Silverfish Writing Programme: 13 July, 2013 intake

Silverfish Writing Programme: 13 July, 2013 intake now open for registration

The next intake for the Silverfish Writing Programme will be on Saturday, July 13, 2013, and run for 10 consecutive weeks (except for holidays) from 10.30am to 12.30pm, and will be opened for registration on June 3, 2013. The past few programmes have been extremely popular and we have had to turn away many late inquiries, because the maximum number of participants we can accommodate is 10 (ten). We have to date received 30 inquiries already. So we encourage those who are interested to register early, and avoid a last minute rush. (Please, tell your friends who are interested, too.) The registration fee will be RM1000.00 per participant for the full ten week programme, but an early bird discount of 10% will apply until (and including) July 1, 2013.

The world is full of stories. Humans are the only story telling animals on the planet. We may miss meals (ask your teenager buried in a book or your aunt or mum hooked on a television soap) but not our stories. Even in famine stricken zones, while people wait for the food trucks to arrive, they tell one another stories to keep alive. In war zones, where life is in danger every single minute, people cannot resist telling stories. All religions have tons of stories that are constantly repeated. Stories are part of our very being, our claim to be human.

We are surrounded by stories every waking minute of the day. When we turn on our radio or television to listen to the news, or to watch a drama or sitcom or even a cooking show, when we open our newspapers or surf the net for news, when we go to the movies, to a dance, listen to a song, or look at a painting, when we go to the office, pitch a proposal to our boss, our clients, meet our co-workers when we relax over tea and gossip, or tell them about our day, or listen to their stories. When we read books, we read stories. And stories will make us laugh or cry or be angry, and dozens of other things. We will love characters or we hate them. Good stories never leave us indifferent. We have a desperate need to tell stories in whatever form. That’s why some of us want to become writers: to tell our stories. But what do publishers want?

That's what the Silverfish Writing Programme is all about: what publishers are looking for.

READ MORE ABOUT THE PROGRAMME and REGISTER

Online retail

A recent US Census Bureau News indicates that online retail accounts for only 5.2% of all retail in the US. That is, 95% of all purchases are done in brick-and-mortar stores. A story in Wired says, "Forrester Research surveyed 4,500 U.S. adults online and found that in every major consumer category other than travel, shoppers said visiting a store served as the most important source of research before buying." The research suggest that no one in the selling business can afford to ignore the primal satisfaction of touching and holding something in your hand before you buy. "Human toolmaking and trade both started as hands-on endeavors; as much as we now love Amazon Prime, we as a species aren’t likely to give up in-person consumption anytime soon."

Is it the same for books? Two interesting recent stories come up. A story in Digital Book Wire story Ebook Best-Seller Price Average Plummets to Lowest Level Yet says, "... the US$9.99 price band, which was the most popular among consumers just six months ago, has fallen out of favor." Now, the average price is closer to US$5.50 per book. How low will it go? Elsewhere, The Association of American Publishers released 2012 sales figures, that showed a substantial increase of 7.4% in overall total sales in the book industry, of which 19% were digital. With plunging e-book pricing will that last percentage fall lower or rise? Digital Book wire seems to think it will stabilise between 20-25%.

So, contrary to popular belief, the book is not only alive and well, it is thriving, albeit in several different forms. This figure is all the more given the way mega book chains are closing all over the world.

Chinua Achebe passes on

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, 82, died in a hospital in Boston after a brief illness, on March 22, 2013. He was widely regarded as the father of modern African literature, and lived and worked as a professor in the United States in recent years, most recently at Brown University in Rhode Island. Nobel prize winner, Wole Soyinka; poet, John Pepper Clark; fellow Nigerian who died in the Biafrah war of the 70s, Christopher Okigbo; and Chinua Achebe were the 'brother' African writers of the 50s and 60s.

There was a minor 'literary' furore in Malaysia in 2006 about Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the news of which took a trip around the world. Malaysia had banned Things Fall Apart.  This is what happened: we had ordered copies of the books, which we had kept in stock since we opened in 1999, but were told by our distributors that they could not supply us because the book had been 'banned' by the government. So, because the book was being used in schools, we had to tell that to many of our customers who were teachers and students. You can imagine their reaction. Blogs were the 'in' thing at the time, not Facebook.

