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Thanks Be Unto God - Article
Henry Morris, Ph.D. - through our Lord Jesus Christ” (I Corinthians 15:57). There are innumerable things for which we could—and should—give thanks to God. But there are three notable gifts mentioned by Paul in his letters to the...
Honor and Tribute - Article
Henry Morris III, D.Min. - very specific that "every one of" us (I Corinthians 16:2), indeed, "every man according as he purposeth in his heart" (II Corinthians 9:7) is to give of his resources to our Lord. We are further told that it is to be "as...
Tragic Ignorance - Article
Henry Morris, Ph.D. - ... themselves unto the righteousness of God” (Romans 10:3).There are several important doctrinal truths about which unbelievers-and sometimes even Christians-seem tragically ignorant, with an ignorance affecting their very lives and...
Blind Hearts - Article
Henry Morris, Ph.D. - “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (Ephesians 4:18). It is a tragedy for a person to have blinded eyes, but infinitely...
Christian Warfare: The Real Battle - Article
Henry Morris III, D.Min. - ... flesh and blood . . .” (Ephesians 6:12). With the intense, “Finally, my brethren” (used only five other times in the New Testament), we are put on notice that a battle is raging “in high places”...
The Word And The Spirit - Article
Henry Morris, Ph.D. - ... freely given to us of God” (I Corinthians 2:12).How is it that some people can read a Biblical passage and find it either tedious, confusing, or even foolish, whereas others will receive great understanding and blessing from the...
Does God Dwell In Temples? - Article
John D. Morris, Ph.D. - heart shall be there perpetually” (II Chronicles 7:16). Of course there is no real conflict. God implies that this place would enjoy His special attention, favor, and name, but He never claimed it as a dwelling place. Solomon even...
Things Inexpressible in Words - Article
Henry Morris, Ph.D. - ... it is not lawful for a man to utter" (II Corinthians 12:4). There are three things called "unspeakable" in the New Testament, with each one translated from a different Greek word. However, they all convey the notion of...
Sacrifices, Stones, and Soldiers - Article
Henry Morris III, D.Min. - ... unto God, which is your reasonable service" (Romans 12:1). Each member of God's family is called to be a living sacrifice -- obeying His Word, seeking His glory, anticipating His will, accomplishing His work, and "looking for and...
Taking One's Leave - Article
Kenneth B. Cumming, Ph.D. - “Finally, brethren, farewell. Be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you” (II Corinthians 13:11). When it comes to moving in new directions, the illustration...
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3 bed, 2 full bath. Great family home, single level, south facing back yard with in ground swimming pool. New painted e

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3 bed, 2.5 full bath. Better than new home. Open floor plan on a larger corner lot. New luxurious carpet. Low maintenance

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3 bed, 2 full bath. PC3315 Great home in quiet neighborhood w/many updates. New roof w/30 year warranty installed June

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Uttara Ringer T-Shirts

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Uttara Ringer T-shirts are an Idakoos specialtiy! Idakoos has many things to offer. Whether you want to get a Uttara Ringer T-shirt for a special occasion, give a Uttara T-Shirt as a present or need to represent with a funny Uttara Ringer Tee during Holidays or Family and Friends get-togethers, Idakoos is sure to have the right Uttara Ringer T-shirt for you! Even if it turns out you can't find the right Uttara Ringer Shirt with the perfect design for your mother, father or children (or friends!); Idakoos offers all of its men's women's and children's Uttara Ringer T-shirts as Custom Uttara T-Shirts. Personalize any Uttara Ringer T-shirt the way you want to ensure the perfect gift.


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Home>T-Shirt>Female Names>Aadi>Free Hugs - Aadi Way!
Free Hugs - Aadi Way! Men T-Shirt

Free Hugs - Aadi Way! Men T-Shirt

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- 100% Cotton- Classic Fit- Wash Cold- Other Colors available- Dry Low

The Men T-Shirt Free Hugs - Aadi Way! is our old-school favorite. Perfect for use in sports where you are bound to sweat and need wide range of movement. Short sleeves to let cool air in on those hot and sunny days. Also great for every day use and to show everyone your love for Free Hugs - Aadi Way!.

This product is made of the finest combed jersey which feels soothing against your skin. Shoulder-to-shoulder taping guarantees long life and a good fit.  Aadi Men T-Shirt is available in 10 different color options. Heather Grey: 80%  Cotton/20% Polyester. Remaining Colors: 100%  Cotton.

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vendor-managed inventory

Penguin Random House does its competitors a favor by walking away from subscription

I sometimes feel like I’m the only guy in town (NYC, but I’d include London too) contemplating out loud how Penguin Random House might use its position as by far the biggest commercial trade publisher to make life a bit more difficult for its competitors, which in the first instance means the Following Four: HarperCollins (which is much bigger than the other three), Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan.

What I mean, of course, is that PRH could use its position to either improve its margins in relation to everybody else or to create proprietary distribution. Either way, it would expand its ability to make money on books, fueling further its ability to outbid rivals for attractive properties. That’s why, when I looked at the Amazon agreement with Hachette and Simon & Schuster and the story of those negotiations, I thought first about whether they would tempt PRH to push for a better deal with Amazon than its rivals got.

The two most “obvious” opportunities for them to me, one of which appears to be anything but obvious to the people running PRH, are to build PRH-only general bookstores inside other retailers using VMI (vendor-managed inventory) and to start a PRH-only subscription service. They’ve never commented so I could hear it on my suggestion of the former; they continue to make it abundantly clear that they don’t share my opinion about the latter.

A NY-based executive of PRH told me a year ago that I had the subscription thing all wrong. From PRH’s perspective, it is unwise to offer a service and pricing plan that seems designed to give substantial discounts to your very best customers: those who buy and read many books. This is not a crazy perspective. If PRH sells about half the commercial books, then, on average, they get half the sales from these heavy book readers. Why would they want to help them reduce their book spending?

Last week, Tom Weldon, the CEO of PRH in the UK, issued an emphatic dismissal of the subscription idea. Weldon was speaking with Bookseller editor Philip Jones at the British digital publishing event, Futurebook. And The Bookseller reported it.

Weldon said: “We have two problems with subscription. We are not convinced it is what readers want. ‘Eat everything you can’ isn’t a reader’s mindset. In music or film you might want 10,000 songs or films, but I don’t think you want 10,000 books.”

Weldon also said the company did not “understand the business model”, and who made money. But he acknowledged that subscription could work “in certain markets around the world in emerging economies where access to books and bookshops is extremely limited”.

Nobody has more respect for the intellect and professionalism throughout Penguin Random House than I do, and that certainly includes Tom Weldon, whom I had the opportunity to meet once over a business lunch. But in this case, and assuming (as I do) that Weldon is speaking for his colleagues as well as himself, they seem just about 100 percent wrong. (And, of course, it is obvious that there are people in the home office at Bertelsmann who also don’t agree with him, since they power the German ebook subscription service, Skoobe.)

Weldon is absolutely right that the consumer case for a reading subscription is not as powerful as it is for subscriptions to music or video. Particularly when comparing with music, the point that having access to many thousands of choices all the time is not nearly as valuable for books is totally correct.

But making the leap from that that “it is not what readers want” is a totally unproductive generalization. SOME readers want it, and Oyster, Scribd, and Amazon (as well as 24Symbols, Bookmate, and others) are signing them up. The Oyster and Scribd subscribers will have HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster books to choose from but none from PRH. It won’t take a data scientist to prove that PRH will lose market share among those readers to competitors.

Perhaps Oyster and Scribd will fail. Is PRH essentially predicting that? Is PRH counting on that? Are they assuming that’s what will happen? It would certainly seem from the combination of their non-participation and Weldon’s remarks that they are. (Of course, it is also possible that Harper and S&S also think the subscription services will fail, but they don’t mind getting some revenue for themselves and their authors in the meantime.)

But it is the second objection that is most mystifying. Weldon is saying he doesn’t get the business model, which reinforces the idea that he doesn’t believe in it and expects the big subscription services to fail. But that is not an explanation for why Random House wouldn’t do this themselves. By definition, if a publisher starts a subscription offering for its own books, it is not the same business model as a third party offering it. There is one fewer entity feeding at the same trough. Oyster has to make enough money for themselves and for the publishers and authors whose works they peddle. Random House would only have to make sure their authors were whole, or maybe a little better than whole, and they could keep the rest.

Cutting out the intermediary supply chain, there’s a lot of vig in there for PRH to be able to give consumers a reason to subscribe to a service that provides only PRH books without costing authors a penny.

