Fetishable Books

The Book Cover Archive

I could, and have, spent hours looking through this collection. Like many amazing things, it comes from the casual optimist.  from the interview I excerpted earlier: an exchange that I thought was actually very insightful and changed my mind about e-books:

E-book detractors have of a strange idea of what most books are. Those beautiful dusty old encyclopedias, that rare first-edition of Ulysses, even your fancy new Vintage paperback? That is not most books. The Grisham and Grafton paperbacks at the airport, Chicken Soup for the Spirit, college textbooks — that’s most books. Does anyone really care if the next Janet Evanovich thriller has no corporeal form? Wouldn’t that be an improvement?

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Finally, some clarity

Josh Marshall (TPM):

I had conversations with a few friends yesterday. And what came out of those discussions was that even among pretty knowledgeable people there’s still very basic confusion about what bank ‘nationalization’ even means. My point is not that there’s one thing true definition and others are misinformed. But the collective ‘we’ is talking about this; but what’s clear is that the conversation is muddled by different people meaning different things by the same word.

So, for what it’s worth, what I think we’re talking about, what I’ve been talking about when I’ve been blogging on this topic is basically a super-powered version of what the FDIC does when it seizes a failed bank. …

… So, to sum up, what we’re talking about is very much a private sector, perhaps the ultimate market based response to the problem.

Take this as a counterpart to the video I posted earlier about the credit crisis.  The whole piece goes a long way toward helping make sense of the actual rehabilitation process of the megabanks, and the very significant questions Marshall poses should be the ones people are actually debating, rather than the very idea of recievership / “nationalization”.  Namely, how much will bondholders lose? And how will temporary government ownership impact the long-term operation of these businesses once privatized again?  If only the SEC could have done its freaking job in the first place.  The usual caveats of opinion/editorializing apply, as always.