Rocket Bomber - linking to other people's stuff

“Sorry kids; I haven’t been here in a while… back in my day this place was all porn theatres, strip clubs, and hookers as far as the eye could see.”

Note: not really a caption contest. I just wanted to post that.

I was very skeptical about a smurfs movie, and even moreso when I heard it was a live-action/CGI mix. BUT:

Neil Patrick Harris and Hank Azaria are two of the live-action actors; Jonathan Winters, Alan Cumming, George Lopez, Fred Armisen, John Oliver, Paul Reubens, & Wolfgang puckin’ Puck, among others, are voicing various smurfs.

Still don’t know if I’m going to see it, but damn, they have my interest now.

I’m turning over the soapbox this week, not because I ran out of things to say [I can always rant about customers] but because there are a few links clogging up my drafts file and I thought it might be better to propogate them, rather than have them collect dust until they might be useful.

[for a full index of ‘rethinking the box’ posts, see the most recent one, Sales vs Service]

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Most recently was Tom Spurgeon’s conversation with Brian Hibbs over at The Comics Reporter

Among other observations:

“Specifically, what I would really say is that it’s a real lack of understanding in the retail base that alt-comics aren’t just a sell-this-month or even a sell-this-week kind of a deal. That alt-comics for the most part tend to sell continually over the years. I still have every single issue of Optic Nerve sitting on my shelf, including number one that came out 15 years ago. I still stock it because I sell enough copies to justify that rack space. I have every issue that’s in print and available from Diamond of Love and Rockets Vol. 2 on myself. I don’t have Volume One because it’s easier to sell the single book. If I could have the last ten issues of Eightball and the last ten issues of Hate on my wall, I would.”

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McSweeney’s Issue #33 was an actual newspaper, featuring news of the day, comics [indy comics!], sports & arts coverage, and of course, a book review section.

Not necessarily buried, but tucked away, in the Book section was this neat little sidebar, thankfully reproduced in the May/June issue of the Utne Reader [and posted to their website, click the link] and also represented (with commentary, & alongside a number of other photographic snippets from the SF Panorama) at Steve Rhodes’s flickr account

So You Want To Open A Bookstore featured figures from Annie Danger of Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco. “Modern Times is a medium-sized independent bookstore—about 3,700 square feet, and with five part-time staffers.”

So, a small storefront bookstore with six booksellers (I’m guessing Danger didn’t count herself as part of the ‘part time’ staff) can be run with monthly operating costs of $56-57K — more than half of which is the cost of new inventory, and which dates back to November? of last year.

We could parse the numbers to figure out Modern Times rent-per-square-foot (~$20/sq.ft., actually) or the wages offered to employees (you can ball-park it, but there are too many unknowns) but that would be unfair. All bookselling is local, and while it is nice (abso-freaking lovely) to see someone else’s numbers, it doesn’t affect my expenses or the differences between our two stores and markets.

Still, very much worth a read

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Questions abound around Google’s e-bookstore initiative, and Ian Paul at PC World rounds up five

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This guy gets a book deal, and I don’t. Thems the breaks, I guess. I must not be snarky enough. Oh, and I write essays, instead of posting pics-and-a-gag or stuff other people write for me — my loss, twice over.

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…almost on cue: oh, look, A Survival Guide to Managing Employees from Hell: Handling Idiots, Whiners, Slackers, And Other Workplace Demons (isbn 9780814474082) is one of five titles recommended to retail managers by Shari Waters, retail blogger for About.com. I need to read at least 3 of these. (Yes, even with my experience, I’m still looking for input on how to do the job better) – Waters also posted a list 10 books on how to get started in retail

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How valuable are my columns on retail? Well, of course, value is subjective, but at least one firm wants to charge you $1,150 for stuff you can find on Google in a single weekend. [that, and by looking at primary sources, you can do you own analysis] — $1000 seems a bit steep, and their description of the doc is more than a little… dry. Could be any industry.

One thing I can promise: Mean spirited, condescending, self-righteous, occasionally funny (but not as often as I think I’m being “funny”), and grounded in reality — but never dry. Even when I’m numbers-heavy, I try to tell you what the numbers mean. And I’m not charging anything for it, let alone $1000.