The joker in the deck, of course, which Oyster and Scribd would only be too glad to point out, is the customer acquisition cost. But even if PRH didn’t want to recruit subscribers for such a service by promoting it on the books themselves — certainly the most efficient and direct way to reach their customers — out of concern for how it would be received by the retailers selling their books, it has all sorts of ways to get the word out about what should be a bargain for many of their readers. Penguin Random House has been building its database for direct customer contact for years. It can reach literally millions of readers virtually free, and in many cases would know the names of their favorite authors which is nice ammo for the subject line of an email to get it opened and read. And it also has millions of page views through author sites, both those PRH controls and those where an author could be recruited to help.

And unlike the other services. PRH wouldn’t have to maintain a whole apparatus to make deals to bring in the content; they’re already doing that! Presuming they could make the right white label deal to manage the subscription service, they wouldn’t really have a “critical mass” issue either. And instead of being on the outside looking in as the extant subscription services sign up readers they could only get access to by putting their books into somebody else’s proprietary platform, they’d be building their own unique distribution that nobody else would have.

And, frankly, a service offering all of Penguin Random House’s books, whether they put in the new ones or not, would deliver a selection at least comparable and perhaps superior to any existing subscription service.

Why they’d simply dismiss this idea is very hard to understand.

Reading tea leaves, I have gotten the impression that PRH is preparing a licensing program to make its content available for use in schools, another very disruptive thing they could do by themselves that could only be effective for their competitors in combination with each other somehow. Maybe my tea leaf reading is wrong; we’ll see if that comes down the pike in the coming months or not. Of course, this kind of subscription licensing is completely different, and they could well believe that the customers do want this and that the business model makes sense.

It has seemed to me for some time that all of the Big Five houses could peddle a subscription service for kids ebooks that would be a reliable generator of cash flow and customer acquisition as well. Many parents would love to be able to let their young kids take the iPad in hand and “buy” books, as long as they weren’t actually spending any money. The big houses all have extensive juvie publishing programs. Each one could offer a subscription service that would keep many kids amused for months. It could be a “totally cool” 6th (or 5th or 8th) birthday present. While it is true that there are others competing for the kids’ market, any of the Big Five could pull something like this together very inexpensively and, over time, build a customer base that would be both proprietary and lucrative.

With the number of ebook subscription services for consumers proliferating, surely the tech to try this out on a smaller scale is getting cheaper and more accessible. In fact, if Weldon is right, and the subscription business model is wrong, then maybe even Oyster or Scribd will want to build a service provision model into their next pivot. And if they succeed, imitators in many ways will follow.

Subscription is here as a tool to sell ebooks that any publisher totally ignores at its peril. And whether it ultimately becomes a significant channel for general trade ebooks or not, it will be tried in many forms and many ebooks will be moved that way in the years to come.

We have a great panel discussion on subscriptions at Digital Book World, Jan 14-15, 2015. It will be moderated by Ted Hill, who co-authored a BISG study on subscriptions earlier in 2014 that is looking increasingly prescient. Ted will have both Oyster and Scribd on the panel along with two publishers providing them with books, Simon & Schuster and Kensington. Kensington, being a non-agency publisher with no choice in the matter, is also a provider to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. The discussion will be prefaced by a quick presentation from Nielsen’s Jonathan Stolper around what Bookscan has learned about the reading patterns in subscription services. This should be a very informative discussion.

The future of books in stores

The future for books in retail stores is not unified; it’s dispersed. To the extent that there continue to be bookstores (and although shelf space in them will continue to decline inexorably, they’ll also be around for years to come), the bookstores will increasingly be more about books for reading and less about books for using. Much of the slack can be picked up by merchants of other things, but there are challenges.

The one piece of good news from Barnes & Noble’s most recent reporting was that their stores are still throwing off cash. We don’t know how much of the margin they’re reporting comes from books as opposed to NOOKs or toys and games. But it is definitely good news that the stores, which publishers still depend heavily on for sales as well as “discovery” are apparently still healthy.

Unfortunately, it would be a surprise if things stayed that way for very long. The share of book sales that are migrating to the Internet keeps growing. Amazon’s print book sales keep going up (more slowly, of course, but everybody else’s are going down) and sales of ebooks keep rising as more and more people get the digital habit. Amazon gets 60% or more of those sales through the Kindle platform.

The term “showrooming” is becoming familiar to people in the book business to describe the retailer’s role in the consumer’s new tendency to use stores to shop but the Internet to buy. Part of what drives this effect is Amazon’s well-earned reputation for heavy discounting — it seems just about every book at Amazon sells for less than the publisher’s suggested retail and most books in stores sell at the price the publisher printed on the book. (It was actually instructive in a recent NY Times piece decrying the reduction of discounting at Amazon to see that even academic books with very limited audiences were being sold at some discount from the publishers’ suggested price.)

With handheld devices that can check Amazon (or any other online) prices now ubiquitous, capitalizing on showrooming isn’t surprising consumer behavior, but it keeps bookstore retailers from “capturing all the value they create” as their own revenue.

Ultimately, illustrated books and the publishers who create them will be the most affected by these changes. There are two important reasons for that. One is that “straight text”, narrative books that are read from beginning to end work just fine as ebooks. That means they’re already cheaper and it is easy for more and more consumers to purchase them this way. (And from the publisher’s perspective, their margin is — at least for the moment — fully replaced when a sale migrates from print to digital.) The other reason is that a novel doesn’t need to be seen or touched to be considered for purchase. Even with the capability to “look” or “search” inside the book, many illustrated book customers really want to examine the printed version to make a buying decision. As there are fewer stores carrying them, that gets harder and harder for the consumer to do.

One of the changes we’re living through is that content as a “pure play” is getting less and less viable at retail. For Amazon, “media” (i.e. content) is no more than 20% of their business. It’s what got them started and it is still very valuable because the content people search for and buy sometimes can provide important clues about what else you can sell them. At least some of Amazon’s success against online media competitors is due to the fact that their base is broader than media.

Selling media alone has become a dinosaur in brick-and-mortar. Stores selling music and renting video have all but disappeared. Retail shelf space for books isn’t ever precisely measured, but what’s available in book-centric stores must be less than half of what it was five years ago, when Borders was still in business and before cutbacks in shelf space that are visible in Barnes & Noble and others. One of the hopes for traditional publishers is that smaller independent stores will pick up some of the slack. But the kind of stores they’re envisioning would probably carry less in the way of illustrated books, particularly illustrated how-to books.

All of this should spell opportunity for other retailers, particularly those who are in “verticals” where there is a lot of publishing: gardening, home repair, and crafts, as examples. Just about every retailer could benefit from a customized selection of books that would both attract and excite their core audience, often stimulating them to buy the other things the store sells.

But doing that is hard because buying books is hard for all retailers to do but it is particularly challenging for non-book retailers. They get foiled by the unique characteristic of the book business that frustrates just about everybody coming into it from the outside: its sheer granularity. A store that wants to carry 100 or 500 SKUs on gardening, home repair, or crafts will most likely need books from several, perhaps dozens, of publishers to have the best selection. And they’d be selecting from 10 or 100 times as many titles as they want to carry. New titles will be issued every week. Each individual title might have a sales potential in any one store of $150 or $250 or $500 at retail, less than any other single item that store has ever carried or thought of carrying.

The biggest publishers of illustrated books in the categories that can benefit from non-book merchants are all quite aware of their importance to their future. If you talk to people at companies like Abrams, Chronicle, Quarto, and Workman — and I have — they will all tell you that “special sales”, the industry term for sales outside the bookstore trade, are critical to their future.

Of course, publishers have been doing special sales for many years, certainly including the five decades that I’ve been involved in the business. They have done it in ways that aren’t necessarily optimal. They’ve forced stores to “buy”: select the titles and quantities and place orders for each shipment they get. That’s an unacknowledged bottleneck. It has also engendered two sales policies which are counterproductive but well-established. Special sales accounts customarily buy from publishers at high discounts (lower costs) than bookstores but, unlike bookstores, don’t get the rights to “return” unsold stock. This has “taught” some publishers that returns aren’t “necessary”; retailers should just mark down what they can’t sell.

And it has taught the retailers to expect unrealistic margins. Of course, those margins are also largely unrealized, because they are buying stock without the right to return and end up marking down a too high (but unknown to the publisher) percentage of what they buy.

Of course, stores that don’t return any other merchandise don’t know anything’s missing in their terms. But, ultimately, it reduces those stores’ ability to experiment and it reduces the publishers’ ability to get stock in place on speculation. They can only sell “sure things”, and even those end up not being sure things.

But that’s not the biggest constraint. The challenges of mastering the mechanics of buying are. Non-book retailers simply don’t have the inventory management systems or the ordering practices that are necessary to manage books, where good practice might be to bring in one copy 20 times over a year to get 20 sales. Why? Because the book might only sell 1 or 2 or 5, and putting in 20 to sell 20 would result in overstocks most of the time.

