to the national level for the same age bracket.

"I have looked for work. Since I was 18 I have had six or seven jobs, they have all been unstable, poorly paid, like filling in for two weeks at IKEA. They have had nothing to do with what I studied," said Roger Cervino, a 23-year-old who holds a degree in history.

"The economic situation is bad and one of the solutions to ending the crisis is secession. It would be complicated, but Catalonia has the capacity to reach full employment," he said. "What stops it is Spain, and above all the Spanish government, which has been a disaster."

___

Alan Clendenning contributed from Madrid.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-09-30-Spain-Catalan%20Independence/id-6ad77c6f8015456e8185399a81ebcd93

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What makes Barry Diller.com tick - Fortune Features

Editor's note: Every week, Fortune.com publishes a story?from our magazine archives. This week, The New York Times company closed its' $300 million dollar sale of About.com, a network of topic articles, to Ask.com. Much was written about how much the Times made in the deal (about $100 million). But what about Ask parent InterActiveCorp (IACI)? Barry Diller's strange brew of Internet companies?puzzled?many observers for years, not least because it?completely bucked the much-romanticized origin story for dot-com success. (Some variation on the small band of brothers, programming against all?odds, and striking digital gold.)?Instead, the former Hollywood titan made his company through deals -- many, many deals. The About.com acquisition, in fact, is just the latest in a interminable line. To find out where that line began, we turn to this 2004 cover story. ? ??

By Bethany McLean

FORTUNE -- One day last Fall 400 investors and analysts gathered on Wall Street to hear a full day of presentations given by Barry Diller and the cadre of top executives at his Internet company, InterActiveCorp. They came in part because of Diller's unquestioned star power. But they also came because IAC has been anointed one of the "four horsemen" of the Internet--right up there with Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay--although IAC got there in a very different way. Diller, through a staggering number of deals, has assembled a conglomerate that includes the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Citysearch, Expedia, LendingTree, Match.com, and other well-known brands. Today, although IAC's market capitalization of $25 billion places it behind Yahoo ($36 billion) and eBay ($49 billion), it is slightly ahead of Amazon's $18 billion.

Diller comes from Hollywood, and he was the impresario of a superb show that fall day. The huge ballroom was decorated with multicolored banners bearing the logo of every business. Each one's CEO explained why his particular company could double, triple--maybe even quadruple!--over the next five years. All of this added up to grand goals. IAC hopes to almost triple its revenues in the next five years, from $6.3 billion today to $16.5 billion, while increasing its profits at a 25% to 30% annual clip to $3 billion. IAC also plans to kill its competitors by, as Diller put it, spending "more than anyone else can afford"--some $1 billion this year alone--on marketing. Ultimately, Diller has said, his goal is to create "the largest, most profitable e-commerce company in the world."

To the true believers--and there are many--IAC is in the Internet's sweet spot: As consumers increasingly gravitate toward online commerce, IAC plans to take a cut of just about every kind of transaction, from travel to dating to lending to things you can't yet imagine. But unlike those of Internet companies of yore, most of its businesses are not smoke and mirrors, and IAC has real money in the bank: at least $3.3 billion. And the fact that Diller is the one putting it together just makes it that much more enticing to his legions of true believers. "I'd take Barry Diller over [Cisco chief] John Chambers any day," says James Cramer, the ubiquitous CNBC host. "Put me in the religious camp," adds State Street managing director Larry Haverty, who's owned IAC stock as long as IAC has existed. Diller and IAC, in fact, are a reminder of how much fun it used to be, back in those late-1990s days when anything seemed possible, and no idea--and no growth rate--seemed too outlandish.

Which is precisely why IAC has attracted skeptics as well as ardent fans. It isn't the late 1990s anymore, and we know all too well that grandiose promises can end in ugly disaster. After almost doubling in the first part of 2003, to a high of $42.74, IAC stock has fallen 25% and trails the other three Net titans; there is a healthy chunk of stock--some 50 million shares--currently sold short. When the skeptics look at IAC they see not so much visions of future glory but warning signs in the here and now. IAC indulges in iffy practices, like inventing financial metrics: Its contribution to generally unaccepted accounting principles is the absurd-sounding OIBA (operating income before amortization), which excludes all kinds of costs. In 2003, IAC's OIBA was an impressive $860 million; its GAAP net income was just $154 million. Diller's nonstop dealmaking--more than $8 billion in the past 18 months alone--is not just tortured in its complexity but has resulted in numerous strategy shifts and five name changes. Critics point to the enormous sums Diller has paid himself and his top executives. Diller's complaints about IAC's "undervalued" stock also strike people as unseemly and promotional: IAC has incessantly whined that the other big three Internet stocks are valued much more highly.

But if you think, after reading the previous paragraph, that you know where this story is headed, think again. IAC is a company that can scare you and seduce you at the same time because it contains such a potent mix of reality and fantasy. There is enough reality to give credence to the fantasy, but enough fantasy to cast doubt on the reality. There's never been a company quite like IAC. And before you can understand this company, you have to understand the man who put it together.

His reputation precedes him, of course. Over the years Barry Diller has been described with words like "arrogant," "intimidating," and "bulldog." In public forums such as the one held last fall for investors, he seems even less approachable than your average CEO as he tosses off facts and predictions as if they were holy writ. He has been known to react with vitriol to public criticisms of his company. And IAC's offices--in Manhattan's Carnegie Tower--do nothing to temper that image. The 42nd-and 43rd-floor executive suite has cool, blond wood, a silver spiraling staircase, and fresh flowers everywhere. (The company is about to break ground on a new Frank Gehry--designed headquarters in the hip Chelsea area of New York City.) Several of Diller's assistants--there's a whole pack of them--guard the door to his office, which has a private terrace offering sweeping views of Central Park.

But Diller, like his company, is difficult to characterize. One-on-one he appears anything but arrogant and slick. In fact, for a chief executive, he seems unusually willing to question himself. He rambles. He expresses self-doubt. He admits to mistakes before you can play "gotcha." For instance, during IAC's fourth-quarter conference call, Diller told analysts that it was absolutely critical for the company to be "consistent." But "consistency" is hardly the word IAC's history brings to mind--and it's refreshing when Diller admits in an interview that it won't be easy. "It's hard to be consistent when you're making it up every day," he says. "That's the bitch of it."

Nor does Diller seem to believe he's infallible. He says that "the most solid thing about this enterprise is that we enjoy being told we're stupid," by which he means he likes to be challenged. Though the 62-year-old CEO has been in business longer than many of his executives have been alive, he doesn't impose top-down rule; rather, he has fostered a culture of debate. "You must have people who will say, 'That's nice, you fool, you're wrong,'" Diller says. Meetings at IAC are not decorous affairs, but loud and even combative. "People are interested in finding the right answer, not in affirming their own answers," says Karl Peterson, CEO of Hotwire.com, which IAC bought in 2003. "Diller," adds Doug Ledba, CEO of LendingTree, another 2003 purchase, "has a great ability to hold two simultaneous, seemingly opposite thoughts in his mind." His executives find it impossible to sum him up easily. He's arrogant and self-deprecating; certain of his views and questioning of them; he's created IAC both to satisfy his intellectual curiosity and to make money. "Diller is intense, a builder, an opportunist, a capitalist ... a personality in your face, always pushing," says John Pleasants, CEO of Ticketmaster, one of Diller's first purchases.

IAC's convoluted history began in August 1995, when Diller invested $10 million (half of which was a loan from the company) to buy a 20% controlling stake in a tiny TV network called Silver King Communications, which broadcast the Home Shopping Network. Silver King was controlled by John Malone's Liberty Media, as was HSN, and Malone had recruited Diller. (Liberty still owns a 20% stake in IAC.) By the end of 1996, Diller had merged the Home Shopping Network, Silver King, and Savoy, a small film production company, into an entity named HSN Inc.

Diller, of course, was well past the point where he needed to work for the reason most people do. After starting in the mailroom of William Morris, he had rocketed through the entertainment world to head ABC, run Paramount, and turn Fox into a viable fourth network. But he abruptly departed Fox in 1991--with a reported $140 million--after Rupert Murdoch refused to make him an equity partner.

Diller became fascinated with interactive shopping in 1993, when he visited QVC with his now wife, designer Diane von Furstenberg, who was selling her dresses on the air. Diller called home shopping the "fastest link between action and reaction I've ever seen." Within a few months he became chairman of QVC, a platform from which he tried to buy Paramount, losing a bitter battle to Viacom's Sumner Redstone. When he then tried to buy CBS, Comcast, which had a majority stake in QVC, nixed the idea. By 1995, Diller was gone.

Back to HSN, which Diller first envisioned as the foundation for a new network he would build, a la Fox. But it didn't work out that way. On the one hand, Diller continued to do media deals, purchasing Universal Studios from Edgar Bronfman's Seagram for just over $4 billion in 1998. Diller paid $1.6 billion in cash, gave Bronfman a 46% stake in his company, and changed its name to USA Networks. Four years later Diller sold Universal to Vivendi for $11.7 billion--although only $1.6 billion of that was cash; the rest consisted of the return of USA stock Vivendi owned and various other convoluted securities in a new entity called Vivendi Universal Entertainment. (The ultimate value of those securities is the subject of a lawsuit between Vivendi and IAC.) Diller also sold all of USA's TV stations in early 2001, for $1.1 billion in cash.

