Reports of the death of books are greatly exaggerated

Book publishing and sales are not in decline. However, the forms of their delivery are changing radically, as I have pointed out here repeatedly.

Editor and publisher Peter Osnos, writing in The Atlantic:

Robert Darnton, the Harvard librarian and our preeminent writer about books from the perspective of history, has a fascinating piece in the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education that, among other observations, demolishes the notion that books overall are in inexorable decline. Darnton quotes 2009 numbers provided by Bowker, the data agency for publishing, which records 288,355 new and reissued titles and speculates that the numbers for 2010 and 2011 will show continuing increases; a further 764,448 titles in 2009 fell into a "nontraditional" category of self-published, micro-niche, and print-on-demand books, according to Bowker. "However it is measured," Darnton wrote, "the population of books is increasing, not decreasing and certainly not dying". . . .

In fact, a recent Wall Street Journal survey on self-publishing concluded that e-book titles priced as low as 99 cents are making an increasing impact on the market. Jeffrey Trachtenberg, the newspaper's respected publishing reporter, wrote: "As digital sales surge, publishers are casting a worried eye towards the previously scorned self-published market. Unlike five years ago, when self-published writers rarely saw their works on the same shelf as the industry's biggest names, the low cost of digital publishing coupled with Twitter and other social-networking tools, has enabled previously unknown writers to make a splash". . . .

For those of us in all aspects of publishing, these are heady times--which is a mix of dizzying, exciting, and to be candid, somewhat intimidating, given the pace of transformation and the unknowable consequences of so dramatic a period of upheaval. One outcome is certain--there will be books and they will be read, one way or another.

Read it all.

Leading environmentalist admits that movement is "lost"

George Monbiot, a leading environmentalist writer, now acknowledges that the environmentalist movement's policy prescriptions are intellectually incoherent and utterly contradictory. Yet he still clings bitterly to the false Malthusian economic Narrative that underpins environmentalist theory.

Walter Russell Mead comments:

This is an awesome admission of categorical intellectual, political and moral failure. For two decades greens have arrogated to themselves the authority of science and wrapped themselves in the arrogant certainty of self-righteous contempt for those who oppose them. They have equated skepticism about their incoherent and contradictory policy proposals with hatred of science and attacked their critics as the soulless hired shills of the oil companies, happy to ruin humanity for the sake of some corporate largesse.

Monbiot has worked his way through to a cogent description of the dead end the global green movement has reached, but he has not yet diagnosed the cause. In particular, he remains a staunch Malthusian. . . . Economic growth is a cancer, in this view. Its bad effects are permanent and cumulative, its blessings are evanescent and ultimately trivial.

Malthusianism is a religious conviction that desperately needs to think of itself as a science. From Thomas Malthus and his mathematical certainties to Paul Ehrlich with his famine timetables and the Club of Rome with its ‘scientific’ predictions of resource exhaustion, Malthusians have made confident predictions about the future and claimed scientific authority for statements that turned out to be contemptibly silly. That is the brutal fate that often awaits people who can’t keep the boundaries between science and religion straight.

It is happening on a massive and humiliating scale to the world’s greens today.

OSAMA BIN LADEN KILLED BY U.S. FORCES

Blown up Shot down by our special operations guys in a town outside of Islamabad, Pakistan.

Fantastic news. Justice is done.

UPDATE: In the midst of my private celebration and salutes to all involved in the killing of this monster, one bit of sober reflection -- and that has to do with President Obama's statements telling the world that bin Laden's corpse will be treated with "all respect" in accordance with "Muslim practice."

First, I can't fault the theory behind the alleged burial at sea: Don't leave around a burial site for this bastard, so that it becomes an Islamist martyr shrine.

On the other hand, this business of treating his corpse with all "respect" in accordance "with Muslim tradition" is completely hypocritical.

Didn't President Obama himself say that Obama was not a true Muslim? Hasn't his argument all along been that bin Laden was a phony Muslim who had "hijacked Islam" -- and that no "true Muslim" would so warp the "religion of peace" by committing mass murders?

WELL, MR. PRESIDENT: WHICH IS IT?

If he is not a Muslim -- if Islam is truly a "religion of peace" -- then you don't have to "respect" the carcass of this animal. You could show by your indifferent treatment of it (perhaps a public display to prove that he's really dead) that you do not take bin Laden to be a true Muslim, nor should the world.

But by these "respectful" acts, you do in fact treat him as a true Muslim -- which in effect elevates a mass-murderer as a representative and member in good standing of the Muslim faith. If so, then what becomes of its own standing as "the religion of peace"?

So, Mr President, which is it? Should the Muslim world believe your statements, or your actions, concerning bin Laden's status as a Muslim -- and therefore of Islam's status as a "religion of peace"?