There is a better way for distribution to work for non-book retailers, and that’s with vendor-managed inventory, relieving the retailer of the need to manage complexity challenges greater than they face in their core business for what amounts to a sideline. So far, we are only aware of one distributor — West Broadway Book Distribution — that offers that capability. (Full disclosure: West Broadway is our client, and we had a lot to do with creating their offer and their system over a decade ago.) WBBD gathers books from many publishers for their retailer clients. That’s also almost always necessary because very few publishers have enough titles in any category to stock a store adequately on their own.

The future of bookstores is challenged. The likelihood is that those that survive will be smaller (or, like today’s B&N, devoting some of their floor space to things other than books). The book-centric retailer will be increasingly inclined to stock “writerly” books rather than “practical” ones. That creates an enormous opportunity for non-book retailers to create a traffic magnet, incremental margin, and a stimulus for their customers to buy their principle lines of merchandise by creating book departments. More of them will, but the challenges of buying will continue to be a constraint in the market.

Vendor-managed inventory: why it is more important than ever

The idea of vendor-managed inventory has never become particularly popular in the book business, despite a few experiments over the years where it was implemented with great success. (And despite the fact that I was pushing for it back in 1997 and 1998.) But as the book business overall declines, with the print book business leading the slide and that portion of the print book business which takes place in retail stores falling off at an alarming rate, it is time for the industry to think about it again.

In fact, VMI for the book business began with the ID wholesalers and mass-market paperbacks right after World War II. The IDs — the initials stood for “independent distributors” — managed the distribution of magazines and newspapers at newsstands and other accounts within their geographical territory. The retailers had no interest in deciding how many copies of LIFE they got in relation to Ladies Home Journal; the ID made that determination. And since only the torn off covers were necessary for confirmation of a “return”, the “bulk” cost of distribution was in putting the copies in, not taking back the overage. And because newspapers and magazines had a disciplined frequency, it was obvious that you had to clear out yesterday’s, or last week’s, or last month’s to make room for the next issue.

When the first mass-market paperback publishers started their activity right after World War II, providing books for, among others, returning servicemen who had access to special servicemen’s editions of paperbacks (in a program created by the polymath Philip Van Doren Stern, a Civil War historian and friend of my father’s) they helped the jobbers along by having monthly lists. They also were comfortable with a book only having a one-month shelf life and having the stripped covers serve as evidence the book hadn’t been sold.

For quite some time, the initial allocations to the ID wholesalers (the local rack jobbers were called “Independent Distributors”) were really determined by the paperback publishers. Eventually, that freedom to put books into distribution choked the system, but there were a lot of other causes of the bloat. By the 1960s, many bookstores were carrying paperbacks and many other big outlets were served “direct” by the publishers, leaving the IDs with the least productive accounts. But VMI, even without any system and very little in the way of restraints on the publishers, was responsible for the explosive growth of mass-market paperbacks in the two decades following World War II.

In the late 1950s, Leonard Shatzkin, my father, introduced The Doubleday Merchandising Plan, which was VMI for bookstores on Doubleday books. For stores that agreed to the plan, reps reported the store’s inventory back to headquarters of Doubleday books rather than sending an order. Then a team posted the inventories, calculated the sales, and followed rules to generate an order of books to the store. Sales mushroomed, particularly of the backlist, and returns and cost of sales plummeted. Doubleday was launched into the top tier of publishing companies.

In a much more modest way, a distributor that my father owned called Two Continents introduced a VMI plan in the 1970s. Even with a very thin list and no cachet, we (I was the Marketing Director) were able to get 500 stores on the Plan in a year. We achieved similarly dramatic results, but from a much more modest base.

Two Continents was undone by the loss of some distribution clients. The Doubleday plan was undermined by reps who convinced headquarters years after my father left that their stores would be more comfortable if they wrote the Plan orders rather than letting them be calculated at headquarters. And the rise of computerized record-keeping systems for inventory and national wholesalers who could replenish stock quickly improved inventory performance, and store profitability, without VMI. Although our client West Broadway Book Distribution has successfully operated VMI in specialty retail for more than a decade, and Random House has worked some version of VMI at Barnes & Noble for the past several years, the technique has hardly been considered by the book trade for a long time.

It is time for that to change. What can foster the change is a recognition about VMI that is readily apparent in West Broadway’s implementations in non-bookstores, but would not have been so obvious to the bookstores using Doubleday’s or Two Continents’ services.

From the publisher’s perspective, the requirement that there be a title-by-title, book-by-book buying function in the store in order for the store to stock books purely and simply reduces the number of stores that can stock books. The removal of that barrier was the key achievement of the ID wholesalers racking paperbacks after World War II. Suddenly there were thousands of points of sale that didn’t require a buyer.

From the store’s perspective, buying — and managing the supply chain to support the buying decisions — is expensive. VERY expensive. Books are hard to buy. New ones are coming all the time; the number of publishers from which they come (and who are the primary sources of information about the books, even if you could “source” them from wholesalers at a slight margin sacrifice for operational simplicity) is huge; the shelf life of any particular title is undeterminable; and the sales in any one outlet are very hard to read.

Consider this data provided by a friend who owns a pretty substantial bookstore.

Looking at the store’s records for a month, 65% of the units sold were singles: one copy of a title. Only 35% were of books that sold 2 or more. (I didn’t ask the question, but that would suggest that 80-90 percent of the titles that sold any copies sold only one.)

Then, the following month, once again 65% of the units sold were singles. But only 20-30 percent of them were the same books as had sold as singles the prior month. Upwards of 70% of them were different titles. And upwards of 70% of the ones that sold one the prior month didn’t sell at all.

To further underscore how slowly book inventory moves, another report they do shows that more than 80% of the titles in the store do not sell a single copy in any particular month. So it is no surprise that an analysis of books from a major publisher that promotes heavily showed that more than half the new titles they receive from that publisher don’t sell a single copy within a month of their arrival in the store, which would include the promotion around publication date!

These data points demonstrate another compelling reason for VMI. When a store sells none of 80% of its titles in a month, and of the ones they do sell 80% of those sell one unit, they clearly need information about what is going on in other stores to know which ones to keep or reorder and which ones to return. Above the Treeline is an inventory service which provides its stores with broader sales data to address that issue, but the information is not as granular or as susceptible to analysis as what a publisher or aggregator could do with VMI.

Partly because of the high cost of buying and a supporting supply chain that a book outlet requires, publishers will see shelf space for books drop faster than retail demand. (The closure of Borders, which wiped out a big portion of the shelf space, is part of what is behind the recent good sales reports from many independents.) At the same time, retailers of all things will be under increased pressure to find more sales as the Internet — often, but not always, Amazon — keeps eating into their market.

This all adds up to VMI to me. We’ll see over the next couple of years whether industry players come to the same conclusion.

Some ideas for publishers that will help bookstores; other suggestions that make us skeptical

This is the fourth of a series of posts on bookstores and their future. The previous posts have covered the challenges of buying (proposing VMI as a possible solution), explored what we should expect for the future of Barnes & Noble, and envisioned what the world of brick-and-mortar book retail might look like in the years to come. I promised previously to review the list of suggestions for publishers to help bookstores recently rounded up by Bookseller editor Philip Jones. He’s written more about this since, but the “original” list from Philip included:

1. Publishers offering books to retailers on consignment. That means the store pays when the book sells rather than on a date based on when it was shipped to them.

2. Publishers offering books to retailers with higher discounts. That means giving stores more margin between the price they pay and the price the publisher “suggests” as the retail price.

3. Bookstores taking advantage of Amazon’s “weaknesses” as an online bookseller. That would apparently be about localized curation as opposed to algorithmically-based suggestions.

4. Bookstores becoming something more (or less, but different) than bookstores. This suggestion may be inspired by B&N’s claim that they are creating new “prototype” stores.

5. Publishers creating special print editions for stores. This was done in Canada by the device of Random House creating Indigo-specific editions for Canada’s biggest bookstore chain.

And since then, in a radio interview, Harper UK MD Victoria Barnsley added a sixth suggestion:

6. That bookshops should charge “admission” to allow browsing (and perhaps credit the admission charge against a book purchase.)

We’re going to dismiss suggestions 3 through 6 pretty quickly. They either don’t scale or don’t help.

The notion that indie stores can beat Amazon at online selling is nothing short of preposterous. What indie stores can do, and should do, is offer an online sales capability to allow the customers they have who want to express their loyalty to do their online shopping with them. And they should do that in the simplest and easiest way possible. To the extent that the store has done curation work (store bestseller lists, recommendations from staff or customers), those should certainly be reflected online. But the notion that a single player can beat an online behemoth at the behemoth’s own game is a delusion and no great effort should be wasted on it.

The idea that bookstores become something other than bookstores, which is how I’d interpret suggestion number 4, is also not really much help. If not a “bookstore”, what, exactly? And if you can’t tell somebody “what, exactly”, then how is this advice anything more than a suggestion to keep throwing stuff at a wall until something sticks? That’s a strategy? Bookstores have already and always been “community gathering centers”. Playing up that piece of it is never a bad idea, but it hardly seems like an original one.