But Diller also began making deals that had nothing to do with traditional media. He acquired Ticketmaster, the nation's dominant ticket seller, for about $680 million in stock. He also began investing in an Internet company called Citysearch, which planned to make its fortune from local advertising and commerce. The stated rationale for the Ticketmaster acquisition was that Diller could combine HSN's delivery infrastructure with Ticketmaster's phone capability and outsource its "integrated electronic commerce solutions" to other companies. Though Diller invested roughly another $1 billion to further this strategy, that never worked out either.

By then, though, Internet mania was in full bloom. So Diller spun off Ticketmaster's nascent online division, grafted it onto Citysearch, and sold stock in a new entity called Ticketmaster Online--Citysearch, or, mercifully, TMCS. (The rationale? Citysearch would help steer people to Ticketmaster events.) TMCS's stock shot from $14 to $80, allowing it to acquire a slew of companies, including Match.com (a dating site) and Evite (an invitation site), before plummeting back to earth. Losses ballooned, and in early 2001, Diller reunited TMCS with its brick-and-mortar half by having TMCS issue $670 million of stock to his company in exchange for the old-fashioned piece of Ticketmaster.

Then came the travel business. In a 1999 deal Diller paid $245 million for a tiny Texas-based company called Hotel Reservations Network that sold blocks of hotel rooms at steeply discounted rates over the Internet. (In 2000, Diller sold a stake to the public and later on renamed the business Hotels.com; in 2003, IAC reacquired the shares for $1.2 billion.) Diller also bought a $1.5 billion stake in Expedia, which had been spun out from Microsoft a few years earlier. Erik Blachford, an Expedia executive who would later become its CEO, recalls Diller's saying, "You guys think this is the future of travel. I think it's the future of everything."

The deal that garnered the most headlines in the 1990s was the one that failed: Diller's attempt to buy just over 60% of search engine Lycos for $3.8 billion. Though his critics today say he dodged a bullet, Diller vehemently disagrees. "Those dopes!" he exclaims. "I did not dodge a bullet! We were going to wire all of our commerce to the No. 3 search engine at the time when habits were just changing. Our company would have been so far advanced! I would have loved it!"

With all the bewildering wheeling and dealing, Diller achieved four undeniable results. First, he created a cash-rich company with a healthy $3.3 billion on its balance sheet (not including the value of the Vivendi securities). Part of that came from Diller's dealmaking, but he has also owned businesses that have produced lots of cash. Second, Diller did quite well for those shareholders who stuck with him. IAC dates its founding to Dec. 16, 1996; from that starting point, IAC's stock has returned around 600%, or more than triple the S&P 500's return. Diller views this as the answer to just about any form of criticism. "It's amazing that anyone would look at our company any other way than its only reality," he says. He has done particularly well for Malone, who is entitled to keep his IAC stake at 20%. This past spring, for instance, after IAC planned to issue a ton of shares to make acquisitions, Malone's deal allowed Liberty to buy over $1.6 billion of stock--for $1.16 billion.

Diller also made himself a fortune. He's guaranteed--yes, guaranteed!--$255 million from the deal with Vivendi. Add in Diller's two million shares of IAC, 42 million stock options, gains from stock sales over the years, salary, and bonuses, and he's reaped some $1.6 billion. That's not much less than the $2.4 billion the company has reported in net income over that same time, which helps explain why Grant's Interest Rate Observer opined last year that "no public investor in Diller's company will ever do as well as Diller himself." (To be fair, Diller has not taken any stock options in six years.)

And finally Diller's wheeling and dealing has given rise to a company--the name was ultimately changed to InterActiveCorp. in mid-2003--that, to hear Diller and his executives tell it, is no longer a hodgepodge of disparate assets but makes coherent business sense. It's all about selling to consumers, whether your interest is travel (Expedia) or treadmills (HSN), finding a mate (Match.com) or a mortgage (LendingTree). Assets that didn't mesh with that focus have been sold. Companies that extended that focus, such as LendingTree and Priceline competitor Hotwire.com, have been acquired. Diller took almost $1 billion in pretax charges to clean up the company's balance sheet and spent $5.6 billion buying the publicly traded shares of Ticketmaster, Expedia, and Hotels.com in an effort to simplify the company's structure for investors. "We finally have a poker hand we like," CFO Dara Khosrowshahi has been known to say.

If you were looking to cast someone to play the CEO in a movie about the dot-com era, you could pick the men running the various IAC businesses. They're mostly young, white, thirtysomething MBAs--Harvard appears to be their business school of choice--many of whom once worked at TMCS. They're trim and handsome, and favor the open-collar-shirt look. They say the kind of optimistic, enthusiastic, hyperaggressive things that dot-com executives used to utter. Listen, for instance, to Tim Sullivan, CEO of Match.com: "Our mission is truly bringing happiness to the world. I'm not afraid to say it!" Or CFO Khosrowshahi: "We're here to conquer." You'll also hear more than one say some variation of "Barry pushes me, but not as hard as I push myself." You'll discover a little bit of arrogance and a lot of ambition, but as with Diller, you don't get the sense that they're selling a story they don't believe. Indeed, if there's Kool-Aid drinking going on, they're drinking it.

Most of them are also dot-com rich; Khosrowshahi, for instance, made $8.3 million from selling Hotels.com stock. (He received that stock because he sat on the Hotels.com board.) John Pleasants has netted $3.8 million from stock sales; there was also very heavy insider selling at Expedia and Hotels.com before IAC bought back the publicly traded shares. Erik Blachford got a slew of Expedia options right before the buyout was announced, resulting in a windfall of $3 million. Most of the top executives have millions of dollars' worth of stock options. IAC has 98 million options outstanding, which is why some eyebrows were raised when Diller announced in 2002 that IAC would no longer hand out options--even characterizing them as a "get rich quick" scheme. Says Albert Meyer, an IAC skeptic who founded 2nd Opinion Research: "The horse has bolted, and now the stable door is closed."

But if the CEOs fit the dot-com stereotype, the companies themselves are all over the lot. Yes, they are all in the business of selling things to consumers, but not all of them do so online--in fact, about 50% of IAC's sales are offline--and the closer you look, the more you're struck not by how similar IAC's businesses are, but how different. Everything about Ticketmaster, for instance, from its Sunset Boulevard address in Los Angeles to its near chokehold on the ticketing business, exudes power and success. Its old partner Citysearch has never made a penny despite numerous strategy shifts. HSN, with its $2.2 billion in revenues, 53-acre Florida campus, and omnipresent screens that track every single sale every second of the day, represents a certain solidity. Yet while HSN does 15% of its sales online, it sells most of its wares on TV. Today it has virtually nothing in common with the rest of IAC.

And on it goes. LendingTree is a classic dot-com, with all that implies: It could represent a revolutionary way for consumers to fulfill all their financial needs, or it could turn out to be a flash in the pan. IAC's crucial travel business--which accounts for 41% of revenues, and which Diller predicts will become the largest travel company in the world--has been terrifically successful so far. But it is engaged in a titanic struggle with its most profitable suppliers, the hotel industry. Starwood Hotels chief marketing officer Steve Henkin explains the state of the travel business this way: "This industry is changing at a phenomenal rate, and for anyone to say he knows where it's going is crazy." In truth, in virtually every business IAC owns, the size of the opportunity is matched only by the size of the risk.

Let's look again at Ticketmaster. With its $743 million in revenues last year--and its 19% profit margin (using, alas, OIBA)--it is by far the dominant player in its industry. And as ticket sales have gravitated to the Internet--Ticketmaster now does half its business online--its profitability has risen. To boost ticket sales, CEO John Pleasants has pioneered all sorts of new Internet-based strategies, such as last-minute e-mail alerts. (It sent 300 million last year, which resulted in an additional $43 million in ticket sales.)

But the Internet also has the potential to diminish Ticketmaster's importance. What's to stop its clients, such as event promoters, from doing their own online ticketing? Pleasants's challenge is to ensure that doesn't happen. He is trying to convince clients that by using Ticketmaster, they will sell more tickets--and make more money--than they would otherwise.

Now look at Citysearch, which has been subsumed into a new division called Local Services, where it exists alongside Evite and a recently acquired business called Entertainment Publications (EPI), which sells coupon books offering restaurant discounts. Diller has big plans for EPI, which currently makes up most of Local Services' revenues and all of its OIBA. But those plans revolve around turning the business into an online service--and currently EPI has a minuscule Internet presence. ("Once you're able to throw targeted discounts to people online instantly, we think the business frankly explodes," Diller has told the Street.) It also requires some sort of synergy with Citysearch and Evite. Given Citysearch's previous failed attempt to mesh with Ticketmaster, skepticism is warranted.

As for Citysearch itself, now on its third or fourth business model, it remains IAC's black hole. The latest plan is a "pay for performance" model, in which local merchants pay Citysearch whenever users click through to their establishments. IAC has told the Street that Citysearch hopes to turn a profit in the fourth quarter of this year. But Diller is willing to entertain the notion that it might not work out that way. "We will either pull it through, and people will say, 'Well, it took them a long time,' or we'll apologize and go on," he says. "I think it'll be the former, but I don't know."

