2 Places From Which I Would Accept Employment, If Pressed

1. Soft Skull Press: Rad, punk press in NYC founded by Sander Hicks in 1992 as a guerrilla publishing operation. He ran it under-the-table at the Kinko’s where he was employed. 

From the website FAQ:

Q. What does “Soft “Skull” mean?

To be perfectly honest with you, we’re not really sure. Sander says in an interview somewhere that it’s kind of “punk” sounding. It’s certainly memorable. But we sometimes imagine that it has something to do with the softness of a baby’s skull as it emerges from its mother’s womb, and the beauty and fragility of a new thing emerging into the world, full of promise and righteous yowling.

Enough said.

2. Bitch Magazine: I’ve been reading Bitch since I was a wee feminist-in-training (Dear Diary, I’ve decided to spell “woman” with a “y” from now on.*), and I can always count on the mag to explain to me why I find certain pop phenomenon so disturbing, or to call out products I had considered innocuous on their shady subtexts.

Awesome recent example, this article about the Twilight books, taglined, “Stephenie Meyer’s vampire-infested Twilight series has created a new YA genre: abstinence porn.”

*actual excerpt from my 5th-grade diary

It Wouldn’t Fit In Here

Before I got “into” book publishing, I thought of Amazon.com as a pretty righteous company:  cheap, limitless, and somehow able to project a radical, free-market vibe despite its obvious corporate bulk.  I wrote my undergrad thesis on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire theory, which is kind of neo-marxism (if that even means anything to you\at all) and is very excited about the internet because Hardt and Negri wrote in the late 90′s, during the Pre-Jaded Era.  Anyway.  They loved the internet because it represented centralized information accessible to all, and, moved by that same spirit, I felt pretty Okay or even Good about Amazon.  Of course, the truth is that I was going to start using it no matter how I felt because it’s convenient, and I’m lazy.

Lately though, I’ve come to learn that Amazon is a lot more than one-stop shopping for my out-of-print textbooks and Pilates workout videos.  First of all, it’s cheap because Amazon screws over publishers (and authors), and there’s nothing new or innovative about that.  It is truly limitless, unconfined by spatial or geographical boundaries, which is the wave of the future, and, I’ll admit, pretty awesome.  But they aren’t radical.  They’re just Big Business, doing what Big Business does best:  Monopolizing the market, and then doing whatever the heck they want.

My Online Marketing professor, Marty Brown, posed the following question:

With its POD/distribution company (BookSurge) and its proprietary e-book platform (Kindle), Amazon looks less and less like an ordinary bookstore, and more and more like a publisher and distributor. Does this bode well or ill for readers, authors, and publishers?

This is, of course, a really good question. 

My first impulse is that this is a bad thing.  It’s going to run publishers out of house and home, destroy the industry, close the cute independent bookstores (if there are any still open), and convert books into GigaPets, or whatever. 

But the whole thing about the internet is that nobody owns it, and I would guess that, as we speak, some cybergenius is figuring out how to subvert the whole system.  Also, not to be a drag, but the publishing industry has been treading water ever since it started trying to make money instead of enrich and distribute works of art.  If anybody killed The Book, it was the blockbuster. 

In short, it’s high time for a restructuring of the whole system, and I’d be fine if all of us “publishing” students became freelance editors or literary agents, and left the ordering and stocking up to Amazon.  Not to excuse their evil ways, but if us bookish types were allowed to do our thing without stressing out over pricetags, it could be a boon to readers and authors alike.  My guess is that, in the future, sites like Amazon will be used as filters for the incredible excess of titles available to readers, and that other, more specialized filters will emerge.  Independent book review sites will be the new independent book stores, as well as the new “publishers.” 

Or, Amazon will just eat the entire world and we’ll have nothing to read but the Twilight Series.  Whichever.