I’ll take a book deal if anyone cares to offer one, though.

So:

High School Students? Check.
Plaid Skirts? Check.
After-school Club? Check.
Panty Shot? Check and check.

Ah, yes, let’s look at this latest anime promo art:

http://www.rollingstone.com/issue1102

Special bonus: Teacher in a track suit. (no shinai, though)

Not every blog is as easy to navigate and link to as, say, Rocketbomber.com [*cough*] but this shouldn’t be an impediment when the articles themselves *must* be read.

A recent link from Dirk (¡Journalista! at The Comics Journal) pointed me toward the 10th and 11th instalments of Stephen Bissette’s excellent series “Forgotten Comics Wars, Or: How Angry Freelancers Made It Possible for A New Mainstream Comics Era (Including Vertigo) to Exist”

If you’ve missed this up until now (like I had) — You Need To Read This.

and to make it easier, I’m going to spoon-feed you the links:

Part 0 : Part 1 : Part 2 : Part 3 : Part 4 : Part 5 : Part 6 : Part 7 : Part 8 : Part 9 : Part 10 : Part 11

…and more is promised. This puts my rather pitiful attempts to chronicle fandom to shame, and for me is also an education into comics that I, as a manga-fan, sorely needed.

@ProfessorBlind Chipped in $25 #cash_for_robot to help a worthy cause – encourage you to do the same. www.giantrobot.com/donate

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/borders-partners-with-kobo-to-deliver-ebooks-79339012.html

I don’t have a whole lot of commentary, considering I just read the article myself. But Kobo née Shortcovers claims 2 million titles, supports open standards, is device agnostic, and the crafty Canadians have had 10 months lead time to build up their back-end and launch their e-reader apps for a variety of smartphones (and through the kind offices of Adobe, for a number of other devices) (*cough* including the nook. How’s that taste, B&N?).

The press release says 2nd quarter 2010, though, and for retail (most retailers use a fiscal year that starts in February) that means May at the earliest, and more likely July. So a late start… but maybe six months is enough time for B&N to fix the bugs in the nook, for Sony to sell a few more e-readers, for the media to beat the whole e-book thing into the ground, and for the folks who own a nook, kindle, or sony to start asking the question: where can I get the cheapest book, without DRM?

Still and all: Borders now has a horse in this race.

Not with the blog; the failings are in the wetware of the guy running the blog.

In lieu of substantive updates: here’s Kevin Smith on Twilight Fans (I think I first saw this on the Huffington Post)

Oh, and Kevin Smith = Not Safe for Work [“Multiple f-bombs incoming, Captain!”] but it’s a holiday for a majority of my readers — I pity those of you who have to work, the rest of you enjoy this.

“There is a plan, and it’s working.”

Came across a new (rather sparse) blog recently, Clay Shirky, though the content provided more than makes up for the lack of bells and glitter:

In much the same vein as my Rethinking the Box series of columns, Clay takes on the topic, “Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization,” and while some of the same concepts come up (bookstore as third place, bookstore as community hub) without my bias as a bookseller the essay goes off into whole new areas, and to a very different conclusion.

Worth a read. (as are the other articles — at least those currently on Clay’s main page — which also touch on issues of publishing and content)

But I’m going to enthusiastically encourage you to participate anyway.

That link over in the left sidebar — yeah, the second one — has been sitting there for like a year now.

Go ahead, click it.

Even better, click this link to Book One, and then this link to the (illustrated, but not comic) text interstitials that have been at least as engaging as the original comic.

Are you hooked yet?

And now, Rob Balder and Co. (there is an artist change, from book one to book two — Jamie Noguchi is being replaced by Xin Ye — Jamie is moving on [moving back?] to other projects; though Xin Ye was identified and selected [I’m assuming] because she was also a fan and an active member on their forums — and so yes, it’s a change but not a revolution) after a short hiatus, are storming back into another volume of Erfworld comics. Book Two, Page One just posted on their homepage

I’m tempted to post an image on the main page to further encourage folks to go, and read, but I’ll hide it as a comment to this post for those of you who might want to read the original without the (minor) spoiler.