Similarly, the idea that publishers can save stores by offering them “unique” product is not really a solution at all. Yes, Random House (the biggest trade publisher) can do it for Indigo (a dominant retailer that owns the Canadian market). Even if it is adding value for Indigo, and we really don’t know if it is, there are precious few situations in the world where it could be applied.

And the suggestion that stores can save themselves by charging admission is one that can be very rapidly be disproven by any store that cares to try. It actually strikes me as a very good Candid Camera sequence. Put a toll booth at the front door of a retail store (any retail store, but a bookstore will do) and record the reaction of customers when they encounter something that makes absolutely no sense to them. I suspect wild enthusiasm for the idea will be rare.

However, the first two suggestions — to provide the stores inventory with more time to pay (consignment or extended payment terms) or more margin to work with — are worthy of more analysis and thought.

For publishers to consider easing the financial burden for bookstores based on their importance as a marketing component of the supply chain is a reasonable idea. But neither expanding retail discounts nor applying consignment is without complications.

Expanding margin needs to be done carefully, so that the margin expansion accomplishes the purpose that publishers seek: to increase the display of books in retail stores. Simply increasing discount is a difficult way to do that. What needs to be applied is an expansion of an existing principle.

In the book business, “coop” is the heading under which publishers purchase display for their books in prime locations. Coop was originally used for publishers to purchase space for their titles within a local bookstore’s newspaper ads. (Sometimes that “local bookstore” was a branch or group of branches of a chain.) But recently it has been applied to getting prime display locations, often near the cash register, as part of a promtion. The convention is for the payment for the space to be calculated as a percentage of a “supporting order”. This process imitates what happens in other classes of trade and is referred to outside the book business as RDA (retail display allowance) or MDF (marketing development funds). Another application of the same idea is for publishers to pay for “pockets” (sometimes called “slotting fees”). Under an arrangement like that a non-book retailer (like Michael’s, the craft store chain) can get an additional subsidy over and above what the discount schedule calls for on every title they carry.

But what we may be learning is that every book in a bookstore, or perhaps any retail location, has its discovery enhanced, not just the ones on promotional tables. So perhaps a publisher (followed by others, in time) might consider extending the idea to pay a “shelving fee” for every book in a “qualifying” bookstore. Consider a little math.

Let’s imagine a store that does $2 million in annual sales. If their average discount is 40% (which is a reasonable number; discount schedules would say it is higher than that, but it is reduced by freight costs, including for returns), the value of the inventory to make those sales is $1.2 million at cost. If they turn their stock three times a year, the average cost value of the inventory in the store is one-third of the total, or $400,000.

The two million in annual sales means shifting about 133,000 books (if the average retail price of the books is $15), and the average inventory is about 45,000 books. If publishers paid ten cents per book per month to be shelved, that would deliver an additional $4500 a month — $54,000 a year — to the store. If publishers paid 25 cents per book per month to be shelved, the store would get an additonal $135,000. Since a bookstore would be doing quite well to earn 10% on its sales, our notional $2 million store would be happy to earn $200,000 in profits now so, in either case, the “shelving fee” would be adding a meaningful increment. Certainly, for some stores it could make the difference between staying open or closing down. For others, it would encourage a bigger book inventory. In either case, that’s what publishers want to accomplish.

Publishers could, if they chose, make the “shelving fee” applicable whether the store bought the book directly from them or from a wholesaler. It actually makes it less tricky to apply if the wholesaler-supplied books are included. Invoicing now is done when publishers ship books, not when they arrive at the store so the time lag in between works in the publishers’ favor. For a “shelving fee”, publishers wouldn’t want to pay for time the book is not on the shelf: while it is in transit, or in a box waiting to be unpacked, or in a stockroom unavailable to a browsing customer.

In order to collect “shelving fees”, a store would have to deliver much more robust data than they now have to publishers about stocking and selling. But modern technology can make doing that not terribly difficult (systems don’t routinely do it now, but they surely could) and, in fact, stores should want to know about the efficiency of their shelving practices for their own reasons. And doing things this way would put publishers and stores on the same side around returns, because both would have good reason to get books that can’t sell off the shelves (and replace them with ones that have better odds).

Increasing the margin as a reward for a brick-and-mortar store being open and stocking books is doable and it is doable without cutting the wholesalers out of the picture. Consignment is definitely more complicated. And perhaps less helpful.

Sometimes the sale-and-return convention that has prevailed for nearly a century in the US book business is thought of as equivalent to consignment, but it isn’t. Although bookstores sometimes use returns as a tool to diminish the payments they have to make to publishers, they also “own” (and, in many cases, have paid for) a lot of books on their shelves at any particular time. And a non-trivial side effect of sale-and-return is that “shrinkage”, books that don’t sell but for whatever other reason may disappear from a store, are very much the store’s problem, not the publisher’s.

Under consignment, the payment from stores to publishers would be based on what passed through the cash register, not what was shipped from the publisher’s (or wholesaler’s) warehouse. “Shrinkage” would only be detected if a publisher called for a return of a book it had previously shipped and the store was unable to send it. Since even with the best of intentions, a store wouldn’t necessarily know a book was missing and certainly couldn’t pull a missing book for a return, the payments for those books would, at the very least, have to wait until some inventory check or returns protocol was invoked and discovered it.

The big question in consignment is when and how often a store pays. I recall having a discussion about consignment with a very large book retailer ten years ago. The top person there was thinking in terms of paying publishers every six months or so. It is safe to assume that no publisher would be excited about offering consignment on that basis. Allowing a store to “pay on sale” is one thing; allowing them to pay six months after sale is much more costly to the publisher.

For consignment to be workable, payments would have to be no less frequent than monthly, and would have to cover sales pretty much up to the moment of payment. What might make sense, for example, would be payments on the 5th of the month for sales made through the end of the preceeding month. That would be 35 days after sale for some books, 5 days after sale for others, and an average of about 15-20 days after sale. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for a publisher offering consignment to want payment more often than that, perhaps even as often as weekly.

The challenges of turning consignment into a workable commercial practice in our business include establishing a payment timing that makes sense and some method to catch shrinkage.

But the next problem is that the process of ordering would probably have to change. It is sometimes said that stores are now too easily tempted to over-order because, after all, they can return whatever they don’t sell. Imagine how much less restraint there would be on over-ordering if the store could hold books cost-free for as long as it took for them to sell! (There could still be the cost of freight in and out to discourage over-ordering, but that exists now.) Unlike the “shelving fee” concept, consignment puts the publisher and store in conflict around slow-moving inventory.

Let’s also take note of the fact that consignment is not all about paying later; sometimes consignment would require paying earlier. Bookstores get a boost when a bestseller comes in and flies off the shelves for the first week or two it is out. The revenue on those books is kept by the stores for 45 or 60 or 75 or 90 days (depending on how publishers enforce their collections) before they have to pay the publisher. Under a consignment arrangement, they’d have to turn over the publishers’ share much faster. (Of course, at the same time, they wouldn’t have to pay for some slower-moving books that might have come in the same shipment but hadn’t sold yet.)

There are other complications to consignment. The way things work now, publishers carry books in their warehouse on their balance sheet at inventory “cost” (something like manufacturing cost). When they sell them, they book the amount they sell to the store for, and keep some “reserve” for potential returns. On the store’s balance sheet, the books sit at the price the store paid, or will pay, the publisher for them.

But if the books are shipped to the stores on consignment, there has been no sale. So the publisher would have to continue to carry those consigned books on their balance sheet at the manufacturing cost and not credit themselves with the sale until the store reported it and paid them. What this would do to public reporting and bank covenants is a company-by-company proposition, and perhaps a knotty problem in some cases.

And sometimes there are state or local taxes based on “inventory”. IANAL (“I am not a lawyer”) but the taxing authority probably expects payment from the entity that ownsthe inventory. Under sale-and-returns, stores “own” it (whether or not they’ve paid the bill). Under consignment, the publisher certainly owns it. That would create complications, at the very least. Complications could also arise over insurance. (If a store had a flood or fire, would consigned inventory be covered by a store’s insurance?)

The bottom line is that publishers can help stores most by helping them carry their inventory less expensively and there are a great variety of ways to do that. The simplest way of all, of course, is just to extend the payment time from the current (as it often enforced) 60 days to something more. Thirty-five years ago, my father had me administer a program called “credit for overstock” where we gave stores 180-days extended billing for books left unsold after Christmas if they’d delay returning them. (Simple to do: issue a credit for what’s there dated today and an invoice for the same stock dated six months from now).