HSN creates a different sort of question: Diller's dealmaking skills notwithstanding, how good an operator is he? Analysts constantly speculate that HSN will be sold, not only because it's not an Internet business but because it has struggled. In the nearly ten years Diller has controlled it, HSN has always been the also-ran to QVC; currently it has half the sales and just a third of the profits. It's also on its third management team. New CEO Tom McInerney says that when he first joined HSN, he thought there was some secret to the performance gap, so he spent three months digging into it only to conclude that QVC "just had better execution over the past decade," meaning that everything from its merchandise to its service was better. He adds, "If we sold the exact same thing head-to-head they would beat us."

Without question, part of the problem was Diller himself--as Diller forthrightly admits. "We were fed up with the fact that they hadn't grown, and we forced them to push sales beyond their capacity," he says. "I blame first us--without question me--then I absolutely blame management for not saying to us, 'You can't do that.' " After he brought in McInerney last year, Diller says, he tried to push the new guy into doing acquisitions to juice growth. To his credit, McInerney refused. ("Thank God," Diller says now.) Today McInerney's focus on better execution seems to be working. Sales are growing at double-digit rates, and last year HSN took market share from QVC.

LendingTree? Diller called it "probably the most important strategic foot we've put down in the last year" when he announced the purchase in the spring of 2003. IAC has also made the astonishing prediction that LendingTree's revenues, which currently stand at $160 million, will reach over $400 million in 2008, while its OIBA will increase a stunning 48% annually to reach over $125 million.

LendingTree's core business--helping consumers find mortgages--has climbed like a rocket, and the company is now trying to break into the business of matching consumers with real estate brokers and take a piece of the $1.2 trillion real estate market. But Diller bought the company--at a 48% market premium--at the height of the refinancing boom, and much of its business has been refinancings. In the fourth quarter of 2003, with interest rates climbing, LendingTree lost money. Which raises the obvious question: Was its early success a result of the lowest interest rates in decades--or can its profits still rise meteorically when rates increase?

And then there's the travel business.

Travel is the main reason that IAC's stock shot up in the first half of 2003 and the main reason that it has since lagged. Expedia, Hotwire.com, Hotels.com, and the other businesses that make up IAC Travel are at the heart of the debate over IAC. This debate is partly about the prospects of the business and partly about the future of the Internet. But it is also about the level of faith investors are willing to put in Diller and his executives. Following the buy-in of the publicly traded shares of Expedia and Hotels.com in 2003, IAC decided to provide investors with just three data points on the amalgamated travel business: total revenues, OIBA, and operating profits. Khosrowshahi says that since this is how IAC plans to measure the business, Wall Street should look at it that way too. Skeptics say that IAC is trying to hide deteriorating results in the individual businesses, particularly in the profits that Expedia and Hotels.com earn from hotels.

There is no question that IAC Travel has been phenomenally successful: Last year it sold $10 billion worth of travel--that's hotel rooms, plane tickets, car rentals, time-share stays, and so on--making it one of the world's five largest travel agents. Blachford has said that IAC Travel could sell as much as $86 billion in travel by 2010. IAC is also gunning for a piece of two huge additional markets: corporate travel and the $350 billion European market. "Our goal," Diller has said, "is to be the No. 1 seller of worldwide travel on-or off-line in three years."

The core issue right now is the hotel portion of the business. After 9/11, when the travel industry was in the midst of a terrible recession, hotels handed blocks of deeply discounted rooms to Expedia and Hotels.com. The travel sites, in turn, would take the rooms, mark them up by 25%--or more--and sell them online at rates that were still lower than you could find elsewhere.

The steep discounts drew a flood of consumers, giving the online agencies power over hotels: Expedia can shift market share between Manhattan hotels simply by placing one higher in the search results than another. But more recently the major hotel chains, as the economy improved, realized that allowing IAC to control their pricing wasn't such a good idea after all. Today Expedia and Hotels.com have deals with five major hotel chains in which they get access to more rooms--but promise not to undercut the hotels' pricing and accept a lower margin. Most of the chains now guarantee that you'll find the lowest price--usually equal to the Expedia or Hotels.com rate--by booking directly with them.

There is little doubt that the chains see themselves in a struggle with IAC. Some are doing everything in their power to get customers to bypass IAC, such as offering loyalty points only on rooms that are booked directly. And they're having a surprising amount of success. John Davis, CEO of Pegasus Solutions, which provides services like reservation technology to the industry, says that at a recent conference he attended, all the bankers were talking about how they now checked prices on Expedia--and then went directly to the hotel's own websites to book the rooms.

For their part, IAC Travel executives--Diller very much included--insist that those are nonissues. CEO Erik Blachford says, for instance, that IAC does only 20% of its business with the big chains. (But he's not including franchisees in that number.) The rest comes from independent hotels--which still offer a rich margin. Indeed, on the last conference call, Diller said that "visions of serious margin deterioration are not realistic." But there will be no way to verify this claim, because IAC no longer provides information on gross margins to investors.

Here's the larger question: For all the money IAC Travel is spending on advertising, are customers drawn to Expedia because it's a great site with a great brand--or because they're looking for the kind of cut-rate deals that were more prevalent a year ago? PhoCusWright, a travel industry research firm, has data that would suggest that consumers are less than brand loyal. It says that the average customer searches three travel websites before making a purchase. But if customers continue to flock to--and buy through--IAC Travel, then over time IAC will have the leverage to keep its margins high. "You can't forget, these guys are from Microsoft," says analyst Paul Keung of CIBC. "It's all about getting volume, and then the margins are here to stay."

The continued growth of travel is important for another, less obvious reason. IAC's operating cash flow--$1.3 billion in 2003--is one of the most appealing things about its business. But around $330 million of that cash flow is "float" from the travel business: that is, money customers paid IAC upon booking their trip, but that IAC has not handed over to the hotel or the airline because the trip hasn't occurred yet. IAC says that this is "permanent cash that we can put to work."

Not everyone agrees. Although Meyer thinks the float may be sustainable, he also argues that "IAC does not gain title to this cash." He thinks a more accurate figure for IAC's operating cash flow is just over $850 million, which also excludes the tax benefit IAC receives from employee stock option exercises.

You can't help but be struck by Diller's willingness to entertain questions about IAC's ambitions. He is not like a typical CEO, who stays "on message" at all times. Listen to Diller talk about eventual synergies among the various business--synergies that would seem critical, because otherwise what's the point of collecting these disparate entities under one corporate umbrella? "It's the most important potential benefit we have," says Diller. "If we're right about just that, there will be enormous competitive advantages and very high barriers to entry." If IAC is able to pull this off, which Diller admits "is a bigger 'if' because it's an executional nightmare," then, he says, "this company has the kind of power that is only dreamed about." But he also concedes, "This idea should be treated skeptically. We haven't proven it yet."

Diller is also willing to hold another possibility in his mind: that the Internet ultimately destroys IAC's business model. You only have to visit Froogle, a recent offering from Google that scours the web for the lowest prices on any item, to see the risk. Five years from now, will most of us go to Expedia to book a trip to Hawaii, or will we use a version of Froogle to instantly search the Net for the best deals?

"I think about that a lot," says Diller. "I believe that intermediaries who deliver services to the consumer that are of value are going to be able to sustain their margin. All of my experience tells me there's a chance to do that." Then he adds, "I could be completely wrong, but I like my bet."

Nor, for all his talk of consistency, is Diller promising that IAC won't change course again. "We reserve the right to zig and zag on various dimes in the road. That's one of the things that created this thing." He adds, "I'm never absolutely sure of anything, and I don't want to be. You're either right and you'll pull through, or you're not. We're never going to be right about everything, and we've certainly been wrong."

Ultimately, Diller's willingness to be both a believer and a skeptic is reassuring. He is fully aware of the gritty realities he faces in making the fantasy of IAC come true. He'll adjust to those realities if he has to. But just don't trash his fantasy. "The only thing that makes me crazy is cynicism," he says, "because I've been fighting it all my life."

Source: http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/30/what-makes-barry-diller-com-tick/

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Afghan forces also suffer from insider attacks

FILE - In this July 9, 2010 file photograph, an Afghan National Army soldier wears an ammunition belt around his neck during a joint patrol with United States Army soldiers from Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion of the 508 Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne, in the volatile Arghandab Valley, outside Kandahar City. U.S. military officials have noted that Afghan security forces are dying in insider attacks along with foreign troops, but so far, the Afghan government has not provided statistics on the number killed. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer, File)

FILE - In this July 9, 2010 file photograph, an Afghan National Army soldier wears an ammunition belt around his neck during a joint patrol with United States Army soldiers from Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion of the 508 Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne, in the volatile Arghandab Valley, outside Kandahar City. U.S. military officials have noted that Afghan security forces are dying in insider attacks along with foreign troops, but so far, the Afghan government has not provided statistics on the number killed. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2009 file photo, U.S. Marine squad leader Sgt. Matthew Duquette, left, of Warrenville, Ill., with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion 5th Marines walks with Afghan National Army Lt. Hussein, during in a joint patrol in Nawa district, Helmand province, southern Afghanistan. U.S. military officials have noted that Afghan security forces are dying in insider attacks along with foreign troops, but so far, the Afghan government has not provided statistics on the number killed. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Afghan Army Sgt. Habibullah Hayar didn't know it, but he had been sleeping with his enemy for weeks.

Twenty days ago, one of his roommates was arrested for allegedly plotting an insider attack against their unit, which is partnered with NATO forces in eastern Paktia province.

