Year / 2005

by Edward Champion

Target: Refusal Clause Happy

It looks like Target policy involves refusing to fill emergency contraception prescriptions. In a Missouri Target store, a 26 year old woman was refused an emergency contraception prescription. When she asked why, she was told by the pharmacist, “I won’t fill it and I don’t have to fill it and that’s my right!”

Why should something as ridiculous sounding as “Target Greatland” have control over a woman’s body?

I’m not really surprised, given that when you walk into a Target store, you are a “guest” not a “customer.” This is fantastic linguistic chicanery, because while one can legitimately claim “the customer is always right,” anyone who has unknowingly served Drink Number 7 to a party guest would be hard-pressed to suggest that “the guest is always right.”

Planned Parenthood has sent three letters to Target. There have been an additional 4,600 letters from people around the country. Target refused to respond to them.

Target has however answered the City Pages. And Target claims, without producing their findings, that the “alleged incident” was a he-said, she-said thing and, through perhaps unintentional subtext, they have essentially endorsed the refusal clause.

There are two solutions here: (1) boycott Target or pressure them to adopt a wholesale ban on refusal clauses and (2) engage in a national campaign to get state legislation (in as many states as possible) passed that prohibits any pharmacy from employing the refusal clause (specifically in relation to a woman’s right to buy an emergency prescription).

by Edward Champion

Is the AAP’s Google Lawsuit Truly Reflective of Its Members?

Richard Nash has returned from Frankfurt and he’s now blogging up a storm. Perhaps his most interesting entry is this exchange between Nash and the Association of American Publishers over the Google Library Project lawsuit. (Background reading on the subject can be found here.) What’s particularly interesting is that the AAP’s litigious ardor stems from its representative government. Further, other AAP members (say, smaller presses) don’t seem to factor into the Board’s decision. The unnamed representative at the AAP writes:

As you know, AAP has a Board of Directors that is elected by our members and empowered by AAP’s bylaws to make decisions and take actions on behalf of the entire AAP membership. Quite often, issues that eventually come before the Board for decisions and actions are initially explored and considered by one or more of AAP’s committees and divisions. AAP staff routinely work to facilitate participation in these committees and divisions by all interested members, and members are always encouraged to contact AAP staff to make known their interests, concerns and views on relevant matters.

I tried hunting around the AAP site to see if I could locate a copy of these bylaws. Given that the publishing industry is a mighty and multifarious zoo populated by animals of different stripes, I figured (perhaps naively) that any large organization might have some exigencies for allowing minority opinions (such as Nash’s) to be voiced and considered, if not outright memorialized before the Board. Alas, no such luck.

However, I did locate this list of the Board of Directors. And I’m not certain if the Board’s current makeup genuinely reflects the industry as a whole. Sure, we have the big behemoths (with Houghton Mifflin as chair, Random House as vice chair) well represented. But aside from a few midsize educational publishers, why isn’t a single member of the board a small or midsize fiction publisher? Surely, any board hoping to represent the entire publishing industry would fill at least one slot along these lines. Then again, “small publisher” probably means something fundamentally different to me than it does to Pat Schroeder.

Further, the AAP’s lawsuit seems to work against their stated agenda. Among the AAP’s goals: “To expand the market for American books and other published books in all media” (emphasis mine) and “To aid AAP member publishers in exploring the challenges and opportunities of the emerging technologies.”

So we’re left with the AAP’s letter to Nash, which is, as Nash notes, “civil” but ultimately a bit dismissive towards anyone who disagrees with the unquestionable wisdom of the mighty Board (“We would certainly welcome the opportunity to answer any questions you may have regarding the basis for AAP’s actions, and perhaps to even persuade you to reconsider your disagreement with those actions.”).

In other words, the sense I’m getting here is that, if you happen to be an AAP member and you have a different spin on an issue that the representative board is considering, not only are your thoughts disregarded when the Board decides upon a course of action that has a tremendous effect on the whole (and, in this case, the lasting power of backlist titles), but the Board doesn’t offer a viable alternative that might help the member explore the “opportunities of the emerging technologies.”

So I have to ask: Is the AAP really there for its Google Library-friendly members? Or does this lawsuit exist to appease the big boys rather than considering this issue holistically?

by Edward Champion

NaDruWriNi Naught Five

Folks who read this blog last year know that I shamelessly participated in National Drunken Writing Night (aka “NaDruWriNi”), along with Gwenda Bond. The results here weren’t very lucid, and I became obsessed with bolding words. (In fact, Gwenda was far more compelling than I was.) But it was certainly the mark of bloggers who had had too much to drink. (In my case, I had recently broken up with a girlfriend and the results were, as the old song goes, sad and lonely. Read them if you dare.)

Well, this year, the hardest work man in blog business ain’t steering this baby, but Brittanie is. And on Saturday, November 5, 2005, I plan to write a good deal more incoherence while drinking. Tune into these pages that evening for more. I should note that my inhibitions lower rather quickly.

by Edward Champion

Just Don’t Forget to Use Alt-Tab When the Boss is Coming

Everyone seems to be pointing to this Advertising Age article about how U.S. workers will waste 551,000 years reading blogs. Well, what the article doesn’t say is that businesses will, in turn, waste countless eons destroying people’s spirits with tyrannical middle managers, mundane job duties, mandatory office meetings that are utterly pointless, and by hiring high maintenance people who constantly make workers’ lives a living hell. If workers are maintaining their sanity through reading blogs, thus ensuring that they will be able to focus their energies accomplishing vapid and meaningless tasks to justify their employment (and in turn increasing productivity), then quite frankly, 3.5 hours a week isn’t nearly enough.

by Edward Champion

Slow Reader

How Fast Do You Read?: “You read between 350-400 words per minute. Well above average reading level. (The average rate is between 200 – 250 words per minute.) It is assumed that you did not skim the words nor fail to understand the meaning of what was read.”

Assuming that this level holds, it would take me 250 minutes (or 4.16 hours) to read a 100,000 word novel. If I were to die at the age of 85, I would have roughly 19,710 days of life, or 473,040 hours of life. Cutting out seven hours of sleep from those days (I assume that, as I get older, I will need more sleep), this leaves 335,070 hours left of waking life. If I were to somehow become a literary shut-in (god forbid) and devote every spare minute to reading (this also cuts out a full-time job), assuming that I was able to live to 85 with my vision intact, then I would be able to read a maximum number of 80,545 books. According to the Book Industry Study Group, the number of books published each year is 175,000. Let us immediately assume that 90% of these are worthless. This leaves us with 17,500 books a year (the top 10%) that are perhaps passable or worthwhile. By this criteria, I would only be able to keep tabs on 4.6 years of every book that is passable or worthwhile throughout the remaining duration of my life.

Thus, when one has boasted that he has “read everything,” you should be highly suspicious. For not only is it impossible to read everything, it is impossible to get through a pared down list. Given that 80,545 books remains the absolute maximum (and, at that, a diminishing figure as I grow closer to death), I do not anticipate my library growing too far beyond that number.