We’ve heard through the grapevine that at least one of the Big Six is experimenting with 180-day terms and that another might be a fast follower. That strategy is apparently offering competitive advantage (stores stock more of that publisher’s books, so they sell more of them too). That’s a way for a publisher to give benefits that are “like consignment” without the complications. From my perspective, it’s a shotgun, not a rifle, because it extends terms for everything equally. Credit-for-overstock targeted books that would very likely have been returned. The old “dated billing” plans targeted particular titles at particular times of year. Consignment requires that books that sell fast be paid for fast. A big across-the-board increase in time to pay is a far less targeted tool, but it still constitutes a big step in the right direction.

That’s because books on bookstore shelves are more valuable to publishers than books in their warehouse. Increasing recognition of that fact is occurring; more actions will certainly follow.

Worth mentioning — and inadvertently neglected by me in the VMI post — is that VMI does not need to be, and should not be, at odds with bookseller-management of curation. A publisher can certainly manage lists of titles that are designated “do not stock” or “always have on hand” that are designated by the store. The point to VMI is not to take tastemaking power away from the store. Of course a store should be able to exclude books they find offensive or that they think their customers will find offensive. And their decisions about categories or authors to stock out of proportion to how well they sell — higher or lower — can also be accommodated. And so can their inputs about local promotions that a publishers’ central office would have no way to know about. VMI offers two enormous benefits in any case. One is that the publisher knows things about individual book promotions, and recent performance, that might not be factored into each store’s calculations. And the other is that most stocking decisions are routine and  best made — particularly in the age when we’re discovering Big Data — by a system massaging the maximum amount of information.


text:
T-Mobile confirms: we will start selling Apple products in 2013

By , Dec 6, 2012

This is interesting. Even though it claimed it couldn’t afford the iPhone due to Apple’s stringent terms of business and the billions required in upfront subsidy, Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile USA, the nation’s fourth-largest, has confirmed an agreement to start carrying some mobile products from Apple beginning with next year.

Though the carrier did not specifically confirm the long-expected iPhone distribution agreement, this development is the best indication yet that T-Mobile USA stands poised to finally land the iconic Apple smartphone and tablet on its network in 2013…

Writing for AllThingsD, Ina Fried points us to a press release with Deutsche Telekom’s Rene Obermann announcing the Apple/T-Mobile partnership made to analysts earlier today.

“T-Mobile USA has entered into an agreement with Apple to bring products to market together next year,” Deutsche Telekom said in a press statement on Thursday.

A spokesperson additionally told The Loop that “additional details will be made available at a later date”.

T-Mobile USA offers some nice and free support to unlockers, it sells Nano SIMs and already hosts about 1.5 million unlocked iPhones. Additionally, the carrier’s been rolling out its iPhone-friendly HSPA+ network to more and more places in the United States.

Upgrading its towers to the 1900 MHz GSM band, the same radio frequency used by AT&T and compatible with existing iPhone models, benefits owners of unlocked iPhones who can at last enjoy 3G/4G download speeds on the T-Mobile network.

And as T-Mobile transitions to an iPhone-friendly service and begins a nationwide transition to LTE following last year’s failed acquisition by AT&T, only now does an Apple partnership make sense as the T-Mobile network is becoming fully compatible with Apple’s 3G/4G mobile devices.

Analyst were previously calling for a deal with Apple in 2013, with Merrill Lynch’s Scott Craig warning recently that “speculation is heightening” around Deutsche Telecom announcing the iPhone deal this week.

Is a T-Mobile iPhone really gonna become a reality in 2013?

And, can it change market dynamics concerning Android?

  • Share:
  • Follow:
  • ic0dex

    IMO once T-Mobile improves their coverage Sprint will become the 4th largest network in the US.

    • Falk M.

      Spot on, also keep in mind that if T-Mobile gets enough relevance in the US market, I’m sure Deutsche Telekom will be confident enough to invest big time into them and make them go for way more.
      T-Mobile USA has once lost all hope of DTAG, but I’m sure that when they start fixing their spotty coverage a bit more and go stronger, there will be heaps of investments.

      Me as a Telekom subscriber here in Germany I can only hope that this might lead to better deals for me, too when roaming/calling abroad/etc.

  • http://twitter.com/digitalfeind Dani Hayes

    It’s about time. So long AT&T.

    • http://www.facebook.com/joe.jonsen Joe Jonsen

      not so fast….lol now that tmo has the iPhone and demand for their service increases they start raising plan rates ..lolo

      • Falk M.

        You must have missed the most recent news.
        Also, I think TMo knows their position in the US market, so they won’t get too crazy.
        They just lost half a million subscribers and I’m sure they are dying to get them back and steal some more from other carriers.

        If they are smart they also try to work out a deal with Google to sell the Nexus 4, too and advertise that it’s compatible with T-Mobile LTE as opposed to any other US network.
        They could have a field day running advertisements on that.

  • http://www.facebook.com/andrew.canavera Andrew Canavera

    Finally, I’ve been a loyal T-Mobile customer for years now, I’ve been waiting for this since 2007.

  • http://www.facebook.com/joe.jonsen Joe Jonsen

  • http://www.andrewcassone.tk/ NY Andrew

    Virgin Mobile FTW!


text:
Office of Health Protection

LOCATION: 525 W. Jefferson St., 2nd Floor, Springfield, IL 62761-0001
DEPUTY DIRECTOR: David W. Culp, Ph.D., 217-782-3984; fax 217-524-0802;
email: David.Culp@illinois.gov

The Office of Health Protection administers programs to prevent and control infectious and communicable diseases, to reduce and eliminate exposure to environmental hazards and to ensure a safe, wholesome and nutritious food supply. Among the major responsibilities are efforts to reduce the spread of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) through education, surveillance, partner notification, counseling and testing; to immunize children against vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles, mumps and pertussis; to reduce the incidence of disease and injury related to environmental factors; to prevent contamination of food and drugs; to prevent and control outbreaks of illnesses, such as salmonellosis, E. coli 0157:H7, meningococcal disease and hepatitis; and to provide clinical and environmental laboratory testing services to support the broad spectrum of IDPH programs. Other areas of responsibility are --

  • asbestos -- school inspection, abatement and control; licensing of inspectors, abatement contractors and workers
  • bathing beaches, swimming pools, campgrounds, migrant labor camps, mobile home parks, and youth camps -- construction permits, licensure and inspection
  • food safety and restaurant inspections
  • generic drugs -- providing information to prescribers and pharmacists on more than 4,200 equivalent generic drugs
  • insect and animal nuisances, such as bats, rodents, birds, fleas, flies, mosquitoes and ticks, which can transmit diseases to humans
  • lead inspectors, contractors and workers licensure and lead paint abatement
  • manufactured housing inspection
  • milk processing plants and dairy farms inspections
  • plumber licensure and inspection of new, remodeled and existing plumbing systems
  • rabies control
  • sexually transmitted diseases control
  • structural pest control companies licensure and pesticide worker certification
  • tanning facilities licensure and inspection
  • tuberculosis prevention, control, investigation and treatment
  • water well construction and private sewage disposal systems, such as septic tanks, permits and inspection; and licensure of installers

Communicable Disease Section

Division of Environmental Health

Division of Food, Drugs and Dairies

Division of Infectious Diseases

Division of Laboratories

HIV/AIDS Section

Immunization Section

Plumbing Program

Sexually Transmitted Diseases Section

State Epidemiologist

Tuberculosis Section

idph online home
about the department home

Illinois Department of Public Health
535 West Jefferson Street
Springfield, Illinois 62761
Phone 217-782-4977
Fax 217-782-3987
TTY 800-547-0466
Questions or Comments


text:
Photo of Neil McCulloch

Neil McCulloch - Research Fellow

T: +44 (0)1273 915845

Stacey Townsend

Neil McCulloch is an economist specialising in the analysis of poverty in developing countries and the linkages between poverty and both global and local economic reform.

Dr McCulloch currently works on the political economy of private investment in Vietnam and Indonesia. He has led research on the Rural Investment Climate in Indonesia and has worked on the relationship between growth and poverty reduction in that country.

In addition, he has written a systematic review of the evidence on financial transaction taxes, and has co-written a book 'Trade Liberalisation and Poverty: A Handbook' for the UK DFID which provides a comprehensive analysis of the evidence linking trade liberalisation and poverty and guidelines for how policymakers can ensure that policies of economic integration are pro-poor.

Dr McCulloch has published academic papers on the causes of movements into and out of poverty and the effectiveness of different anti-poverty policies using data from China, Pakistan and Zambia. He also has experience of working as a long-term advisor within a developing country government and managing capacity building projects in that context. He also has considerable experience of teaching and training and the management of research activities.

The current financial crisis has stirred up an old debate about whether it might make sense to impose a Tobin Tax, either on foreign exchange transactions or on all financial transactions.

More details

This project examines a key assumption which underlies one of the main approaches to poverty reduction currently advocated and practised by many international development agencies.

More details

An examination of whether or not exporters in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing a decline in trade credit.

