Slavery, Oil, and Servitude

Very pleased to finally share my brief but hugely illuminating interview with Andrew Nikiforuk about his important new book, The Energy of Slaves, Oil and the New Servitude.

If you looking for a little light reading I recommend that you check out whatever it is that they’re selling at the local Costco. This is not the book for you.

Hope that you’ll listen to the conversation with Andrew located at the bottom of this post. Really nice guy, super smart, articulate, and passionate about the subject.

For those of you interested in an overview of what the book contains, here’s some website copy:

A radical analysis of our master-and-slave relationship to energy and a call for change.

Ancient civilizations routinely relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. In the early nineteenth century, the slave trade became one of the most profitable enterprises on the planet, and slaveholders viewed religious critics as hostilely as oil companies now regard environmentalists. Yet when the abolition movement finally triumphed in the 1850s, it had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world’s most portable and versatile workers, fossil fuels dramatically replenished slavery’s ranks with combustion engines and other labour-saving tools. Since then, oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, gender, and even our concept of happiness. But as Andrew Nikiforuk argues in this provocative new book, we still behave like slaveholders in the way we use energy, and that urgently needs to change.

Many North Americans and Europeans today enjoy lifestyles as extravagant as those of Caribbean plantation owners. Like slaveholders, we feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion, and now that half of the world’s oil has been burned, our energy slaves are becoming more expensive by the day. What we need, Nikiforuk argues, is a radical new emancipation movement.

Canadian Book Consumer 2012

Last week I was in Montreal to speak with the Association of English-language Book Publishers of Quebec about using the web and social media to develop communications and discoverability strategies for publishers, writers, and books.

While I was there I was made aware of the imminent release of BookNet Canada’s research into consumer behavior entitled: The Canadian Book Consumer 2012, Book Buying Behavior in Canada.

I was stoked to hear that they had been working on this project and were finally releasing the results.

Anyone who is interested in how consumers make decisions of what, when and where to buy books or ebooks as the web continues to dumbfound and disintermediate traditional discoverability and sales channels will find lots of food for thought in this booklet.

I spoke to the CEO of BookNet Canada, Noah Genner, via skype from my cavernous hotel room in Montreal. Noah was speaking from the BookNet offices in Toronto.

A really fascinating conversation about a very important and evolving bit of research that’s of immense importance to the traditional and developing book/ebook trade.

Our friends at the CBC do a nice job of providing an overview of the research and some of the key discoveries. Check it here: Ebook Sales Surging in Canada but Print Sales Still Tops.

Please check the audio link below to hear our conversation. Apologies for the substandard sound quality, I take full ownership for that and will work on finding a fix.

Thanks to Noah and the unflappable Samantha Francis for setting this up.

Ewan Morrison, in situ.

Seth Godin publishes a lot of articles that are designed to trigger wide-spread sharing across the social media channels.

It’s called link bait.

Godin is a master of creating provocative little posts that people repost and share across web.

Some time in June I shared one of Godin’s posts from the Domino Project, Piracy? You Wish, to twitter.

Ewan Morrison fired back a response and thus began a rare non-self-immolating discussion around ebooks, piracy, content aggregation, and the near hopeless situation the digital space presents to culture and literature for those creators who want to be paid for their work.

A grim situation indeed, and one that required more than a spasm of tweets to properly discuss.

Ewan agreed to my request to appear on Books on the Radio for further exploration of these issues and more.

Ewan Morrison is an important and influential voice in the global discussion about what happens when cultural products like literary writing meet the seemingly lawless digital space.

How does one get paid when digital files are capable of infinite replication and sharing regardless of the layers of digital rights management that have been applied to protect them?

How does one even begin to approach the problem of content aggregators and file-sharing sites that are protected by the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)?

What can be done to confront the expectations of younger generations who have grown up with the web and expect their cultural content to be readily available for free?

These are the questions that we discuss in this interview.

Ewan Morrison is the author of three novels: Swung, Menage and Distance (Jonathan Cape/Vintage) and a collection of short stories.

In 2012, he will release his fourth novel Close Your Eyes (Cape) and Tales from the Mall, an enhanced ebook/app with video (Cargo).

He lives in Glasgow and is learning how to make compost.

You can check out his excellent work for the Guardian here.

His two most recent books are:

TALES FROM THE MALL:

TRAILER     BUY AT GUARDIAN BOOKSHOP     BUY AT KINDLE

CLOSE YOUR EYES:

TRAILER

Listen to our conversation here:

eBook display at Mable's Fables in Toronto

The uncertain evolution of retail bookselling continues unabated with news that Amazon is intent on providing same-day delivery for books and other products.

Add that info to the pile of things to freak out about later because right now there is something interesting happening that could help #indiebooksellers to better compete in the current world of Kobos, Kindles, Nooks, and iWhatevers.

Enthrill, a boutique tech company from Calgary, believes that they have an answer for the question of how brick and mortar booksellers can offer ebooks to their customers.

ebooks to go allows readers to buy selected e-titles at the point of sale within the indiebookseller environment. Paper plus digital while supporting your local book shop.

