It’s Five Minutes To Midnight For Print Publishing

It’s Forrester, but this is all on the mark.

On The Certain Economics Of Relegating Paper Books To The Margins Of The Business

This will mean an automatic retraction in how many books are printed because publishers won’t get the massive bulk purchases they used to get for as many titles. It also means they won’t be able to give as many large advances. Meanwhile, authors won’t like that advances are going down, marketing spend is plummeting, and royalties are shrinking (especially now that 30% of the eBook price goes to the bookseller in most cases). Suddenly, self-publishing seems a real alternative for anybody with even a modest Twitter following, especially when Amazon is offering 70% of the retail price of eBooks — paid monthly, not twice annually.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

There will come a full-blown panic in the halls of print publishing. Staff will be jettisoned when they discover just how far underwater they’ve been. And none of that last-minute emergency triage will work to their benefit.

But writers will have a clear path to the future.

December 7, 2010: Kill The Banks Day In France

Eric Cantona’s call for bank protest sparks online campaign

The 44-year-old former footballer recommended a run on the cash reserves of the world’s banks during a newspaper interview that was also filmed. The interview has become a YouTube hit and has spawned a new political movement.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

He said:

We don’t pick up weapons to kill people to start the revolution. The revolution is really easy to do these days. What’s the system? The system is built on the power of the banks. So it must be destroyed through the banks.

This means that the three million people with their placards on the streets, they go to the bank and they withdraw their money and the banks collapse. Three million, 10 million people, and the banks collapse and there is no real threat. A real revolution.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

I wonder if just a hint of this in America would stop these crooked illegally-foreclosing bastards in their tracks?

Was Dagny Taggart Right To Shoot After All?

There is a shocking scene in Atlas Shrugged. Dagny Taggart commits murder.

I’ve always had problems with that. But with report after report of TSA staff going about their jobs unthinkingly, like automatons, I begin to wonder.

Just look at this video:

That is just indefensible.

Applicable Atlas Shrugged excerpt after the break.