More details

This project used a global trade model to gauge the impact of a slowdown in economic activity in the OECD on trade performance, world prices and aggregate welfare in the rest of the world.

More details

IDS has already conducted a qualitative analysis of the social impact of the crisis in five countries. This research project aims to use the results from a new round of qualitative research to inform detailed quantitative analysis of existing nationally representative quantitative surveys in two countries.

More details

Search and filter for all the author's publications by journal, research theme, country and much more.

Does Better Provincial Governance Boost Private Investment in Vietnam?

IDS Working Paper 414 (2013)

A large literature asserts a causal relationship between the quality of economic governance and economic performance. However, attempts to establish such a link at an aggregate level have met with considerable methodological criticism. More details

This is the image for IDS Research Report 76, 'Who Drives Economic Reform in Vietnam’s Provinces?'.

Who Drives Economic Reform in Vietnam’s Provinces?

IDS Research Report 76 (2012)

Vietnam keeps surprising the world with the speed and depth of its economic transformation. This research report suggests that the decentralisation of certain economic powers from central to provincial government has contributed to this success. More details

This is the image of Does Better Local Governance Improve District Growth Performance in Indonesia.

Does Better Local Governance Improve District Growth Performance in Indonesia

IDS Working Paper 369 (2011)

A large literature suggests that countries with better governance have higher growth rates. We explore whether this is also true at the sub-national level in Indonesia. More details

IDS Research Report

The Tobin Tax: A Review of the Evidence

IDS Research Report 68 (2011)

The debate about the Tobin tax, and other financial transaction taxes (FTTs), gives rise to strong views both for and against. Unfortunately, little of the popular debate refers to the now considerable body of evidence about the impact of such taxes. More details

IDS Research Summary

The Tobin Tax: A Review of the Evidence

IDS Research Summary of IDS Research Report 68 (2011)

The Tobin tax, a small levy on foreign exchange transactions, should theoretically discourage speculation and thereby stabilise markets. More details

Thematic Expertise:
Economic Growth; Financial Crisis; Trade and Growth; Poverty; Work and Labour.

Geographic Expertise:
China; Indonesia; Pakistan; Viet Nam; Zambia.


text:
Bank capital regulation should be dropped

The Telegraph reports on IEA research

The Institute of Economic Affairs, in a report published on Tuesday, said banks should be allowed to decide themselves how much capital they need to hold instead of being told by regulators.

The IEA said the whole system of capital regulation should be dropped and attention focused on making it easier for banks to fail.

“Once they are forced by the possibility of failure to take responsibility for their actions, banks are best placed to judge their own capital requirements,” said the IEA.

The IEA said the idea of regulators determining how much capital banks needed was flawed and recommended a return to 19th century banking model whereby lenders would be free to determine their capital levels for themselves.

“We would go back to the years of banks choosing their own capital ratios: the system which produced stability in British banking for more than a century. It will be a system where there is stability not stasis,” said the IEA.

Read the full article here.

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text:
New study to examine health impact of Alberta oilsands

By Marty Klinkenberg, Edmonton Journal

Fort ChipewyanPhotograph by: Ryan Jackson, file , Edmonton Journal

Fort Chipewyan
Photograph by: Ryan Jackson, file , Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON – An independent study will soon be launched into the health effects of the oilsands on nearby communities.

Partially funded by the provincial and federal governments, the study will be overseen by University of Calgary sociology professor Cora Voyageur and will re-examine cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan, a native community about 220 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.

Links to other health issues, including autism, will also be explored as researchers try to determine if contaminants from industrial developments are causing illnesses in residents of Fort Chipewyan and Fort MacKay, the native community closest to operations in the oilsands.

A study conducted in 2009 by the Alberta Cancer Board found higher-than-expected rates of rare cancers in Fort Chipewyan, but no research to date has directly connected pollution from the oilsands to incidence of disease.

The 2009 report recommended further analysis to determine possible causes, but until recently, government and two native bands — the Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikesew Cree First Nations — were unable to agree on terms of reference for a comprehensive health study. At this point, it is hoped that research can begin as early as spring after memorandums of understanding are signed.

Links between development in the oilsands and contaminants, including cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, were revealed last month in studies released by the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Wood Buffalo Environmental Association. The study published in the U.S. found traces of hydrocarbons in the sediment of lake bottoms downwind of oilsands operations, but did not include any sampling done as far north as Fort Chipewyan, however.

“My way of thinking, especially in light of these recent studies, is that we need a very strong independent public health voice on this issue,” said Dr. John O’Connor, who became embroiled in controversy in 2003 and 2004 after he reported elevated cancer rates in patients in Fort Chipewyan. “From a public health standpoint, it should have happened a long time ago.”

The province conducted a statistical analysis of cancer cases in Fort Chipewyan and found no evidence rates were higher in the region or the rest of Alberta. That led to O’Connor being accused of causing “undue alarm” by Alberta’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, a charge of which he was later exonerated.

On Tuesday, provincial health officials said they were committed to supporting Fort Chipewyan and Fort MacKay in their efforts to assess the health of their communities.

“We are making progress and are moving forward with the community health assessments,” said Howard May, a spokesman for Alberta’s Health Department. “We are supporting the communities in doing what we all agree is necessary — an overall assessment that will inform future steps.”

Eriel Deranger, communications co-ordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, is happy the study is about to commence, but disappointed it has taken so long. The 2006 study done by the province was flawed, Deranger said, because it included only patients that lived within Fort Chipewyan’s postal code.

Once diagnosed, members of the native band often move to Fort McMurray and Edmonton for treatment, and those that did were excluded from the study.

“The numbers got skewed because the data was poorly done,” Deranger said. “The report was mainly done simply to placate residents. Now it looks like government finally has got its act together.”

O’Connor said it is critical that the study take a comprehensive look at the issue.

Travis Davies, a spokesman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said industry is glad to see the study begin.

“Industry has long publicly supported more scientific study on potential health concerns in the oilsands region, as we have consistently supported more objective science-based reporting and monitoring on all oilsands environmental issues,” Davies said in an email.

“As an industry, we welcome science. We believe what’s needed is more solid data to build confidence among Canadians that this resource is being developed responsibly and safely.”

O’Connor said he hopes the study thoroughly addresses issues that he first brought to light a decade ago.

“The fact that something is happening is good, but what is actually happening I’m not sure,” said O’Connor, who now treats patients in Fort MacKay and at the Northern Lights Regional Hospital in Fort McMurray. “At the end of the day, it better be credible and of the transparency that nobody will doubt it.

“An urgent study is needed.”

mklinkenberg martykej

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal


text:
Bill on state control of broadcast media being debated

(IPI/IFEX) - IPI is very concerned about the serious threat to freedom
expression and opinion in Russia posed by the passing of a bill which
tighten state control over the country's broadcast media by creating a
television and radio watchdog.

On 17 March 1999, the upper chamber of the Federal Assembly, the
Council, approved the bill by 115 votes, with seven against and two
abstentions. The bill, which had been already passed by the lower
State Duma on 10 March, must now go to the President for signing into

The law "On the Supreme Council for the Protection of Moral Standards in
Television and Radio Broadcasting in the Russian Federation" would
create a
high council comprising of twelve members - three each nominated by the
President, the Government and the two parliamentary chambers - to
moral standards in broadcasting and television. The council would be
empowered to take "appropriate measures" against any television or radio
station broadcasting a programme "liable to enflame social, racial,
national, religious hatred, enmity or superiority, or advocating war,
violence or cruelty."

IPI understands that although the law would not let the new council ban
broadcast of reports or force media companies to co-ordinate with it,
council would be able to issue reprimands and impose fines for
material that does not meet "acceptable" moral standards.

IPI believes that the bill seeks a return to censorship and the
control of the media, and could be used to suppress legitimate news and
opinion, in particular during the campaigns for the parliamentary and
presidential elections scheduled for the end of this year and in

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  • 600m from slopes
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Iris A (CH3954.190.3)

Comfortable apartment block "Iris A", 4 storeys, built in 2008. In the resort, in a central, sunny, elevated position, located by a road. In the complex: sauna, fitness room, steam room, whirlpool, lift, central heating system, washing machine, tumble dryer (for shared use, extra). Communal covered parking. Shop 400 m, restaurant 200 m, bar, café, thermal baths 400 m. Skisport facilities 600 m, ski bus stop 150 m, ice field 1 km. Between the Iris-houses, there is a fitness and wellness Chalet for share use for all occupants. Spa with Finnish sauna, aroma steam bath, single whirlpool. 3-room apartment 96 m2 on 2nd floor, comfortable and tasteful furnishings: living/dining room with open-hearth fireplace, cable TV, CD-player and DVD. Exit to the balcony, south facing position and west facing position. 1 double bedroom with 1 double bed and shower/WC. 1 room with 3 beds and shower/WC. Open kitchen (oven, dishwasher, 4 ceramic glass hob hotplates, microwave). Sep. WC. Terrace furniture. Very beautiful view of the mountains and the resort. Facilities: children's high chair. Internet (WiFi, free). Reserved parking (roofed). Please note: non-smokers only.