Afghan soldiers and policemen ? or militants in their uniforms ? have gunned down more than 50 foreign troops so far this year, eroding the trust between coalition forces and their Afghan partners. An equal number of Afghan policemen and soldiers also died in these attacks, giving them reason as well to be suspicious of possible infiltrators within their ranks.

"It's not only foreigners. They are targeting Afghan security forces too," said the 21-year-old Hayar, who was in Kabul on leave. "Sometimes, I think what kind of situation is this that a Muslim cannot trust a Muslim ? even a brother cannot trust a brother. It's so confused. Nobody knows what's going on."

The U.S.-led coalition said a NATO service member and an international civilian contractor were killed on Saturday in the latest such insider attack. The coalition said in a statement on Sunday that Afghan soldiers were also killed or wounded, but provided no other details about the attack in eastern Afghanistan.

Insider attacks are taking a toll on the partnership, prompting the U.S. military to restrict operations with small-sized Afghan units earlier this month.

The close contact ? with coalition forces working side by side with Afghan troops as advisers, mentors and trainers ? is a key part of the U.S. strategy for putting the Afghans in the lead as the U.S. and other nations prepare to pull out their last combat troops at the end of 2014, just 27 months away.

The U.S. military also has shown increasing anger over the attacks.

"I'm mad as hell about them, to be honest with you," Gen. John Allen, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, told CBS' "60 Minutes" in an interview scheduled to be broadcast on Sunday. "It reverberates everywhere across the United States. You know, we're willing to sacrifice a lot for this campaign, but we're not willing to be murdered for it."

So far this year, at least 52 foreign troops ? about half of them Americans ? have been killed in insider attacks. The Afghan government has not provided statistics on the number of its forces killed in insider attacks. However, U.S. military statistics obtained by The Associated Press show at least 53 members of the Afghan security forces had been killed as of the end of August.

A U.S. military official disclosed the numbers on condition of anonymity because he said it was up to Afghan officials to formally release the figures. An Afghan defense official who was shown the statistics said he had no reason to doubt their accuracy.

Overall, the statistics show that at least 135 Afghan policemen and soldiers have been killed in insider attacks since 2007. That's more than the 119 foreign service members ? mostly Americans ? killed in such attacks since then, according to NATO.

Typically, foreign troops are the main targets, but Afghan forces also have been killed by comrades angry over their collaboration with Westerners and many more get killed in the crossfire, Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi said. He said the ministry did not have a breakdown of how many had been targeted or killed in gunbattles during the attacks.

In at least one instance, an Afghan police officer with alleged ties to militants, killed 10 of his fellow officers on Aug. 11 at a checkpoint in southwestern Nimroz province. An Afghan soldier also was killed on April 25 when a fellow soldier opened fire on a U.S. service member and his translator in Kandahar province, the southern birthplace of the Taliban.

Last year, a suicide bomber in an Afghan police uniform blew himself up May 28 in Takhar province, killing two NATO service members and four Afghans, including a senior police commander. And just a week before that, four Taliban fighters wearing suicide vests under police uniforms attacked a government building in Khost province, triggering a gunbattle that left three Afghan policemen and two Afghan soldiers dead. On April 16, an Afghan soldier walked into a meeting of NATO trainers and Afghan troops in Laghman province, blew himself up, killing five U.S. troops, four Afghan soldiers and an interpreter.

"It's difficult to know an attacker from a non-attacker when everybody is wearing a uniform, Hayar said.

The attacker was one of seven people rounded up earlier this month from various units within the Afghan National Army Corps 203, Hayar said. The corps covers the eastern Afghan provinces of Paktia, Paktika, Ghazni, Wardak, Logar and Khost.

"He was together with me in my room with some of my other colleagues. He had a long beard. We didn't know anything about him. We were living together, sleeping together," said Hayar, who has been in the Afghan army for 2 1/2 years.

He said the suspected infiltrator was identified after a Taliban militant arrested in Logar told his Afghan interrogators that members of the fundamentalist Islamic movement had infiltrated the corps and were planning imminent attacks. That prompted Hayar's superiors to start questioning soldiers in various units.

Hayar said his roommate's uneasy reaction raised suspicion, and investigators found Taliban songs saved to the memory card of his cell phone. He was then detained by Afghan intelligence officials and confessed he was a member of the Taliban and planned to stage attacks.

Hayar says he assumes his former bunkmate was probably going after foreign forces, but it makes him uncomfortable nevertheless.

"It's very hard to trust anybody ? even a roommate," he said. "Whenever I'm not on duty, I lock my weapon and keep the key myself. I don't put my weapon under my pillow to sleep because maybe someone will grab it and shoot me with my own weapon."

To counter such attacks, the U.S. military earlier this year stopped training about 1,000 members of the Afghan Local Police, a controversial network of village-defense units. U.S. commanders have assigned some troops to be "guardian angels" who watch over their comrades even as they sleep. U.S. officials also recently ordered American troops to carry loaded weapons at all time, even when they are on their bases.

Then, after a string of insider attacks, Allen this month restricted operations carried out alongside with small-sized Afghan units. Coalition troops have routinely conducted patrols or manned outposts with small groups of Afghan counterparts, but Allen's directive said such operations would no longer be considered routine and required the approval of the regional commander.

For their part, Afghan authorities have detained or removed hundreds of soldiers as part of its effort to re-screen its security forces. The Ministry of Defense also released a 28-page training booklet this month that advises soldiers not to be personally offended when foreign troops do things Afghans view as deeply insulting.

The booklet urges them not to take revenge for foreign troops' social blunders, such as blowing their noses in public, stepping into a mosque with their shoes on, walking in front of a soldier who is praying or asking about their wives.

"Most of the coalition members are interested to share pictures of their families. It is not a big deal for them. If someone asks you about your family, especially the females in your family, don't think they are disrespecting you or trying to insult you," the booklet says.

"That is not the case. By asking such questions, they are trying to show that they want to learn more about you. You can very easily explain to them that nobody in Afghanistan would ask, especially about wives or females in the family."

___

Associated Press writers Amir Shah and Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-09-30-Afghan-Insider%20Attacks/id-e65bbd96bca4407ebbcd9b90e8adf413

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Neil Young Unveils His New Pono Music Player [Music]

Neil Young has been banging on for some time about his dreams for hi-res digital music. Now, appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman, he's unveiled his new music player: Pono. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/AfbFQBSAkaQ/neil-young-unveils-his-new-pono-music-player

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Relationship Enhancement Therapy Workshop Announcement ...

Please forward this announcement to any list serves you may be on.

November 9-11, 2012

Workshop Leader: Rob Scuka, Ph.D., Member of NIRE's Training Faculty

Rob is the author of Relationship Enhancement Therapy: Healing Through Deep Empathy and Intimate Dialogue.

Location: The workshop will be held in Bethesda, MD.

Workshop Description: The purpose of this three-day skills training workshop is to provide participants a comprehensive introduction to the theory and methodology underlying the RE model and to teach participants how ?to conduct RE Therapy with couples and families, beginning with the intake interview and proceeding through all the phases of RE therapy.

Intensive Supervised Skills Practice: The workshop emphasizes the building of participants' therapeutic skills through a process that combines lecture, video, role-play demonstrations, and intensively supervised skill practice. The number of participants is limited in order to ensure frequent individual supervision when participants break into triads to practice the previously-demonstrated skills.

Workshop Objectives: Participants will learn:

• How to structure an intake interview so as to minimize in-session conflict and maximize commitment to positive therapeutic engagement
• How to teach clients the nine RE skills
• How and when to use special RE therapy techniques of Becoming, Troubleshooting, Laundering and Double-Becoming to manage the clinical process
• RE methods for crisis intervention
• How to overcome power imbalances among family members
• When and how to combine individual therapy of family members with RE couple and family therapy

Continuing Education: Upon completion, participants receive 20 CE credits for completing this workshop.

IDEALS/NIRE is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. IDEALS maintains responsibility for the program and its content.

IDEALS/NIRE is approved by the National Board of Certified Counselors to offer continuing education for National Certified Counselors. NBCC provider #5560.

IDEALS/NIRE is approved by the Maryland State Board of Social Work Examiners to offer Category I continuing education programs for social workers. IDEALS/NIRE maintains responsibility for the program and adhering to the appropriate guidelines required by the respective organizations.

Number of participants strictly limited to assure ample individual supervision.

Fee: $375 (includes RE Therapist Manual).

For further information, or to register, please call NIRE at 301-986-1479.

Visit our website at www.nire.org.

Source: http://billcoffin.org/relationship-enhancement-therapy-workshop-ann-74217

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FDA approves less-invasive heart defibrillator

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Food and Drug Administration says it has approved a first-of-a-kind heart-zapping implant from Boston Scientific that that does not directly touch the heart.

Implantable defibrillators use thin wires to send electrical signals that disrupt dangerous heart rhythms. Surgeons have traditionally connected the wires to the heart through a blood vessel in the upper chest.

The new device from Boston Scientific uses wires that sit just below the skin's surface and do not need to be threaded through the heart's blood vessels.

Natick, Mass.-based Boston Scientific Corp. acquired the device through a $150 million buyout of San Clemente, Calif.-based Cameron Health. Under the terms of the deal, Boston Scientific will pay an additional $150 million for FDA approval, plus up to $1 billion in payments based on future sales figures.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-09-28-Heart%20Device-FDA/id-d72d2d77abb946ccaabada0d77e28257

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WRITING ON THE ETHER: Discoverability ? The Maiden Voyage ...

