Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.
...I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature — art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage.
In a return to the public stage, John Edwards has confirmed plans to talk politics a month after admitting to an extramarital affair. But his wife won't be at his side.
AFP - Australian police have cleared an Indian doctor of involvement in failed bomb attacks in Britain last year after a bungled 14-month probe that is now the subject of a judicial inquiry.
Reuters - Personal income tumbled unexpectedly
in July and inflation-adjusted spending shrank as government
economic stimulus waned, but consumer spirits rose this month,
a hint the economy may muddle through its woes.