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Arc the Lad Online to US

Namco set to publish Sony's RPG sequel. New images and videos inside.

As a special treat for our readers, Namco has revealed exclusively to IGN today an announcement that will be released worldwide tomorrow morning: that the company plans to publish the online role-player Arc the Lad Generation for American PlayStation 2's this coming May.

Developed by Cattle Call (the same team that programmed the last game), the newly-renamed Arc the Lad: End of Darkness picks up five years after the events of Twilight of the Spirits and gives players control of a new character named Edda. A man who is completely bored by his serene island existence, Edda's life is radically changed the day he meets an attractive but rude young woman known as Kirika who he suspects is involved in the death of his friend. A talented exorcist and burgeoning badass in his own right, Edda assumes his slain friend's old job as a hunter and sets out to save the world in a battle of civilization against nature.

In addition to the brand new characters Edda and Kirika, more than two dozen other personalities from the previous titles make appearances as well (Arc, Kharg, and Elc among them). Gamers will also be able to take advantage of the first real-time battle system in the franchise's history -- which moves beyond the pseudo turn-based setup of Twilight of the Spirits -- and take part in the biggest addition to the series: online play.

Speaking of which, the online portion of Arc the Lad enables up to eight players at once the ability to participate in PvP versus competitions (four people per team) and the option to explore their environments with a four-person co-op mode. Exclusive scenarios that are only available online have been included too, and an improved upgrade and guild system rounds out the U.S. package.

"We are excited to be able to bring the long-running Arc the Lad series back to game fans in this newest installment," said Jeff Lujan, Business Director at Namco Hometek. "With new features such as real-time action and the return of original characters from the series, this next episode is sure to be a hit with RPG fans everywhere."

Click for More Images

To check out Arc the Lad: End of Darkness for yourself, just visit our media page for brand new screenshots and movies provided by the Namco publishing team itself. Of course, we'll be back with even more in the coming weeks but invite you to check out Anoop's Hands-On Impressions of the Japanese version in the meantime. See you again, soon.

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Minecraft Classic

Release Date: May 17, 2009

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Published by: Mojang
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Genre: First-Person Action
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About This Game

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Greetings Starfighter, you have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Zur and the Kodan armada!

Starfighter is the arcade cabinet used by Star League to find recruits for the real intergalactic battle taking place amongst the stars in the film The Last Starfighter. The prop game used in the film was not designed to act a real game and was never released; thanks to fan dedication based on specifications from the film, however, working replicas have since been created.

Genre: Shooter
Developer: Vaporware

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F-Zero: Maximum Velocity

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Release Date: December 16, 2011

Ancient Mesa 1

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Knight Series

4. Ancient Mesa

Split Circuit

The first series of curves on Ancient Mare are a cinch. You know the drill -- skid and stabilize. But the next portion of the track needs some explaining. As you hit the western straight, the track widens and leads to four Dash Plates and a fork in the road (A). It's up to you which way to go, but let's pick the right branch to make things easier. Since the track is covered with ice, you need to tap the accelerator a lot if you don't want to lose control. Head for the very right Dash Plate, hit it and follow the right branch of the course. Tap the accelerator rapidly as you're making a sharp left turn. If you don't tap fast enough, you will skid into the guardrail. Two Dash Plates await right around the corner. Once again, hit the right one. As you boost forward, start turning to the right (but don't tap A). You will hit a long Dash Plate head-on (B). The moment you hit it, tap A repeatedly while turning right to stabilize yourself and turn the ship into the right direction. The force of the boost will knock you 90-degrees around the corner without losing time. Alternatively, you can be a wuss and brake while turning right without hitting the Dash Plate.

The ice patch ends and parts of the regular track are exposed. Maneuver through the next series of turns by sticking to the regular track portions. The road widens and you are heading right for a blue ramp (C). If you have a boost to spare (or a ship with very high top speed, such as Silver Thunder or The Stingray), now is the time to pull off a flashy little shortcut. Hit the jump, then quickly turn to the left. You can bypass the whole icy corner by cutting across to the solid road. Push down when you're ready to land. Even the slower cars can bypass at least a small portion of the curve. Instead of jumping straight across the gap, cut across diagonally and land right before the final turn. The below illustration shows the two different jumps. The red one is the more difficult boost shortcut.

The final stretch following this curve lets you replenish your battered shields. If you're playing it safe, this is the place to utilize your ship's turbo every round.

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Missions: Print Works

Edit Page    Last Edit: 2 years 9 months ago

Missions: Print Works

Spilling the Beans

Once you buy the Printworks, you'll immediately get into the business of dirty money. As in counterfeit money. The old printer tells you there's already a good set of plates around... you just have to get them.

Use the Kaufman Cab in this mission to get to your destination. The first one is the Malibu Club. Step into the pink marker in front of the club to chat with Kent Paul. He'll tell you the Triads are the ones who supply the plates, and tells you where to find them. Jack a ride and load up on weapons and Body Armor.

Once you're loaded up, get to the docks. As soon as you board the boat, you're going to get lit up, so be careful. Approach the docked ship and move up the extended gangplank nearest the pink dot. This will alert those on board to your presence. Don't go in like Rambo, though. Stay at the bottom of the ramp. As they run down to get you, pick them off with your weapon of choice (we recommend the Shotgun).When it seems no one is left to attack, move carefully up the ramp. Keep on the lookout for more men, and pick them up with the powerful Uzis you collect. The information you need is on the second floor from the top. Step on the pink marker to grab it.

When you do, your wanted level will go to two stars. This isn't too tough to deal with. Just run back to whatever car you brought and outrun the cops back to the Printworks. Or, if you're feeling sheepish, tuck into the nearby Pay N' Spray to wipe your record clean. You'll get $2000 for completing this assignment.

Hit the Courier

The second part of your job here requires you to intercept the counterfeiting plates from the woman arriving with them at the docks. Get in your ride and get over there fast! The pink dot on the map reperesents the courier's destination. The yellow blip is the courier.

Park just outside the area where the meeting will occur, then get out. Use a Sniper Rifle or Uzi to take out the female bodyguards sprinkled around the compound. Then target the wheels of the black getaway sedan. If you can cripple the vehicle, chasing down the villain will be that much easier.

Once the courier gets in the car, do the standard thing: ram her and use drive-by tactics to hose her car down. Once it starts to catch on fire... get away! But go back to collect the plates she drops. Once you have them, cruise back to the Printworks. Once the asset is complete, the Printworks will generate up to $8000 a day. Not too shabby. Guess funny money pays off after all!

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Release Date: March 11, 2014

Vortex Shield

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The Vortex Shield is one of the Tactical Abilities that can be chosen in the Titan Loadout at Level 10. This ability creates a shield in front of the titan for a few seconds, grabbing any projectiles fire from the enemy and fires them back. It's best used immediately after an enemy fires slow-moving rockets.

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Relevant Revisiting: BioShock 2

Posted By: In: Reviews, Xbox 360 On: 15 Feb

Relevant Revisiting: BioShock 2

Since BioShock Infinite still isn’t out yet, and I have almost zero faith in the possibility that the March 26 release date will actually hold up (please prove me wrong, Irrational), I figured it might be a nice time to step away from Ni No Kuni’s post-game monster hunting and revisit an old favorite of this generation. So, just in case there’s one person around these parts who hasn’t played BioShock 2 yet, here’s my review upon revisiting the game several years after release.

The world of Rapture is a fascinating place. Particularly for me, the idea of an underwater city just seems like a fantastic setting: One which I believe peaks the natural curiosities within the average person’s mind. I mean just think about it, wouldn’t it be awesome to live underwater? Or what about colonizing out in space? These ideas are far from new, but the original BioShock did an outstanding job of making these imaginings realistically presentable. Now that the sequel has been released, I find myself torn between wanting to give in to all the hype surrounding the game as well as taking a step back and trying to make my expectations more feasible. While the second installment makes noticeable improvements, it still falls short of being the story-driven epic it has the potential to be. What makes the sequel a must-have for fans and newcomers alike? Well, it’s time to put on your Big Daddy and Little Sister replica wetsuits and find out.

BioShock 2 starts off with a bang, literally. While I’ll refrain from any major plot spoilers, it’s far from being a secret that the sequel allows players to become the original games most feared resident of Rapture, the Big Daddy. These monstrous behemoths walk around Rapture protecting their “Little Sisters” from harm, equipped with powerful guns and a drill attached to one arm, should anyone be dumb enough to get up close and personal. Their awesome power left players of the original game quaking in the fetal position, so what must it feel like to finally have the power and ferocity that comes with your Big Daddy boots? Underwhelming, that’s what. The first thing I wanted to do as a Big Daddy was run up to some pesky little splicer and shove my drill through his face. (Umm… wow, there’s really no better way to phrase that, is there? Oh well.) It’s too bad that four or five pistol shots are enough for any splicer to bring you to your knees. I realize that making your Big Daddy invincible would, you know, be kind of game breaking; yet at the same time, what’s the point of having this awesome power if every small encounter could result in game over?