1. DBW Discoverability: The Maiden Voyage
2. eBook Pricing: Help Support Jo Rowling / Owen, Tait
3. eBook Formatting: Another Hachette Job / Owen
4. Books sans Borders: A Spanish Vacancy / Lionetti
5. New Moves and Models: Rogue & Brightline / Shatzkin
6. Libraries: Fingers Pointed / Gonzalez
7. Craft: What a Judge Is Looking For / Rhaymey
8. Craft: When It Feels Like a Grind / Craig
9. Penguin Sues Authors: Your Advance, Please
10. Conferences: Friedman at LitFlow in Berlin, and more
11. Books: Reading on the Ether
12. Last Gas: Saltwater Nooks? / Reilly

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?

Suppose you knew nothing about publishing today. (Blissful thought, isn?t it?)

What if you walked into Digital Book World?s (DBW)? Discoverability and Marketing Conference this week, sat down in New York?s spacious Metropolitan Pavilion with its gleaming-shipboard floors, and spent two days with us?

Hashtagging #DBWDM with the best of us on deck.

You might have come away from Monday and Tuesday?s conference with an admiration for our industry professionals? capacity to withstand?confusion.

You might even think we enjoy it; eagerly checking our box lunches to see if any good confusion is in there, scarfing it down with the pasta salad, asking for more.

Because that?s what we discovered at Discoverability ? we discovered there?s a lot of confusion about how to get there from here.

Febreeze and Angry Birds will help us understand how books are sold @? #DBWDM

Rich Fahle

You know Rich Fahle of Bibliostar.tv and Astral Road Media, right? He?s a videographer and works in author marketing. He regularly tapes on-site conference conversations for Digital Book World.

In a DBW Expert Blog Post, Discoverability Tools and the Writer?s ?Fight for Time,? Fahle has this? observation about the confab:

This, finally, is the important next phase of the digital transition?the industry is ready to address discoverability with its full attention? Those focused discussions?(are) possibly the best news to come out of the conference.

Fahle?s concern in his post is on writers. But the whole community of publishing is at sea until it can sort out the pivotal problem of how you make a book discoverable when, as Laura Dawson tells us, there are 32 million active titles in Books in Print.

I?m going to propose here that the Discoverability and Marketing Conference didn?t quite get it ? or didn?t always get it, let me put it that way. As Fahle writes, the best thing is that it happened at all. And plenty of good experiences in the conference?s debut will mean an even better gathering the next time.

Perils of Twitter: I took a mid-afternoon nap, and dreamed I was at #DBWDM. Woke up very confused? I blame @.

?

Don?t get me wrong.

• I?m not saying that this wasn?t a valuable conference. It was.
• I?m not saying it was badly put-together. It was not.
• And I?m certainly not saying it was presented by anything but great folks with a good idea and a lot of talent and hard, long work ? if anything, I was lucky to be part of the team, as I live-tweeted and wrote about the confab.

Kate Rados

No, what I?m saying is that host Kate Rados, DBW Community Manager Gary Lynch, DBW Editorial Director Jeremy Greenfield, and their many colleagues created a conference the very makeup of which reflected the confusion with which a transition-traumatized industry is facing this problem.

Rick Joyce

After all, that?s what Perseus? Rick Joyce told us in his fine opening keynote on Monday:

If you came here looking for a map, good luck.

Your GPS is useless this time. To follow these trade routes, we have to find them first. And in that regard, the exhilarating opening block of presentations in the conference on Monday ? as I wrote in my Day One wrap for the DBW Expert Blogs ? was right on the money.

Joyce?s curtain-raiser, ?The Next Wave of Discoverability,? was themed on Old World exploration and it included these gems, which I?m drawing from my tweeterie:

• Context Optimizers, ?tools yet to be invented.? We must enhance metadata with new categories, reinvent browsing.
• We need to ??Understand the Natives??what seems to motivate anybody?..connect, collect, compete, accrue, assist??
• Needing ?new instruments,? Joyce says we?re trying to find ?assets that are built to travel (as) behavioral enablers.?
• Assets that travel include ?links with headlines, images, personalization, humor, inspiration?authenticity.?
• The final New Territory is Big Data: ?At any given moment 1% to 2% of all pages on #book-retailer sites are down.?

For its eloquence and point of view, Joyce?s presentation was never topped during the conference?s two days. In the easy glow of hindsight, I can say now that I?d love to have seen Joyce return with a final, shorter observation on what we?d seen and heard in the two days. This excellent opener deserved a benediction.

?

And there were more strong entries from other folks to follow, high points throughout the two days. By midday Monday, however, hints at the confusion were starting to show in our own experience in the room. And by Tuesday, the conference was ? nobody?s fault, mind you? adrift in a slow current that felt almost as baffling as our over-arching theme.

Partly the effects of fatigue, of course, and partly the product of a low-energy presentation or two, things felt more scattered than conclusive as we finished up.

The last sessions seemed to be ?all over the place,? one attendee put it. Nothing fell apart, by a long shot. But it was as if we lost our breeze and the good ship DBWDM was idled in the calm.

Sharing the #DBWDM love-glow with the team: We?re crashing ways to incorporate more images/video content into our work.

?

Do you know the nautical term ?tacking?? Not tacky. Tacking is zigzagging, a pattern a sailor might use to take advantage of a wind, changing direction with the helm alee.

This conference did a lot of tacking in its two days. That?s not necessarily bad. It just requires your crew to know where they?re going with each shift.

Kelly Gallgher

We veered mainly between brightly informative conceptual overviews to course-like instructional sessions. Not a thing wrong with either. It was the juxtaposition that was a little hard to read.

There were the bracing data arrays of Bowker?s Kelly Gallagher (whom we?ve just learned is headed for Ingram ? congratulations, Kelly) and Google?s Gavin Bishop. And then there was a? presenter telling us what happens when you start a tweet with an ?@-symbol? handle. If you don?t know about that use of the ?@-symbol? ? it?s the ?reply? protocol ? that?s OK, don?t feel bad. But in a Manhattan conference of professionals in publishing and/or marketing, that?s an awfully basic fillip of one social media platform.

Rados ran a nice, tight ship, agreeably moving things along precisely on time. And the parade of presentations went off with precious few technical glitches, also no mean feat.

And fanned by the efficiency with which Joyce sustained his keynote metaphor ? our need to brave terra incognita and search for new answers ? we had two very valid, major winds of trade, if you please, cross-cutting the conference:

1. Theoretical and/or conceptual issues of publishing?s response to a content-drowned market; and
2. Technical approaches to online procedures in modern marketing.

Even within the second group, the more technical presentations, we tended to veer from the open water of sophisticated schooners to the paper-boat shallows ? from glimpses of the scope of what?s out there to handy-but-basic material.

Come, shall we tack?

huge congrats to @ on joining Ingram!

?

Marshall D. Simmonds

Schooner: This is a keenly domesticated geek, the Greystoke of ?Authorship and SEO.? Marshall Simmonds told us not to ignore Google+ because the wider Google-verse is integrating so many of its assets there. Our social graphs sailed when he quoted Othar Hansson: ?We know that great content comes from great authors.??

Jessica Best

Paper Boat: She is a vivacious and well-dressed presenter. And Jessica Best?s ?Back to Basics: Email Marketing Still Works!? made the most of that exclamation point: ?Your email should be permission based,? she said, and she?s completely right. But somehow we?d tacked over to workshop mode ? from principle and precept to the special needs of mobile emails: look out for the ?fat thumb? of the recipient.

Dan Lubart

Schooner: Dan Lubart and Angela Tribelli of HarperCollins make ?team teaching? interesting again. They brought a competent, shared delivery to? ?Marketing Analytics: You Can?t Grow What You Can?t Measure.?

Angela Tribelli

Among the best messages delivered in this survey of philosophy:

• ?Dig Deep ? or why creatives need to sit with quants,? and
• Prepare to be surprised,? because If you go into analytics with bias, you?ll see only what you want.

Clinton Kabler

Paper Boat among the Schooners: Clinton Kabler of BookRiot has the drop on Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood. There?s nothing here at the Ether but highest regard for His Sandmanfulness and for The Great Lady Who Tweets, I love both writers. But, dude, Kabler showed us how neither of Gaiman nor Atwood has a ?buy? button on her or his home pages. Get out, right? But it?s true. I clicked over and looked.

From my tweeterie: ?What do you anticipate achieving with this landing page??You?ve got about two seconds of their attention.? And he?s right.

Kabler was an instant hybrid in our little regatta here. He came in with some schooner-class observations, but operated (in the conference?s setting) in the workshop/paper-boats mode, starting with that overlong title for his presentation, a bit of titular verbosity shared by many presenters in this show: ?Creating Landing Pages That Don?t Suck: Converting Click-Throughs to Buyers.?

Note for future confab presenters everywhere: Your title need not be a Kindle Single.

Let me show you how close Kabler came to getting us into deeper waters of healthy debate in ethics, efficacy, or both:

What bundling (ebook + print book) does is?destroy the correlation users have between value and price.

That statement involves the ?default bias? with which marketers can drive consumers to choose the ?best value? option among prices. ?Destroying the correlation users have between value and price,? for some, is a pretty questionable pastime. Presented as a commercial coup, it might leave a bit of guilt gnawing at your conscience.

