Bizmology |
| Posted: 03 Sep 2010 01:18 PM PDT
But as you fire up the barbecue one last time this Labor Day weekend, ponder this: This year’s grand champion steer at the Iowa State Fair was cloned from the Fair's 2008 grand champion steer. Put another way –"Doc," the 1,320-pound entry at this year's fair, is an exact replica of a previous contest winner. Identical. Indistinguishable from its clone-mate, parent, twin, whatever (even finding the right word for cloned animals with respect to their relationship to their clone-mates is problematic.) But word-worry aside, Doc is, in effect, the same animal as the 2008 champion, spiraling right down to its DNA helix. Now there's no ruling at the Iowa State Fair that prevents cloned animals from competing in its contests. And Doc was described as a cloned animal when he was entered into the exhibition, so no one was trying to slip anything over on competition officials. (Interesting aside to add to the list of ponderables: The father of the 17-year-old boy who entered Doc is the president of a company called Trans Ova Genetics.) So the contest at the Fair seems legit. But the Fair contest doesn't seem fair. The musical strains of "Hello, Dolly" running through my head seem oddly chilling. Picture by Mike Licht, used under a Creative Commons license. |
| Barnes & Noble’s Last Chapter? Posted: 03 Sep 2010 09:21 AM PDT
Burkle’s investment firm Yucaipa owns nearly 20% of the ailing bookseller’s shares. He and other stockholders are dismayed by B&N’s plummeting profits as it tries to transition from a traditional store-based business model to one focused on e-commerce. It isn’t helping that the company’s digital book reader, the Nook, is trailing Amazon.com‘s Kindle in the e-reader war or that Amazon reported in July that e-books outsold hardcover books for the first time (read here). My regret has nothing to do with B&N’s past connection to Hoover’s, which predated my employment by more than a decade. Hoover’s subscribers may be surprised to learn that our founder, the entrepreneur Gary Hoover, started a chain of bookstores called Bookstop in 1982. Austin-based Bookstop went on to become the fourth-largest book chain in the US with more than 20 stores in four states before it was acquired by B&N in 1989. A year later, Hoover started The Reference Press, which in 1996 became Hoover’s, Inc. Bookstop lived on, at least in Austin, for another 20 years until B&N shut it down at the end of 2008. Now B&N is shuttering some of its main chain stores. (It closed the last of its B. Dalton stores several years ago.) The most recent casualty is B&N’s Lincoln Center store at 66th and Broadway in Manhattan, which is due to close next year. According to a recent article in The New York Times (read here), while the store gets plenty of foot traffic, apparently people aren’t buying many books there. For book lovers on New York’s Upper West Side and all who enjoy browsing the aisles and cracking the spine of a book beofre purchasing it, the store closures are a big loss. No longer the villain, B&N has become the victim of e-commerce bully Amazon, which arguably has destroyed the bookstore business as we know (or knew) it. ~ Photo by Dove Harrington, used under a Creative Commons license. |
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Bizmology Part 1
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Bizmology Part 1
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