Or, in this case, Family Game Night over...

Or, in this case, Family Game Night over…

The answer: Balance.  Now I’m willing to give credit where credit is due, and if I had to choose one word to describe the gameplay of BioShock 2, I would call it balanced. It will always have an element of survival horror to it, that’s just the nature of the beast, and I’m willing to accept limited ammo capacities and health that doesn’t regenerate so long as I’m given proper reason to believe I will eventually be able to feel like a capable hero; which is exactly the feeling BioShock 2 allows you to have should you desire to press further through the story. As you progress through the beautifully detailed locations, learning plenty of rich narrative points along the way, there are plenty of weapon upgrade stations; not to mention the awesome new toys you’re given as a Big Daddy, such as the portable mini-turret. Once you gather up enough Adam and find a handful of upgrade stations, your Big Daddy really does transform into the powerhouse you always wanted him to be. Which brings me to combat.

Not much has changed in the way you approach combat. You’ll still want to mix up a variety of status effect plasmids, either using ice abilities to stop enemies in their tracks or using fire to light up oil puddles as a way of effectively clearing out a room. What has changed is the tools with which you can wreak havoc upon the nonsense-spewing splicers and still-menacing rival Big Daddies that are on the hunt for lost Little Sisters.  Some of the new weapons and plasmids BioShock 2 introduces add a welcome layer of strategic depth to the gameplay. Not really feeling that room full of splicers? Roll out a mini turret and use a plasmid to summon a Bot, then watch as your mechanical minions do battle for you. Like getting in the way of true love? Well then, you little devil you, whip out your spear gun (wow, I don’t even… I apologize, folks. I’m not doing it on purpose) and shoot the female splicer just as the male splicer is trying to make his move. There are about a million and one ways (editor’s note: not an actual statistic) to combat enemies this time around, and every one of them feels fresh and engaging thanks to an upgrade system that actually improves your weapons. If you really get attached to your grenade launcher, as I did, you’ll want to upgrade that bad boy all the way. The final upgrade for it allows the ricocheting debris from the initial blast to explode a second time, turning your single grenade blast into a minefield of agony for anyone in the room. But combat wouldn’t be as exciting if the enemies you were bringing down didn’t look and react realistically, and the improved A.I. is another one of BioShock 2’s strong suits.

The enemies this time around are faster, stronger and smarter than ever. They will chase you down if you try to run, get behind cover and try to flank you, and even try to blast through the makeshift cover you hide behind. One of the most impressive showcases of A.I. is during the newly introduced “gather” sequences, in which the Little Sister you adopt will, well, gather Adam from specific dead splicers on the ground. Doing this of course attracts a small legion of splicers to your position and it’s your job as the Big Daddy to protect the little one during the ensuing battle. I found the best approach is to lay some traps and hack any nearby devices so that they work with you and not against you. During my playthrough, one of the greatest, yet most frustrating moments was when I laid out a series of trap rivets on the ground at the edge of a doorway and, to my surprise, rather than just running right on top of it the splicer stopped at the door and shot me from there. Of course, with a dozen guys running at the same time trying to stop on a dime, someone eventually gets shoved and the trap rivet doesn’t go entirely to waste, but it was impressive nonetheless to see enemies that adapt to your tactics. Doing these gathers and saving, or harvesting if you’re a heartless bastard, the Little Sisters will eventually garner the attention of the Big Sisters, new enemies that make Big Daddies seem like Big Teddies.  These creeptastical darklings are fast, agile, and oh so powerful.  Fortunately, you know when one is approaching by the screech they let out… and by the fact that the corners of the screen turn blood red,  just as an early warning letting you know that sweet death, she is a comin’. If you’re smart, you’ll use the precious moments before her arrival to hack any nearby turrets, summon a bot, or reload your anti-armor rounds; because it will be an adrenaline-infused thrill ride until that beast is finally slain. Oh, and don’t forgot to set up your camera to film the experience (The in-game one, not your real camera. I mean whatever, if that’s what you’re in to) because fully researching Big Sisters results in a sweet gene tonic reward.

Hurry up, before anyone notic- Ahh, here we go again...

Hurry up, before anyone notic- Ahh, here we go again…

The most intriguing addition to the world of BioShock is the multiplayer aspect.  Now, don’t get too excited and throw out you Call of Duty disc or anything, because even standard deathmatches in BioShock aren’t exactly a fast paced extravaganza. Since the gameplay relies more on tactics, the best part of online matches are the strategic or team based match types like “Adam Grab” and “Capture the Sister”. These modes are the equivalent of traditional capture-the flag, territory, and what I’ll call capture-and-secure (holding a Sister for as long as you can) match types that online gamers are familiar with. The ranking system will assuredly keep some folks addicted for months to come, but honestly the online should wear off for the general crowd within a week or two of play.

Another tweak to the sequel is the new and sort-of improved hacking system. Instead of rearranging pipes, gamers will know have to focus their rhythm and timing skills. The way this works is that a bar appears on the bottom of the screen and will mostly contain red and white spaces, which should be avoided, and blue and green spaces, which are safe zones. The blue spaces are the ideal safe zones because they net extra rewards for the hack, while red spaces are the worst because they trip alarms and summon bots to attack you. While this system is far less strenuous on the mind and much easier to master, I have a tiny, eensy weensy problem with it. I’m COLOR BLIND. No, not like “oh gracious me, why is everything in black and white.” color blind, I’m what’s commonly known as “red-green color blind”; which means unless I’m standing a foot away from my television screen, I can’t tell the difference between the red zone and the green zone. That also means that every time I want to hack something, like say a turret, camera, vending machine, ammo machine, or bot, I have to get up off the couch and crouch right next to my screen. Yeah, thanks 2K games for reminding me how deficient my eyes are, your color choices are a real boost to my self-esteem. While it still didn’t deter me from enjoying the game, it frustrates me and leaves me wondering how such a rather large problem could have slipped through the cracks. And while we’re on the topic of aesthetics, now would be the perfect time to discuss the graphics and sounds offered up inside the wonderful world of Rapture.

What is this? I'll tell you what that is. It's a pain in my ass, that's what it is.

What is this? I’ll tell you what that is. It’s a pain in my ass, that’s what it is.

BioShock 2 still looks great… even if there are parts of it that I can’t see. (Yeah I’m just going to keep whining about that for the rest of this review. Luckily, it’s almost done) The new locations offer both an authentically Rapture approach to design (look at the posters on the wall and all will be revealed!) as well as a fresh take on locations previously inaccessible to players in the original game. The attention to detail is much appreciated, and the end result is an environment that is realistically affected by your actions. Smack a window and the glass will crack, scorch an enemy and the burn marks on the ground will leave a trail to follow. The best part of the adventure is the score, a set of musical pieces that really know how to play with your emotions; somehow managing to find a balance between incredibly eerie and relaxingly smooth. Add to that a stellar voice-acting job, both during game sequences and audio diaries, and those splicers that are always babbling about something in the background, and you have yourself an underwater city that really does come to life right before your eyes. While the story didn’t seem as epic in scale this time around, which I attribute to the fact that the adventure is much more personal in the sequel, the characters were still memorable. Though not as memorable as the intriguing characters of the original, I’ll admit. I really didn’t have any kind of attachment to any of the antagonists or your radio contact this time around, but for what it offers, the story comes full circle and feels very satisfying.

If you never played the original BioShock then first off, got off your butt and buy it, then sit back down and play it, and second, don’t worry. This adventure is totally stand-alone and won’t leave you feeling cheated in any way. Still, the more you know about the previous game, the better your appreciation and understanding of Rapture will be. The combat is still great, and noticeable improvements have made it even better than before.  The sounds and sights still deliver an impressive display even if you’ve been to Rapture before. While the online is no CoD killer, it certainly stands on its own as a more strategic shooter than tradition run-and-gun. This is definitely a must-play, and I would call it a must-buy as well. If you’re at all interested in the idea behind the game, check it out. I highly doubt you’ll be disappointed. Unless your color blind.

I’m thinking about making “Relevant Revisiting” a reoccurring segment for playing old games in the months before their sequels arrive. If you think it’s a worthy endeavor, and something you’d be interested in reading, let me know in the comments below. I’d also consider doing retro game reviews, but I feel like everyone with a YouTube account is doing that these days, so I wanted to keep the games semi-current. Either way, your opinions and feedback are appreciated.

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  2. Nop

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