Hachette Job

“Amazon has begun discouraging customers from buying books by Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Colbert, J. D. Salinger and other popular writers, a flexing of its muscle as a battle with a publisher spills into the open.

     The Internet retailer, which controls more than a third of the book trade in the United States, is marking many books published by Hachette Book Group as not available for at least two or three weeks. [...]
     Generally, most popular books are available from Amazon within two days. [...]
     'We have been asked legitimate questions about why many of our books are at present marked out of stock with relatively long estimated shipping times on the Amazon website, in contrast to immediate availability on other websites and in stores,' said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette spokeswoman. 'We are satisfying all Amazon’s orders promptly.'
     But, she added, 'Amazon is holding minimal stock' and restocking some of Hachette’s books 'slowly, causing "available 2-4 weeks" messages.'
     For at least a decade, Amazon has not been shy about throwing its weight around with publishers, demanding bigger discounts and more time to pay its bills. When a publisher balked, it would withdraw the house’s titles from its recommendation algorithms.
     ‘Typically, it was about 30 days before they’d come back and say, “Ouch, how do we make this work?”’ an Amazon buyer told the journalist Brad Stone in his book about the company, The Everything Store.”
— David Streitfeld, The New York Times
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end papers

From: classaction.org

“April 17, 2014 – Last week, the Authors Guild (AG) filed an appeal to the US Court of Appeals in their ongoing fight against Google’s book-scanning project. This week, eight amicus briefs were filed with the court declaring the original ruling unacceptable. The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) participated in two of those briefs. Longtime TWUC members Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill and Yann Martel joined a brief prepared on behalf of 17 of the world's most beloved authors. Other signatories include J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Malcolm Gladwell, and Ursula Le Guin. As a founding member of the International Authors Forum (IAF), TWUC itself is represented in the IAF's amicus brief. “TWUC is extremely grateful to Margaret, Larry, and Yann for showing leadership and agreeing to sign the individual author brief,” said TWUC Chair, Dorris Heffron. “It’s so important for the courts to see the world’s authors are against Google on this.” The New York Second Circuit court previously ruled Google’s unpermitted, uncompensated copying of millions of complete, in-copyright works to be a "fair use." The AG’s appeal and the author briefs argue such a finding is without precedent and plainly ridiculous.”

— The Writers’ Union of Canada
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“The most arresting moment in 'Google and the World Brain' Ben Lewis' thoughtful new documentary about the search giant's effort to scan all the world's books, takes place not in Mountain View or a courtroom but rather a monastery high above Catalonia in Spain. The film's globetrotting crew is interviewing Father Damiá Roure, who runs the library at the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat, about what happened when Google came to digitize the library's collection. Roure speaks happily of the Googlers' visit, explaining that their efforts allowed the monks to bring their collection -- which dates to the library's founding in the 11th century -- to the wider world.
     As he finishes speaking, a filmmaker just out of the frame asks about what else Google might do with the information found in those books. What if, she asks, Google wanted to sell the information they had scanned in those books? Should the monks get a cut of the sale?”
— Casey Newton, cnet
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“And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.” — 1 Samuel 17:4

From: Canadian Business

"A new Malcolm Gladwell book [David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants] isn’t a publication, it’s an event. Since The Tipping Point was published 13 years ago, the New Yorker staff writer has made himself comfortable at the top of bestseller lists, built a lucrative second career on the corporate speaking circuit, inspired a mini-boom of counterintuitive quasi-academic books, and helped define this TED-talk era of public intellectualism. More than an author, Gladwell is an industry.

     […] we should have considered David the favourite the moment he entered the Valley of Elah with his sling. In those days, projectile warriors like David, armed with mere stones, regularly defeated heavy infantry, clumsier fighters weighed down by armor. Goliath was expecting hand-to-hand combat with a fellow warrior. David changed the rules on him.
     This is the problem with giants, Gladwell argues: 'The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.' Moreover, being an underdog can lead a person to change the way he or she operates. Underdogs take risks and chart strange new paths that the conventionally powerful rarely attempt."
— Nicholas Hune-Brown, Canadian Business
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"What if we lived in a world where the weak were really strong, and all of our disadvantages could easily become advantages? In his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, bestselling writer Malcolm Gladwell tells us we're already living in that kind of world. Even something as debilitating as dyslexia can be an ambitious man's ticket to success.
     'The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed,' says Gary Cohn, a man of humble origins whose bold decisions take him to the top of the U.S. financial industry. 'I wouldn't be where I am today without my dyslexia.'
     Gladwell, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has sold a ton of books explaining seemingly counterintuitive and complex arguments about psychology and the social sciences to a mass audience. In David and Goliath his mission is to show us how our thinking about power, influence and success is often misguided and wrong."
— Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times
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How tall was Goliath? Go here...

