Status-Q

This has been bothering me over the last few days:

How does Shelob manage to sting Frodo when he’s wearing the mithril vest?

On Sunday I threw out the old Gateway 66Mhz Pentium machine on which I wrote my PhD thesis many years ago. It still worked, but the inability to boot from its CD drive was becoming a bit limiting! And its two hard disks had just under 2G of capacity between them.

Today I threw out my floppy disks, realising that I no longer had any machine capable of reading them.

I’m pretty apalling at finding and choosing Christmas presents for others, and hence dislike the whole process intensely, so the streamlined nature of online shopping is a real boon, and almost all of our gift-purchasing this year was done via the web. I did have to make one phone call, but I certainly didn’t have to go into any bricks-and-mortar shops!

Not that it would have really been an option – the things I wanted to buy were definitely from the ‘Long Tail‘ and I couldn’t have found any of them in the centre of Cambridge.

Of course, this only works if you don’t adopt my usual practice of waiting until Christmas Eve. Amazon can do some wonderful things, but they can’t deliver as quickly as I can cycle in and out of the town centre.

But perhaps that will change. Perhaps in future you’ll be able to buy books from your local Barnes and Noble even if they don’t have them on the shelves when you leave home…

On Demand Books is developing the Espresso printing machine – described in this article as ‘an ATM for books’.

The machine can print, align, mill, glue and bind two books simultaneously in less than seven minutes, including full-color laminated covers.

(Thanks to Claes-Frederik Mannby for the link. There’s also more information here.)

I have here a book that Brewster Kahle gave me, printed on-demand when I visited the Internet Archive a while back. Have a listen to some of his inspiring and entertaining talks, this one, for example, for a different spin on the topic – his motivation is to provide universal access to all human knowledge, and mobile on-demand printing is a part of this.

But on a larger commercial front, I predict that in the future the boundaries between print & copy outfits like Kinko’s, and bookshops like Borders, will blur dramatically, because the traditional publishing process is inefficient and slow, and, in particular, doesn’t cater for the Long Tail at all well.

One of the books I ordered this Christmas, for example, was Carl Benn’s Historic Fort York, published by a small Toronto-based press. Think about the logistics of getting it from the author’s word-processor in Canada to me here in Cambridge, even after he had gone through the typically tortuous process of getting it accepted by a publisher. Start with the publisher’s decisions about how large a print run made sense, and how much warehouse space would be taken up by as-yet-unpurchased copies sitting in various places around the world. Think about the packaging, the customs processes, the fuel involved in shipping it around the world. Even the weight in the postman’s bag as he brought it to my door.

And compare that entire process with the purely-digital alternative of downloading a PDF.

But as long as we continue to appreciate the aesthetics of reading things on paper, we will always want printing services which are faster, cheaper and higher-quality than we can have at home. And developments like the Espresso machine will be a godsend to a society which values ever more immediate gratification, and, of course, to husbands too disorganised or busy to buy their Christams presents on time.

Barnes & Noble, and Borders, and Waterstones, if they are worried about their rather uncertain future, might do well, I think, to invest heavily in on-demand printing.

Rose had a haircut yesterday. She also had her eyes checked. They took about the same amount of time, but the haircut cost more than the eye test.

Which probably means that anyone contemplating a career as an opthalmic optician should seriously consider the alternative of women’s hairdressing…

A couple of months ago I wrote about our gradual shift towards locally-produced organic food. Lest we become too smug, though, the Economist has a special report this week which points out that things are never as straightforward as they seem.

The first topic is organic food. “Not everyone agrees that organic farming is better for the environment”, we are told. Norman Borlaug, the father of the “green revolution” and winner of the Nobel peace prize is an outspoken advocate of the use of synthetic fertilisers to increase crop yields:

He claims the idea that organic farming is better for the environment is “ridiculous” because organic farming produces lower yields and therefore requires more land under cultivation to produce the same amount of food. Thanks to synthetic fertilisers, Mr Borlaug points out, global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000, but the amount of land used increased by only 10%. Using traditional techniques such as crop rotation, compost and manure to supply the soil with nitrogen and other minerals would have required a tripling of the area under cultivation. The more intensively you farm, Mr Borlaug contends, the more room you have left for rainforest.

In most areas it’s perhaps a little facile to suggest that there’s a simple swap of rainforest for organic farming, and one could argue that it might otherwise have been swapped for worse things, but it is a point worth considering.

Still, maybe we should focus more on Fairtrade produce?

Fairtrade farmers receive a minimum of $1.26 per pound for their coffee, or $0.05 above the market price if it exceeds that floor. This premium is passed back to the producers to spend on development programmes … Who could object to that?

Economists, for a start. The standard economic argument against Fairtrade goes like this: the low price of commodities such as coffee is due to overproduction, and ought to be a signal to producers to switch to growing other crops. Paying a guaranteed Fairtrade premium — in effect, a subsidy — both prevents this signal from getting through and, by raising the average price paid for coffee, encourages more producers to enter the market. This then drives down the price of non-Fairtrade coffee even further, making non-Fairtrade farmers poorer.

And while it’s true that a larger compensation does get back to the producer of Fairtrade goods,

…retailers add their own enormous mark-ups to Fairtrade products and mislead consumers into thinking that all of the premium they are paying is passed on. Mr Harford calculates that only 10% of the premium paid for Fairtrade coffee in a coffee bar trickles down to the producer. Fairtrade coffee, like the organic produce sold in supermarkets, is used by retailers as a means of identifying price-insensitive consumers who will pay more, he says.

Sigh. Still, at least there can’t be much complaint against buying from local producers?

Research carried out at Lincoln University in New Zealand found that producing dairy products, lamb, apples and onions in that country and shipping them to Britain used less energy overall than producing them in Britain. (Farming and processing in New Zealand is much less energy intensive.)

and

… a shift towards a local food system, and away from a supermarket-based food system, with its central distribution depots, lean supply chains and big, full trucks, might actually increase the number of food-vehicle miles being travelled locally, because things would move around in a larger number of smaller, less efficiently packed vehicles.

See what I mean? You can’t win.

So I’m going to start a new trend. It’s called Consumption Diversity. All methods of food production and distribution have some good effects and some bad ones. But they’re different for each method. The trick is to avoid a monoculture where all the bad bits happen to the same group of people, or damage the same part of the environment.

So we should get some of our food from organic producers to protect the bugs and the fishes, and some from non-organic to protect the rainforests. Some via Fairtrade to reduce exploitation, and some via regular market forces for its balancing effect. And so on. Does that sound like you? Congratulations! You’re a Diverse Consumer! Wear your badge with pride…