The current initial selection is very limited and doesn’t really allow for the unique sense of curation that indiebooksellers are known for but I would expect that to change over time as the project develops.

Enthrill has also introduced a really interesting affiliate-type program that benefits the local indie bookseller for any purchase that a reader makes through the program no matter where they are in the world.

For instance, if you buy all your books and ebooks from Mable’s Fables in Toronto or Galiano Books out here on the left coast and you happen to purchase an ebook through Enthrill while you’re on vacation in the Philippines then your hometown bookstore receives a portion of that transaction.

It all sounds promising despite the regretable inclusion of DRM on the ebook files.

Please take the time to listen to the conversation that I had with Kevin Franco from Enthrill about ebooks, indiebooksellers and what the future might hold for brick and mortar retailing.

I was a high school co-op student in an off-campus pilot project called the Centre for Entrepreneurial Studies (CfES).

The year was 1989.

Though I went to school in Ancaster, Ontario, the CfES was located in the beautiful and historic nearby valley town of Dundas. As a part of the CfES experience each student would work at one of the local small businesses for a semester, learning everything they could and reporting back to their class various metrics and things that would hopefully be of some use in their future lives as globetrotting financiers.

For me it was an excuse to spend an entire semester away from school and, by magical happenstance, to work at the legendary independent bookstore, Chapman Books.

Chapman Books was no ordinary bookstore. It was a huge white building of about 150 years of age that was part bookstore, part home, part architects office, part wildlife sanctuary and garden.

It was the prototypical small town independent bookseller.

The front lawn was a wildflower garden with a giant laburnum tree and turtle pond. The antique front door rang a little bell when someone entered into a sprawling old place.

Once inside a person would behold books on handmade wooden shelfs, an comfy old chair under a lamp beside a fireplace, a couple of cats prowling the floor or lolling on the counter near the rotary dial phone and the antique hand cranked receipt machine.

There were no computers at Chapman Books. No devices designed for inventory management beyond the bookseller him/herself.

The only piece of technology that was admitted for us to use was a solar-powered calculator. We were allowed to use this only because it performed an important function and was powered by the sun.

Everything was done by memory. Every book was shelved and sourced by a bookseller.

No Word Stock. No Amazon.

Just real human interactions, memory, and a (relatively) pure connection between writer, publisher, bookseller, book, and reader.

The Satanic Verses

I showed up at the gate to Chapman Books on my first co-op day like a question that no bookseller wanted to answer.

Full-on mullet, mall-bought Billabong surfer shorts, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Mother’s Milk t-shirt, and a copy of HP Lovecraft’s Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre in hand.

I was reading Poe, Lovecraft, record sleeve liner notes, and role-playing games manuals almost exclusively in those days.

The summers were longer then if I recall correctly.

My co-op placement at Chapman Books changed my life in more ways than I can recount here.

By the time it was over I was reading Dorothy Parker and Jeanette Winterson, Kurt Vonnegut, Vlad Nabokov, and Martin Amis.

I witnessed the hysteria and uncertainty surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

In other words I sold a lot of copies of that book. I got to listen in on those conversations. The daily news and books and ideas – life and death! – were colliding at that time.

Rushdie went into hiding. Granta published some of his little essays in pamphlet editions. It was an amazing time.

I was hooked.

Joanna and Pansy.

But the greatest story of my time as bewildered, eager, and increasingly curious co-op student becoming indie bookseller happened on a Thursday afternoon when I handed Joanna Chapman, the owner of Chapman Books, dear friend of mine, and relentless champion of all that is worth fighting for, a report for my co-op class at CfES that she needed to initial.

The report was one of those two page stapled sheets that lists a series of tasks and objectives to be covered that week by the student and then confirmed by co-op placement proprietor.

That particular report wanted to know various percentages of display place allocated for merchandise versus revenue generated per square foot and perhaps strategies for discounting older product or some such capitalistic breakdowns of the business/consumer relationship.

Joanna took the stapled sheets from me and scanned the pages.

A slight shake of her head had me thinking that I’d made some foolish notation somewhere. Then she openly scoffed, put the sheets down on the desk and pulled the pen from behind her ear and leaned in to sign her name on the appointed line.

Instead of just signing her name Joanna, in that loose looping handwriting that came to confound me almost daily over the next 10 years, wrote, “THERE IS MORE TO THIS BUSINESS THAN THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR! (signed) JOANNA CHAPMAN.”

Boom.

At that moment so much was revealed and confirmed for me.

I took those papers back to my class with pride.

I spent 10 years working for Chapman Books – with gaps here and there for travel and school.

I don’t regret a single second of it. Bookselling is an incredible experience and education.

I hope that more indie booksellers take a chance on young co-op students.

It’s the right thing to do.

Gilbert Gottfried in the throes

When it comes – ahem – to sensual arousal a warm voice reading beautiful prose only has few rivals.

Mellifluous tones wrapped around erotica language cooing from your earbuds only for you… as you reach forward to increase the incline on your elliptical at the gym.

There’s sexy voices reading the great romances of the English language and then there’s Gilbert Gottfried reading Fifty Shades of Grey.

Truly sublime.

Click here to view the embedded video.