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“The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others.”
Unknown
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RE: BoSacks Speak Out: English Dictionary’s Print Edition: Are Its Days Really Numbered?
As you mentioned, the story of the OED going digital seems to be everywhere. But
for the life of me, I can’t understand why. Could there be a print product that’s
more obviously a candidate for conversion to digital? I doubt it. Given the size and the retail cost of the printed version, it’s surely been apparent for years
that its days are numbered. But for all “Golly-gee!”s I’ve heard in the past day
or so on the subject, I wonder how often the people commenting have actually used the full OED in print in the recent past. And I seriously doubt if any of them own a copy. The painstaking scholarship that goes into compiling the dictionary
is unique and invaluable. But how the information is accessed can’t be a day-to-day concern of too many of the journalists who have picked up this story.
(Submitted by a Publisher and Official BoSacks Cub Reporter)
BoSacks Replied Thusly
I couldn’t agree more with your comments. My unfounded concern is loss of serendipity.
How many times have I looked up a word and found something adjacent that was fascinating.
The same concept holds true for printed encyclopedias. How many times have I looked
up something and got happily lost in the search, stumbling upon unknown “things”.
Google is great and I use it every day. But it doesn’t give me the listings of subjects alphabetically near the subject that I am looking for.
When I was a kid I read the World Book from A to Z. I did that just for fun… and it was fun. I guess that you can’t just sit down and read Google.
RE: BoSacks Speaks Out: Jousting at Paper Windmills
Bob, Thanks for this article. I completely agree. The definition that ‘magazines
are paper’ misses the point. I’ve found your magazine definition useful for years
(paginated, edited, designed, periodic, permanent and date stamped). There may be
one more piece, one that helps us think with one foot firmly in the future. A magazine
is also storytelling. That is, in essence, what writers, editors, designers, etc.,
are doing – telling stories. Culture evolved, digital happened, we’ve got a whole
new creative – and higher, more evolved – way to tell those stories. And we ain’t going back, because we humans just don’t do that.
You can imagine more than a few town criers and monastic scribes were a bit peeved
when the printing press took hold, and who knows who’s boat got rocked when cuneiform and papyrus hit the scene.
(Submitted by an Unknown)
Re: Love AARP the magazine
Bob: I have long loved AARP the magazine because of its lively editorial and funky layout. In fact, I was sad when they dumped the “My Generation” magazine moniker
because that was the direction they needed to head and the name was perfect. The former editor of our city magazine, I continue to hand our editorial staff AARP articles and ideas, and don’t get any eye rolls from the 20-30 something staff.
TulsaPeople, Tulsa’s magazine for 25 years, appeals to a broad demographic, 35-60+.
AARP’s mag has cool topics and ideas. Too bad the ad industry still doesn’t grasp
that the boomer set is the one with the bucks, and not just for dentures and adult diapers. How many times do we have to explain it to them?
Feedback On “The Web Is Dead”
I heard Chris Anderson on my car radio this morning and found your blog about The Web Is Dead article in my inbox. AllI can think is that Anderson is using what I call the “me test” and getting skewed results. In his world maybe people check the “bedside IPad” and listen to Pocasts on their smartphones and spend the day
scrolling through RSS feeds and having Skype and IM conversations. By applying his
reality to the world at large, he is ignoring a huge percentage of the population…
those of us who don’t have Ipads (and certainly not a bedside Ipad, implying ownership of more than one!) or smartphones… those of us who still spend our days using the web, communicating on the phone and via e-mail. I think it is a little early
to proclaim the web to be dead… especially to those of us who didn’t read about it through an app.
(submitted by a Promotions Director)
RE: Good News
Bob, In catching up on industry news, I see that you are to be inducted into the Publishing Executive Hall of Fame. Congratulations!
You have done an amazing job of achieving success in a very competitive business.
Starting during the heady days of alternative publishing and making the transition
into the last of the salad days of the old line media giants, you learned your trade, taught many colleagues (including me), rose to the highest levels of management
and acquitted yourself well in that rarefied atmosphere. Beyond that phase and moving
into and helping to shape an uncertain future, you continue to make a significant – perhaps even more significant – contribution to the industry we both love with the unique role you have created and practice daily with such tenacity, insight and elan.
You are deserving of this recognition and I could not be more proud of my old friend or happier for him. Mazel tov!
(Submitted by a printer, Bosacks life-long friend and all around good guy.)
NYU Summer Publishing Institute Graduate
Mr. Sacks, My name is xxx xxxxxx and I recently graduated from the NYU Summer Publishing Institute. I just wanted to thank you for coming to speak with us multiple times and for your always-entertaining and insightful talks. I really appreciated the
time and effort you made to speak to us, and I hope you had a good experience as well. Thank you again and have a wonderful summer.
(Submitted by an NYU Student)
Re: BoSacks Speaks Out: Consumers Out, Other Markets Must Float Our Economy
Rance should stick to publishing
emerging market wages are rising dramatically as their productivity rises. as that
is happening, the creation of goods and services is increasing just as dramatically there. as educational levels in emerging markets rise, so is their middle class. it’s an incredible story.
the henry ford analogy is all wrong. he raised wages because assembly line work
was horribly repetitive and he had incredibly high turnover rates. he couldn’t get workers
and as far as consumers go, consumers ARE the economy. in the equation for the calculation
of GDP, C+I+G+(X-M), or consumption + investment + govt spending + (exports – imports)
it looks like “c” is separate. but this tautological equation is just how you calculate
the books, just like revenues – costs = profits. it’s not how they interact. it’s
like saying price x quantity = revenue. so if you raise the price to a million dollars and sell only one, revenue is one million. so let’s sell one magazine copy for a
million dollars, and we won’t have to sell anything. or better yet, sales people
make too much money: let’s fire them all and look how much more money we’ll save!
it is easy to convince accounting arithmetic with causation. but every businessperson
knows that what they do is more than just accounting arithmetic. consumers pay for
everything, the savings that results in business investment, the taxes and the debts that fund government.
already global gdp has shifted so that the US is 20%. when i grew up it was 33%. it’s not a bad thing. it means that the rest of the world is more capable than
ever of producing goods and services for themselves. when i grew up, we were told
that the impoverished of the world had no hope, and that we would have paul erlich’s
population bomb play out in devastating manner. yet, since that time, we have rising
production of goods and services, with rising life spans, and a more diverse range
of capabilities. it’s essential that we not miss out on the radical shift in wealth
creation that is occurring in these younger and growing marketplaces. their wages
will rise as their productivity does. it already is. just look at the flow of money
into emerging market debt, where debt ratios to their gdp are in far better shape
than the developed economies, and unemployment rates are lower. growth is breaking out all over, and instead of learning from it, we’d like to impose our economic mistakes on it.
i worry that we have lost all sense of wonder in how economies work and how they
grow. the more we think things are zero-sum game arithmetic, the more we lose our
ability to create new things and new opportunities. everything begins to look dire.
required reading: andy kessler’s classic: we think, they sweat
http://www.andykessler.com/andy_kessler/2004/12/wsj_we_think_th.html
(Submitted by an Industry Advisor)
