eBook Sales; debate and social responsibility

View 774 Friday, May 17, 2013

E-book sales are up 43%, but that’s still a ‘slowdown’

After three years of triple-digit increases, the number of e-books sold last year grew by only 43%.

And that’s enough of a difference in the annual growth rate to have publishers talking about an e-book "slowdown," even as digital books remain the fastest-growing part of the market. They now account for about 20% of all book sales reported by publishers.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/15/e-book-sales/2159117/

Only 43% growth, and that’s a slowdown. You may interpret that any way you wish. I think it’s print publisher spin. In another conference science fact writer Jeff Hecht says

As with so much other reporting about the ebook market, you have to

wonder how they’re defining "books" and "the market", especially when

they are trying to do statistics without good numbers on paperbacks. Are

they counting textbooks, professional books, children’s books, and so

on? Are they counting the sales of ebooks in the 10,000- to 30,000 word

format, which essentially are not published in paper format?

Sales growth has to slow down as ebooks gain share of market — it’s a

lot easier to double market share when you start at 1% than when you

start at 20%. I’m starting to hear of people who have gone back to paper

after buying or being given an ereader.

My own experience is that backlist sales in eBook format are growing a lot less slowly than 40%, but they are growing; backlists have become an important part of an author’s income, and almost all backlist sales are in eBook format now. Obviously used print book sales bring to income to an author.

A discussion in another conference brought this to my attention. Charles Murray, one sociologist I have great respect for, has published in National Review On Line an important essay on the decline of rational discussion, along with an appeal to all readers to make an effort to do more of it. He reminds us of the important American intellectual tradition of defending the right to say the unpopular, as portrayed in great films such as Inherit the Wind, and how the American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of the Nazi Party to march through a Jewish section of Chicago, and he says:

Few remnants of those American themes survive. We too seldom engage our adversaries’ arguments in good faith. Often, we don’t even bother to find out what they are, attacking instead what we want them to be. When we don’t like what someone else thinks, we troll the Internet relentlessly until we find something with which to destroy that person professionally or personally — one is as good as the other. Hollywood still does films about lonely voices standing up against evil corporations or racist sheriffs, but never about lonely voices standing up against intellectual orthodoxy.

I’m sick of it. I also have no idea how to fix it. But we can light candles. Here is what I undertake to do, and I invite you to join me: Look for opportunities to praise people with whom you disagree but who have made an argument that deserves to be taken seriously. Look for opportunities to criticize allies who have used crimethink tactics against your adversaries. Identify yourself not just with those who agree with you, but with all those who stand for something and play fair.

In Defense of Jason Richwine
His resignation is emblematic of a corruption that has spread throughout American intellectual discourse.

By Charles Murray

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/348323/defense-jason-richwine/page/0/1

He does this in defense of Jason Richwine in a matter of considerable concern that we will address another time; it’s part of the long time controversy about IQ, race, Nature and Nurture, and other such complicated matters, and that’s all important and must be discussed; but Murray’s appeal hit me just as I had finished reading a defense of the Cincinnati IRS agents involved in the tax exemption application scandal. We’ll get to that in the next section.

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times had story “Scandal born of vague IRS laws” by Matea Gold that present the IRS side of the tax scandal. There had been an enormous increase in applications for tax exempt status of semi-political organizations, and there had never been any rules established for how to deal with them.

At the heart of the issue is the murky role occupied by nonprofit "social welfare" organizations, set up under Section 501(c)4 of the tax code, which are allowed under IRS regulations to engage in a certain amount of campaign activity, as long as politics is not their "primary" purpose. The groups pay no tax on the money they bring in. They can accept unlimited donations and, unlike political committees, can keep their contributors secret.

That status became especially valuable three years ago with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, which lifted the ban on direct campaign spending by corporations, including many nonprofit groups. The ruling triggered the boost of applicants to the IRS.

The stepped-up role of tax-exempt groups in politics has stymied the Federal Election Commission, which has deadlocked on questions about how much disclosure is required of advocacy organizations that engage in elections.

That has left much of their regulation in the hands of the IRS, which has never clearly defined how much political activity is allowed for social welfare organizations.

Faced with hundreds of applications, the civil service bureaucrats sought to find a formula to winnow out the easy cases with were unambiguously within the intent of the law, and the political organizations seeking tax exempt status for what were, in effect, political advocates. They came up with a formula, “tea party” which identified the political advocates, and those got set aside, and

The problem with this is that while every word is true, the words “social responsibility” or “progressive” would generally get the same results, and those weren’t used. It wasn’t that there were rules applied that made no sense: they made all too much sense in a time sensitive situation. I’m perfectly willing to listen to the IRS arguments but I don’t have to believe them. Oh, I can believe there are those who never thought about “social responsibility” advocates as political advocates. But that is yet another argument.

What needs debating is just how much tax exemption there ought to be for political advocates?