Fauzia Burke

It was FSB Associates? president Fauzia Burke who, at lunch Monday, was the first I heard to renounce such marketing modes as something some of us feel is incorrect and/or at the least unnecessary. We?d glimpsed a grand, worthy debate there, thanks to Kabler, standing as we do on the edge of a flat world suddenly gone round in marketing.

But instead of entering a conference forum that could test such? considerations of what?s right and what isn?t (and who says so) , we were off again that afternoon, on a series of associated topics.

We?d missed the chance Kabler had held out to us to explore the white-sand beach that lies between Discoverability and Marketing.

But for Kabler?s part, even within the crass cartography of such salesboy technique, we must credit him for making something more of his session than it might have been. I like him for that.

Add a like button, post more photos, reply to every comment to quickly increase FB reach #DBWDM @

?

Paper Boats: In a purely praiseworthy effort to include authors in the program, the conference presented Elle Lothlorian and Erika Napoletano in the mix, and the organizers are to be commended for that.

It turns out that these two writers? presentations turn on some very negative experiences.

Elle Lothlorian

Lothlorian has attracted condemnation from some for her practice of engaging with negative review-writers:

My goal is to make it right, treat the customer the way they should be treated when not liking the product.

Erika Napoletano

Napoletano pictures herself as a poster redhead for the publicity support she believes publishers don?t provide authors:

Authors believe their publishers are partners?

?only to find this may not be how a publisher sees it.

Both these handsomely ambitious, committed, publishing writers opened with somewhat rambling expressions of their displeasure at how they?ve been treated, either by critics of their reader relations or by publishers? publicity efforts (or lack thereof). And their complaints seem valid and understandable.

But ?look how badly I?ve been treated? doesn?t engender a lot of audience support in any setting, not just in a publishing arena.

And while coarse language may seem a fun way to offer one?s fiery-redheadedness to an audience of peers gathered in a professional conference in New York, it actually doesn?t play that well out in the house.

Someone referred later to this as ?colorful.? I?ll go with that, too.

?

Schooners, quickly: Among more of the stronger high-view presentations at DBW?s Discoverability and Marketing, the standouts included:

• Gavin Bishop?s ?How Searchers Become Readers: Audience Insights from Google? (the lead on a coming white paper about search as a gateway to for consumer interest): Google?s study shows some 1.5 billion searches each year related to books.

• 

  Mike Grehan

  Mike Grehan of ClickZ?s ?The Future of Digital Marketing? I?m told is a 45-minute presentation compressed into 30 minutes. That?s too bad because the breathless speed at which Grehan raced through it left a lot of it hard for the attentive crowd to catch, and this was good stuff, I?d love to have heard more. ?We move away from ?influentials,?? he said, ?and start to focus on small groups of connected friends.?

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  Jon Fine

  Jon Fine?s fine presentation from Amazon, ?Secrets to More Effectively Marketing and Promoting Your Books on Amazon? contained only one real secret, it seems (or at least one bit of info few of us had heard) ? that Facebook elements will ?soon? be added to author pages. Sounds like yet another smart move among the industry?s largest apparatus of smart retailing moves. And I want to congratulate DBW on having both Fine and B&N?s Sasha Norkin on the program. In terms of presentational presence and informational value, there was no comparison who was the stronger, but the presence of both companies onboard gave us the conference its even keel. Good programming.

Fine is a thoroughgoing asset to his company. He presents Seattle?s formidable assets (made available to some 40,000 publishers) without snark or hubris.. He spoke of how authors are considered ?the other customer? because of their importance to the operation. Of everything heard in the conference, Fine?s statement may have been one of the most meaningful to the topic in terms of discoverability:

For better or worse, Amazon has become the common ground for publishing.

So, @ and I are starting a band called ?Milkshake in My Fanny Pack?

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One fine paper boat: Corey Hartford?s ?Marketing Results via Keyword Research? made the F+W home team look even better (as if it needed help).

Corey Hartford

Here, we were squarely in workshop/how-to mode, yes. But this time, you could put aside friction between such sessions and more conceptual presentations, and what you have is a winningly devoted master of metadata.

He?s hardly the only presenter from DBWDM who could use some stage-presence coaching. In any field, the experts may not be the most natural front people. But in Hartford?s case, this was no problem because the guy?s sheer love of his keywords and how he makes them dance was a pleasure to see in action.

Richard Nash

Schooner, explained: Tucked into the second day?s afternoon was a chat led by Greenfield with GoodReads? Patrick Brown and Small Demons? Richard Nash. In that conversation, we got a succinct and useful delineation from Nash about Small Demons and what it?s meant to do.

While the point of GoodReads, of course, is to connect books with other books that readers may enjoy and want to share, Nash said the point of Small Demons is to connect books with other parts of our culture, to draw those lines of reference and revelation that enrich our understanding of a ?storyverse? (his phrase) that goes beyond our books and deep into our lives.

I called a guy on sexism and now it will be very hard to work with him. But it was worth it.

And in wrapping this wrap, I want to point out to you the importance ? in our industry?s storyverse ? of the Discoverability and Marketing Conference?s newness. There are pitfalls in creating new events of this kind, as any producing organization can tell you.

Gary Lynch

I spoke in May for the Ether with DBW Community Manager Gary Lynch about his plans and concepts for this new vessel from F+W Media on our annual journey of major publishing conferences.

I liked his candor:

There?s always a risk when you launch a new event on a subject that?s still very much in the early stages of acceptance in the market. If you do it too soon and the market doesn?t think they need it, then the conference doesn?t work. If you wait too long, then competitors fill the void and your conference becomes a ?me too.? My sense is that our timing is spot-on.

Lynch?s sense for timing, clearly, is right.

And if the organization of the conference seemed to lurch at times between the ?tutorial?-style sessions he had envisioned in the spring and the 30,000-foot overview presentations that to me seem more useful at this point, I can?t help but feel that getting this critical component of the digital dynamic, discoverability, squarely onstage as DBW did was an important, worthy, and salutary exercise.

Joe Pulizzi

And some of the best insights moved fast, the program so rich that Rich was catching it all ?was tough.

Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute, captured a lot of attention with his fly-by question about why publishers aren?t the ones platforming. He called the current model flawed ?? authors madly platforming, shouldering ever greater loads of PR and marketing burdens while writing less and less.

And he asked publishers, rhetorically:

Why don?t you get authors involved in YOUR platform?

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As part of his own conference coverage, DBW?s Greenfield wrote Book Discovery Landscape Becomes More Complicated as Reader Behavior Fractures, based on? Gallagher?s presentation from Bowker, ?Looking Beyond the Book.?

Bowker Market Research, from Kelly Gallagher?s DBWDM presentation

Gallagher deftly drove home for all of us just how complex this moment is in book discoverability today.

During his presentation, he was tweeted saying:

How do tablet owners discover books? We find that an excerpt becomes very important for tablet owners.

How do overall readers discover new ebooks? Again, the excerpt online is a key but also an author site, as well.

A female YA reader, 30-44, relies on social network tips, a teaser chapter in a print book, and online retailer recommendations.

And as Greenfiled writes it:

Tablet owners discover new books through free excerpts about 15% of the time; but readers of young adult fiction discover new books through the same way about 6% of the time. So marketers of young adult fiction have a lot to think about when they want to reach readers who read on tablets.

Jeremy Greenfield

Or try on this challenge for marketers, see how it suits you (this is Greenfield again):

A 27-year-old female romance reader from suburban Indianapolis who reads on a tablet computer but spends most of her time browsing the Web on her laptop versus a 43-year-old female romance reader living in Los Angeles who reads and buys exclusively on her e-reader. They?re both romance readers and female, but couldn?t be more different otherwise when it comes to how they discover and read books ? and reaching them takes different marketing tactics.

Then look at how blogger ?Ellen? at Word Thief writes up what struck her from Jon Fine?s presentation, in her post Digital Book World: Books vs. Everything Else, recalling his line:

?It?s not about Print vs. Digital. It?s about Books vs. Everything Else.?

Ellen goes on to write:

So our real enemy is not the e-readers popping up in every direction. Our real enemy is every other activity that distracts people from reading nowadays: TV, movies, video games, Facebook, the internet, blogging (ha), etc. Later in the day, Charles Duhigg gave a talk on ?Using the Power of Habit to Market and Sell Books.? His thesis, briefly?

Angry Birds is your biggest competition.

I miss being at #DBWDM ? where people understood the jargon and didn?t just throw around buzzwords.

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As for my desire (this is just my opinion) for a more conceptual understanding of what we need and want in discoverability, over at Harvard Business Review, Irfan Kamal writes in Metrics Are Easy; Insight Is Hard:

It isn?t uncommon to see reports overflowing with data and benchmarks drawn from millions of underlying data points covering existing channels like display, email, website, search, and shopper/loyalty?In contrast to this abundant data, insights are relatively rare. Insights here are defined as actionable, data-driven findings that create business value.

That?s the seaworthy promise of DBW?s Discoverability and Marketing Conference in its next iteration.The promise, and the challenge.

No conference can be all things to all people, and the more brightly a line is drawn around what?s wanted in a given confab, the more assuredly it will draw its audience, its speakers, and its conclusions. In that world of abundance our friend Brian O?Leary loves to tell us about, I believe that the victory belongs to the selective, the discerning, and the focused.

DBWDM has had a fine start, something to be really proud of. I?m so glad I was there on the first outing.

