SLIGHTLY UNBALANCED IN THE MEMBRANE

I was messing around trying to learn a little bit about Habermas (who I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never read) and came across the wikipedia page for one of his students, Zoran Đinđić , the Serbian prime minister who was assassinated in 2003.  Truly a remarkable story and one that everyone pretty much stopped paying attention to the minute the Kosovo war ended. I don’t know enough about Serbia to say more than that.

In the course of learning a bit about the recent Amazon/Macmillan dustup I came across this Jim Henley post, which includes this tidbit from Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

while a fixed $10 price point would undoubtedly be good for Amazon’s ebook business, it would take a shark-sized bite out of the market for hot new bestsellers, which is trade book publishing’s single most profitable area.

That revenue source is what keeps a lot of publishing companies afloat. It provides the liquidity that enables them to buy and publish smaller and less commercially secure titles: odd books, books by unknown writers, books with limited but enthusiastic audiences, et cetera.

My honest estimate is that the result would be fewer and less diverse titles overall, published less well than they are now.

The interesting thing about this to me is, why do we see such a different attitude regarding pricing in the music business than we do in the book business? Right now we have major labels that generally pursue the following strategy for making money:

1. Put most of your chips on your huge new releases .
2. Scale back your niche titles available in the back catalog, or better, dump them entirely – they don’t make nearly the margins of the huge new releases.
3. Overprice new releases and often, overprice the older stuff even more. If the nerds want to buy that stuff, make them pay through the nose for it. You aren’t running a charity here.
4. Don’t have a whole lot of price points. You have three basic lines: full price (~$18.98), midprice ($11.98-$13.98), and budget ($7.98-$9.99). That’s it.

Don’t get me wrong, I personally hate this model. It’s tricked consumers into paying more for CDs than they ever paid for LPs, and (in the case of EMI/BMG at least) means that hundreds of historically interesting records continue to languish in the vaults. But purely from the point of view of maximizing profit, it does, intuitively, seem like the way to go.* So why haven’t booksellers followed suit, especially with (2)?  TNH’s comment implies they are more or less on board with (1), and (3) and (4) don’t seem as consequential. But altruistically printing tons of niche books for seemingly little margins does not appear to add up to big profits.

*The big counterexample is the movie business. Most back-catalog DVDs can be had for dirt cheap these days. Is it just that the sums of money in play for movies are vastly larger than most records so there’s more room to give DVD buyers a break?

Digby is thinking about Rahm Emanuel’s legislative tactics and concludes that either he never had much interest in getting health care reform passed, or else he’s just fantastically inept:

I’m not one to mythologize single actors, and I do believe that the buck always stops with the president. But either Rahm is a brilliant legislative strategist, in which case he didn’t bother to use his great powers to pass health care reform for reasons we can only speculate about, given the stakes — or his reputation for brilliance is extremely overrated.

Putting aside the question of whether Rahm planned things this way all along, I’ve been wondering about this phenomenon of vastly inflated reputations lately (see also Matt Yglesias on Mike Pence, who’s apparently a moron despite many conservatives believing he’s brilliant) . From an incentive point of view, it seems to me that mostly things cut in only one direction here when the person is already sitting high in a given hierarchy. If you’re a young conservative think tanker or a Democratic staffer looking for an administration job (or, for that matter, a young whippersnapper working your way up the corporate ladder), it does you absolutely no good to point out that Rahm or Pence or your department director  is a total doofus who couldn’t find his ass with a map and GPS.  And so you’re bound to end up with these situations where people in leadership positions have reputations that rise and rise all out of proportion to their actual capabilities – to the point where people barely notice when they aren’t living up to them.

My main concern with this at the moment is political: I’m trying to figure out how Democrats can create party discipline around a center-left consensus that most of them (and I think most Americans, to be honest) agree on. Right now it looks like the congressional caucus is composed mostly of political hacks, and it’s their wonkish, usually smarter staffers who hold things together ideologically. The problem with this is that seeing as how they’re the ones with the actual votes in Congress, it’s hard to keep the hacks from breaking ranks whenever they feel like it. So one thing I’d like to see happen is: let’s find us some smarter hacks, please.