'Banning' books in Malaysia has many dimensions, not always done in accordance to the law. One can speculate, from past experience, what happened at the customs this time though. I'd go with arbitrary confiscation (because we checked and didn't find the title on the 'banned; list), to scare the hell out of the importer. Why? We have absolutely no idea. Maybe, he said something wrong, or didn't do something right. Or, he did nothing at all. But, it appeared to have worked; after that the importer became a little paranoid about bringing in anything. Proscribing books by harassment works, and is effective. And the Minister can honestly say that the book is not on the 'list', foreign do-gooders will be happy with the reply (tick), and the importer will never see the books again.

I have checked the latest KDN list, and Things Fall Apart is not on it. Maybe, it never was. Or, maybe, the cynic in me says, they did a Winston Smith on it and erased the past, changed history. I notice that the title on breast feeding I saw several years ago is not on it now, either.

Walmart technology

A Reuters report in September last year (which we reported in this column) said,  "Wal-Mart Stores Inc will no longer sell Amazon.com Inc's Kindle eReaders and tablets, severing its relationship with a major competitor." We predicted Walmart would introduce their own gadget and give it away free to replace that trojan horse. What's happening now is that they have developed an app for the iPhone as a free download.

While Walmart is almost a half-trillion dollar company with annual revenues of $466 billion for its fiscal year 2013, which ended January 31, its online sales revenue is only 9 billion dollars compared to 61 billion for Amazon. Walmart want's to compete and win.

"Walmart is a technology company. Let’s just put that out there right now. The company has crushed all competitors through its mastery of supply-chain logistics and inventory management, which above all are engineering problems," says a recent Wired report.

In August last year, Reuters reported that Wal-Mart Stores Inc was testing a system at a Walmart supercenter in Rogers, Arkansas, near the company's headquarters that would allow shoppers to scan items using their iPhones and then pay at a self-checkout counter, a move to trim checkout times and costs for retailers.

The latest news is that Walmart's  app-based self-checkout is available in more than 200 stores in the US, Wired says, "When you open Walmart’s location-aware main app in a store that has iPhone self-checkout, the so-called “Scan & Go” option becomes available. You scan the barcodes on items as you put them in your (physical) shopping cart, and the app keeps a running total. When you’re done, you go to a standard self-checkout station and choose the “mobile” option on the terminal next to the card swiper. A QR code appears on the screen. Scan the code with your phone, and the app transfers over the contents of your (virtual) shopping cart. Pay as usual, and you’re done." (Watch the Walmart video.)

Yes, anyone who gives Amazon some competition deserves our support.

History of Book Vending Machines

Saw this in the Huffington Post, and thought we'd share it.

Did you know, "The first book-dispensing vending machine was built by Richard Carlile in England in 1822. Carlile was a bookseller who wanted to sell seditious works like Paine's Age of Reason without being thrown in jail. His answer was a self service machine that allowed customers to buy questionable books without ever coming into contact with Carlile. The customer turned a dial on the devise to the publication he wanted, deposited his money, and the material dropped down in front of him ... but that didn't stop ... from convicting one of Carlile's employees for selling "blasphemous material."

There are no pictures of that machine, unfortunately, but you can see one of the 1937 Penguincubator, which appeared in London in 1937, conceived by Allen Lane, the founder of (surprise) Penguin Books, and dispensed classic literature in paperback form for about the price of a pack of cigarettes. Cool.

There are others pictures like:

• the 1947 book vending machine called the Book-O-Mat, which featured a selection of 50 books any one of which could be purchased for USD 0.25 each.
  
• the modern day one in Japan that has success in dispensing a variety of items including beer, pornography, wallet-sized books and comics the size of a phone directory;
  
• A Novel Idea at London's Heathrow airport that went bankrupt in 2010. 
• a paperback vending machine in a Barcelona subway station filled with Spanish translations of Nora Roberts and Victoria Holt.
• the Readomatic at the Stockholm airport 
• and lastly, and most interestingly, the BIBLIO-MAT that debuted last year by the Toronto bookshop named Monkey's Paw, the world's first vending machine to dispense a randomly selected second-hand book for the price of two Canadian dollars. You'll never know what you're going to get!