And now, it?s time for it, too, to take to the higher seas. I think there?s a good chance that if some smart decisions are made and honored, this conference will, itself, be an admired schooner in our annual fleet of confabs.

On the internet, everyone knows you?re not funny.

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If you?d like to look further into issues of discoverability and marketing in the industry! the industry! consider joining the free webcast on October 4 at 1pET / 10aPT / 1800BT for the Bowker Consumer Presentation on ?Beyond the Book ? Marketing in the Right Place at the Right Time,? presented by DBWDM.

Information and free registration at Free Webcast: How Social Networks and New Media Are Changing the Ways Readers Discover New Books.

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In the US? What?s that globally? RT @: B&N?s @: Barnes & Noble now 30% of the e-book market #DBWDM

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Why is the ebook edition of J.K. Rowling?s new novel, ?The Casual Vacancy,? $17.99? Thank the fact that publisher Hachette is in a sweet spot between the ebook settlement?s approval and the time that it actually takes effect at non-Apple retailers.

Laura Hazard Owen

Yes, Laura Hazard Owen at paidContent expertly parses the pricing on JK Rowling?s new ebook,The Casual Vacancy, as it Hachette releases it to the digi-verse.

In Why JK Rowling?s new ebook is $17.99, Owen ? with a nod to attorney and Dear Author blogger Jane Litte for some assists ? writes it this way:

The settling publishers have longer to terminate agreements with other retailers (than Apple), like Amazon: ?Starting 30 days after the Court enters the proposed Final Judgment,? they may terminate those contracts??as soon as each contract permits? (i.e., when it expires), or the retailers can terminate the contracts on 30 days? notice. That adds up to about sixty days of wiggle room.

And as luck would have it for Hachette, that wiggle room includes the release of La Rowling?s eagerly awaited new aria.

In the meantime, Hachette?s in a sweet spot where it?s no longer limited by Apple?s price bands, but non-Apple retailers like Amazon also aren?t allowed to discount its books. So if you want?The Casual Vacancy (now) you?ll be paying $17.99.

Owen includes the caveat that should Apple now be on a new contract with Hachette, it could discount ? and Amazon and other retailers might then be able to discount, as well.

But even more interesting, Owen includes a footnote to get at the usual emotionals around such issues as this:

I?m aware this post is likely to engender a lot of ?greedy publishers? comments. The fact is that the ebook pricing settlement incentivizes publishers to set higher ebook list prices. Depending on the new contracts that Hachette works out with retailers, there may be little difference between the money that Hachette gets from?Casual Vacancy sales now and the money it gets once those new contracts are enacted.

J.K. Rowling?s new book on Kindle: Literally unreadable http://t.co/NcAFegqm (via @) wow how can they screw it up so badly

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And if you?re eager for early reviews, Theo Tait is out at the Guardian (which also has one of only two reviews Rowling did prior to the book?s release).

Tait does address the ?Harry Potter and the Miraculously Unguarded Vagina? joke. One probably has to. And then he goes on to deliver himself of an opinion you?ll have to read for yourself, I won?t tip it here, other than to note that he uses the odd phrase ?artificial contrivance.? I?m wondering how many times one encounters a natural contrivance.

Perhaps we?ll find out in Rowling?s book.

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Sure Michiko Kakutani panned JK Rowling?s new book. But she also used the word ?limn,? which I feel is a badge of honor http://t.co/6uoAdUBb

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Update, 2:30pET / 11:30aPT / 19:30BT: Hachette confirmed that the problem was on its end, not Amazon?s, and that the problem was across all ebook retailers. ?There was an issue with the file (no issues reading the book, just adjusting the type), but that has been corrected and is fully adjustable/functional for all those who have purchased the e-book and for those who will purchase it in the future,? Hachette executive director of publicity Nicole Dewey told me.

Initial ebook editions of Jo Rowling?s new The Casual Vacancy offered only an extremely big-font and extremely small-font setting until Hachette stepped in with a fix, conceding that the error was theirs. Images from Laura Hazard Owen?s report at paidContent.org

It?s the faithful Laura Hazard Owen, hardest working woman in show business, back to tell us ? then update us ? on how Jo Rowling?s book not only came blasting out with a Golden Snitch of a pricetag but also in many cases was unreadable, I said unreadable, on the Kindle.

Her story is J.K. Rowling?s ebook: Literally Unreadable at paidContent.

Now, a couple of Ethernauts have expressed their surprise to me that a company as august and French as Hachette (parent of Little, Brown) and an author as world-beating as La Rowling could get themselves rolling to market with the kind of cock-up many generally assign to self-publishers.

But these things do happen.

How soon folks forget when Neal Stephenson got out there with his new Reamde (all 500+ pages, you know Neal) and it was full of errors and missing some bits.

Here?s the Christian Science Monitoron it, thanks to Molly Driscoll.

One year ago: E-book errors in Neal Stephenson?s ?Reamde? annoy Kindle users

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Rowling?s Spanish-language publisher, Salamandra, ha(s) decided not to publish The Casual Vacancy concurrent with the global English-language edition ? and has not yet announced a publication date.

Julieta Lionetti

Our good colleague and friend Julieta LIonetti is at Ed Nawotka?s Publishing Perspectives with her finely headlined The Spanish Vacancy of J. K. Rowling.

She explains that piracy has been an issue in JK Rowling?s past (the Potters were a big target before Pottermore made ebook editions available). But Rowling?s new book is limned with a bigger issue in the translation department. At least in Spain.

The Casual Vacancy is available in French and German, timed to release with the English versions. But in Spain, Lionetti writes:

Fans are annoyed ? and have taken matters into their own hands, starting a collaborative Spanish-language translation of their own. The effort was originated by the Web site Harry Latino, and while the site won?t host the translation, it has nevertheless appealed to Spanish speaking volunteers who want to collaborate in order to get ahead of the publication date by Salamandra.

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And there are precedents. Lionetti writes that this occurred with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and:

A PDF translation hit the sharing sites before the official publication reached stores. Back then there were even some who said that the fan-based translation of the work was much better than the legal one. Who knows?

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World?s supply of ?limn? in danger of depletion. Kakutani largest user of diminishing resource.

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Two new partnerships announced last week suggest the emergence of new commercial models for publishing.

Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin, has a followup to comments he?s been making since 2007 about what he called then ?The End of General Trade Publishing Houses.?

He goes into his telling new essay, New publishing companies are starting that are much leaner than their established competitors, to size up the new Diller-Rudin Brightline announcement and the Movable Type Management initative, The Rogue Reader (currently in soft-launch beta), which we introduced last week in WRITING ON THE ETHER EXCLUSIVE: ?Rogue? Authors on a New Route.

The publishing ambitions here are quite different, but the point they make about the direction of publishing?s future are very much the same.

While pointing to the Diller-Rudin-Coady operation?s ability ?to compete with major publishers for major books,? he rightly contrasts The Rogue Reader project of Jason Ashlock and Adam Chromy for its entrepreneurial dexterity in ?a young and developing literary agency.?

The message here is that we see a similar answer coming from the opposite ends of the continuum of investment and power of what the genesis of a successful future publisher might look like. Both an ambitious well-funded highly-commercial list headed by a publishing veteran and fledgling authors publishing in a niche under the direction of a young entrepreneur with much less seasoning are being launched on new publishing platforms which have copious capabilities to do digital publishing efficiently.

A clarification occurs in the comments under Shatzkin?s good piece ? there, Ashlock echoes the point he made in our piece, that the Rogue authors are self-publishing as part of a collective curated by Ashlock and Chromy.

But Shatzkin says very well where the trend can lead:

We are getting closer to the day when all a publisher really will need to ?own? is the ability to acquire and develop good books and ways to reach the core audience for them persuasively and inexpensively.

And the other side of that coin has to do with author-initiated versions of this kind of formulation. In time, more variants on these models may involve an authorial direction of? publishing functions hired as needed.

Even in terms of the place of print in the future, Shatzkin sees the same mechanism others are understanding:

These new publishers can treat the diminishing print-in-store marketplace as a bit of an afterthought because there are more and more sources from which to purchase those capabilities for as long as they are needed.

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?Limn? just crept up considerably on the http://t.co/9KdAzfnP lookup stats. Used (again) by Michiko Kakutani (in @ review).

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The AAP?s response to ALA?s open letter to publishers re: ebooks is fascinating for what it DOESN?T say.

That?s the Association of American Publishers and the American Libraries Association.

As usual, they?re not happy with each other. This time things are a bit more strident. And in Dear Libraries: No more free handouts for you freeloaders! Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ? former Ether sponsor and an employ with Media Source/Library Journals ? picks up on the latest exchange, taking issue with the implications he sees in the AAP?s widely decried letter.

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

He cites this passage from the publishers? letter:

Publishers and local libraries have had a lifelong partnership dedicated to increasing literacy and nurturing the love of reading. The publisher members of AAP provide libraries with innumerable free resources, programs and services ? all designed to serve their cardholders, inform their librarians and sustain the vitality of their institutions.

And Gonzalez then follows up, emphasis his:

Based on that, you?d think publishers view libraries as social marketing endeavors, making zero reference to the fact that libraries BUY BOOKS, and that a significant percentage of patrons who borrow also BUY BOOKS.