Buy all of Malcolm Gladwell's books here...
(which is only 25 km or 15 miles away from his home town of Elmira, Ontario).

Ten Thousand Hours

From: uncouth reflections

"Elmore 'Dutch' Leonard is gone. This news propelled me back to the days when we both worked on the same floor in the vast carpeted halls of the Chevrolet ad agency in the General Motors Building, on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit in the early sixties. He’d be in his office by eight in the morning, bashing away at his typewriter, on pulp Westerns in the dying days of that genre, as I’d later learn. He was on the truck side and I was glorifying Corvettes, so our professional paths never crossed [….]

     Those dime Westerns were Dutch Leonard’s writing apprenticeship, early swings of the pickaxe in the ten-thousand-plus hours of humble exertion that Malcolm Gladwell tells us is the only sure way to master a craft, any craft.
     I’ve always maintained that my all-too-sustained advertising career never taught me a goddam thing about writing, but Dutch would claim that ad copy’s need for compression and simplification (you get in and out fast, so as not to bore or confuse or provoke second thoughts) helped thin out and tighten his prose. The evidence would suggest that he was righter than I was."
— Bruce McCall, The New Yorker
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Buy all of Elmore "Dutch" Leonard's books here...

"...massive money sink of a mausoleum."

"In a Q+A session with Bloomberg Businessweek writer Brad Stone, the Canadian author of The Tipping Point and Blink [Malcolm Gladwell of Elmira, Ontario] described the flagship NYPL building in Manhattan as a 'massive money sink of a mausoleum.'

     'Every time I turn around, there's some new extravagant renovation going on in the main building. Why? In my mind, the New York Public Library should be focused on keeping small libraries open, on its branches all over the city.'
     The NYPL announced a major $300 million renovation of its flagship location last year, to be completed in 2018.
     Gladwell continued, 'Luxury condos would look wonderful there. Go back into the business of reaching people who do not have access to books. And that is not on the corner of 42nd and Fifth [Avenue].'
     ...A little earlier in the discussion, Gladwell spoke about libraries as 'the only place where you can browse [books]. A world in which you can only find things that you have chosen to pursue is an incredibly impoverished one.
     'Libraries are also safe havens for people who are not from privileged backgrounds, who do not have access to books and where there is no quiet space to work.'"
— Huffington Post
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Buy all of Malcolm Gladwell's books here...

Spread the Word

"Mass media made fads part of the zeitgeist of any particular moment, but virality aspires to map the zeitgeist — trace the routes by which ideas spread and count influence in hard numbers. Fads used to have to measure themselves by proxy in sales figures for some particular commodity; now messages themselves are the whole of the commodity, and if there is anything material associated with a viral phenomenon, it is an afterthought, an optional souvenir.
     Virality becomes self-referential, tautologous, the content of a viral meme is the fact of the meme’s virality, and this autophagy becomes its essence, its motive force. It feedbacks on itself, but no one seems to hear the screech over their own shouting.

     But I wanted to hear the opposing case, that there is something other than de facto virality that drives viruses, so I decided to read Contagious, a recent book by Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger that is intended as a kind of sequel to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Gladwell’s book introduced readers to elite influencers, Berger explains, but didn’t do much to explain what could make content itself viral, able to circulate itself efficiently despite the at times dubious quality of the human hosts transmitting it. 'Contagious content is … so inherently viral that it spreads regardless of who is doing the talking. Regardless of whether the messengers are really persuasive or not and regardless of whether they have ten friends or ten thousand.' No cults of personality for Berger. No personality at all is required in this world. (Isn’t it wonderfully democratic?)"
— Rob Horning, The New Inquiry
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Buy this book here...

Malcolm Gladwell's New Book

"Does being an underdog—whether as a team a country or an individual—help foster creativity? Why should people at the top of their fields quit their jobs and try to reinvent themselves? Little Brown has just announced that next year it will publish Gladwell’s new book, David and Goliath, on, as he says, the 'art and science of the underdog.' He sat down with me, and Page-Turner, last week to talk about the book, the Viet Cong, Impressionist painters, and whether his advice about reinvention applies to successful authors, too."
— Nicholas Thompson, The New Yorker (Page-Turner)
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