Critics hammer JK Rowling?s ?Casual Vacancy.? Will it earn back its (rumored $7 million) advance? http://t.co/YBlLJMsY

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Update: DBW?s Jeremy Greenfield has sat in today on a meeting of the ALA and the AAP ? the libraries and the publishers ? in New York City. His report is Librarian Patience Has Run out on E-Book Lending Issues, Library Association Says.

Greenfield quotes an unidentified executive from Perseus saying, ?Our executives are confused as to what is a library??

I kid you not. This is going so well, don?t you think?

Greenfield writes that Wiley?s Peter Balis led much of the conversation from the publishers? side, and thankfully without such questions as ?what is a library?? Balis, however ? in Greenfield?s report on the meeting ? seems to be adamant in demanding that the libraries specify what ?best practices? would define a workable model for them ? ?more than just ?equitable access at a fair price.??

On the other hand, Balis reportedly ?asked whether ebook access was for the ?less fortunate? that libraries are, in part, there to serve or for ?wealthy residents of Greenwich [Conn.] who just want to have a lot of nice, free access to a lot of books???

That sort of talk helps elucidate such oblique questions as ?what is a library? ? at least by implication, the real question might be whether making ebook lending possible at the nation?s library wouldn?t mean the publishers were giving away free book acess to people who could afford to be customers.

Greenfield?s report is worth your look. If anything, it shows a very formal, difficult atmosphere in talks that have been going on in one form or another since January.

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If you need to catch up on the two letters that preceded the meeting this week, Gary Price at InfoDocket can help you.

Here is a part of Monday?s open letter from ALA chief Maureen Sullivan, in which she writes, emphasis hers:

If our libraries? digital bookshelves mirrored the New York Times fiction best-seller list, we would be missing half of our collection any given week due to these publishers? policies. The popular ?Bared to You? and ?The Glass Castle? are not available in libraries because libraries cannot purchase them at any price. Today?s teens also will not find the digital copy of Judy Blume?s seminal ?Forever,? nor today?s blockbuster ?Hunger Games? series.

Sullivan?s intent seems to be to push the long-running standoff between libraries and publishers on ebooks to something of a head:

We librarians cannot stand by and do nothing while some publishers deepen the digital divide. We cannot wait passively while some publishers deny access to our cultural record. We must speak out on behalf of today?s ? and tomorrow?s ? readers.The library community demands meaningful change and creative solutions that serve libraries and our readers who rightfully expect the same access to e-books as they have to printed books.

The publishers? side was, in a phrase, not amused, referring to Sullivan?s letter as ?a harshly critical open letter to the US publishing industry about e-lending.?

The AAP, as trade organization representing some 300 publishers, writes back ? and note the reference at the end of this passage to a caution about ?antitrust restrictions?:

Publishers support the concept of e-lending but must solve a breadth of complex technological, operational, financial and other challenges to make it a reality. Each publishing company is grappling individually with how to best serve the interests of its authors and readers, protect digital intellectual property rights and create this new business model that is fair to all stakeholders. And while the 9000-plus library systems? non-profit status permits them to convene, debate and reach consensus on these issues, commercial publishers cannot likewise come together due to antitrust restrictions.

And the publishers? side signs off with regret about the sentiments of the libraries? camp:

At a time when individual publishing houses are more actively engaged than ever in exploring viable solutions to e-lending, we are disappointed that the new leadership at ALA chose this path, with this particular timing, to criticize those efforts.

What may be in the offing here is an effort by the library community to take the ongoing crisis public ? or, at least, more public than has been done so far, in order to pressure more movement from the publishing contingent. It?s likely, after all, that libraries, rather than the publishers, will enjoy the favor of the public in almost any outcome.

Ugh. ?Limn,? along with the verb ?keen,? is one of the most annoying words ever: http://t.co/j5CfnWiw

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As we continue to watch things develop ? talks have been going on since last winter ? Andrew Albanese at Publishers Weekly in Macmillan Poised to Test Library E-book Model has this:

Macmillan officials have confirmed to PW that the publisher has developed a pilot project that would enable e-book lending for libraries?a potentially major development. However, details of the pilot remain undisclosed.

There?s hardly a sense of big smiles and high fives anywhere, though. Text from Macmillan, quoted by Albanese, reads:

We are currently finalizing the details of our pilot program and will be announcing it when we are ready, and not in reaction to a demand.

Good times.

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@ Fiction trailers have to compete with Hollywood trailers in quality. Not cost effective ROI #DBWDM @ Honey, I?m not talking about fiction book trailers. You are. Why are you dead set on embroiling me in this? @ It was just FYI for the larger conversation. No broiling or embroiling intended.

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I guess my primary criterion is ?engagement.? Am I engaged/captured/gripped by the words and deeds on the page, by the emotional reaction they create in me?

Ray Rhaymey

When Ray Rhaymey judges manuscripts for contests, he writes, he has a list of elements that go into that sense of engagement he?s looking for.

And in his post Here Comes the Judge for Writer Unboxed, he works up a three-point list of what goes into the engagement he looks for:

Story. Something is happening, a story is taking place. It?s in a place I can see, and there are people doing things.

A scene: That?s how a good writer shows what is happening, what I call an ?immediate? scene. It?s not a summary of information, it?s not exposition, it?s not what happened then, it is what is happening now.

Voice: I frequently read where agents name ?voice? as the number one thing that pulls them in. I can see that. Voice can translate into a personality of the story, and we all react to likeable personalities.

One reason I?ve included this post on the Ether this week is that I like how forthright Rhaymey is about the speed with which an experienced judge can recognize whether what?s needed is in place or not.

I spent a part of my career ? back in the 18th Century ? judging actors who were auditioning for university graduate programs in the theater arts. And what actors never liked hearing (understandably!) was that an experienced audition judge or casting director can tell within seconds whether someone is right for a role or a spot in an ensemble. Normally, by the time an actor has said her or his name and which monologue she or he is about to perform, you know. The ?acting? part is almost secondary.

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Rhaymey is getting at a similar phenomenon here when he writes:

Many of us have faced the toughest judges in the business, literary agents. I think my take on what is good storytelling/writing comes close to theirs?I?ve judged over 600 opening chapters?and, let me tell you, your eye becomes quickly trained to see what works and what doesn?t work. Agents and editors will tell you that they can usually reach a yes/no decision on the first page. I believe them.

None of this should be taken by authors as depressing or hostile to their work and dreams and efforts. But it helps us all to face the fact that the kind of work we really want to do ? the stuff our own dreams are made on, to paraphrase a line I heard frequently in those stage auditions ? is work that arrives with its soul intact, its presence in place, its story, scene, and voice down pat.

And all this you hear about ?good writing? being the key? Here?s Rhaymey again:

The main criterion isn?t, really, good writing. That?s the price of entry, the foundation upon which a good story can be built. You don?t get any credit for good language/grammar/etc. from me or an agent or an editor. It makes a ?yes? decision possible, but that?s all.

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Hey @ could you please devote an entire column to why Michi loves the word ?limn? so damn much? Thousands of minds want to know!!

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Sometimes we lose perspective with our stories.? The plot and the characters become wallpaper to us.? We know we need an extra set of eyes to find the problems with our book?the plot holes, the echoes of repeated words, the loose ends we forget to tie up.

Elizabeth Spann Craig

Elizabeth Spann Craig?s output? in cozy and traditional mysteries is admired by many of her blog readers. It?s likely that many people think Craig is always entertained by and engaged with her characters and stories.

On the contrary, in Discovering What Delights, Craig tells of how a neighbor child?s thrill over seeing hummingbirds ? at a backyard feeder that, for Craig, becomes ?wallpaper to us? ? reminded her how remarkable the birds are.

And because writing, editing, revising can become so grueling, of course, one?s story and characters and settings can become that backyard wallpaper to a writer.Craig has the answer:

It?s just as important to have that extra set of eyes to find what?s right with our story?what?s special.? A turn of phrase, a genuine character, a well-drawn villain. The hours of editing can make us lose perspective on the good parts, too.? We need to know what works so that we can provide more of it.

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In Book Publisher Goes To Court To Recoup Hefty Advances From Prominent Writers, the Smoking Gun reports:

The Penguin Group?s New York State Supreme Court breach of contract/unjust enrichment complaints include copies of book contracts signed by the respective defendants.

Authors involved in the court action, according to the report, include Elizabeth Wurtzel, Ana Marie Cox, and Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat (whose story of concentration-camp love turned out to be false).

Some large advance figures are involved, and commenters include Don Wiggins, who writes:

I believe I?ll write a book about the disintegration of traditional publishing methods. Just send me the 30K advance and I?ll get right on it.

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Ce que les zombies peuvent nous apprendre sur le droit d?auteur et la cr?ation,par Lionel Maurel (@)http://t.co/KPIOzKhE

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Friday and Saturday, Jane Friedman, digital editor with VQR, long-suffering host of the Ether, and hashtag unto her verified self, will be engaging with colleagues in Berlin at the LitFlow conference.

The sessions are conducted in think-tank format, as a kind of big-table debate, which is an exciting and highly immersive format ? I wish we saw it more frequently in the States.

Here?s the LitFlow site, and Jane will be tweeting from time to time as the sessions go forward, keep an eye out.

And for an updated list of planned confabs, please see the Publishing Conferences page at PorterAnderson.com.

Frankfurt-bound folks may want to give special consideration to the Tools of Change (TOC) Metadata Goes Glo

Source: http://janefriedman.com/2012/09/27/writing-on-the-ether-57/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=writing-on-the-ether-57

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