On The Turning Away

“If the twentieth century was the American century, then the twenty-first century belongs to China.” A phrase that has been repeated so often that it has almost become a truism. Ironically, it’s rather appropriate for the blurb of a book whose author calls himself the world’s worst market timer.

That author is none other than Jim “China bull” Rogers. Back in January 2006, Rogers told the New York Times that China would “fully float its currency” in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing - a prediction that’s increasingly unlikely to materialize, according to received wisdom.

But the occasional shooting his mouth off apparently doesn’t deter many China enthusiasts from braving the cold for his autograph at the Barnes & Nobles in midtown Manhattan yesterday evening.
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Last month, “Currency Wars”, billed as a “discussion of global banking and its effects on China, by a veteran of the US financial sector”, made it to the top ten list on Douban.com, a popular book review and recommendation site in China.

The book has become a surprise hit not the lease because its author, a Chinese native who has lived in the US since 1994 as an “IT consultant and amateur historian”, was hitherto little known. But his controversial claims that disparate historical events spanning the last two centuries can largely be attributed to the “control of money issuance by the Rothschild banking dynasty” have catapulted him to the limelight as an authority on financial markets.
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Fake Steve Jobs, that is, for those not plugged-in. Now the jig is up, FSJ was unceremoniously outed by, fittingly, none other than the old media par excellence NYT. He’s Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes and a published novelist.

Better yet, Lyons has a blog to his name: Floating Point. His satirical novel, written in the voice of the Fake Steve character, “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody”, will be published by Da Capo Press in October.

Meanwhile, FSJ is “taking a few days off to sit in a lake and do some yoga and meditation and non-thinking”. We intend to follow suit, in particular the detox, sans yoga and meditation.

Arianna Huffington’s take on Carl Bernstein’s bio of Hillary Clinton “A Woman in Charge” is hardly surprising: Hillary’s “disturbing secrecy problem”. If you followed Arianna’s blog at HuffPo, you’d know that she’s by no means a HRC fan.

But her comparison of Hillary to Dick Cheney is misguided. The latter, according to received wisdom, seems to show an innate contempt for transparency. Hillary, on the other hand, has been criticized roundly by her enemies of omission, obfuscation and outright lying. But their shared fixation with secrey differs in kind, if not in degree.

Bernstein, as The Economist - hardly a HRC enthusiast - put it, tries to “psychoanalyse Hillary” from her “boot camp” childhood to her “difficult relationship with the truth”. He concludes that Hillary married for love, on the whole is better than Bill at learning from experience, and “may have the potential to change the world, if only a little.”
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That Americans are more willing to help relative strangers and America’s overarching marketing culture provided inspiration to young entrepreneurs, according to a tell-all book, “My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young C.E.O. Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley”, by 19-year old Ben Casnocha.

For the record, Casnocha decided to become an entrepreneur at the age of 12, after being struck by the Apple “Think Different” ad. Starting a business is seen as “cool”, thus the desire to make a buck at an ever earlier age becomes the driving force in teens life, dislocating school and family.

However, in the cosmic scheme of things, whether this precocious entrepreneurship that is deeply “rooted in the commercial, competitive, philanthropic, nonegalitarian and open nature of American society” will sustain America’s technological and economic lead is an open question.

Some of our associates are into audiobooks, others - us included - still prefer the old fashioned way of curling up with a book. Those proclaim to read listen to books on iPod may have good reasons to sneer at the Luddite we are: online retailing giant Amazon has jumped into the fray with the purchase of Brilliance Audio, the largest audiobook publisher in the U.S.

Is it a sign of the times as people change our media consumption habits in the era of YouTube and MySpace? That digital is all the rage is certainly not lost on the creator of online book selling. The Brilliance deal will help Amazon tighten its tie with book publishers as it is seeking to cover books from soup to nuts, expanding beyond offering only best-sellers under an audio-book format.
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A piece we missed last week is about the man or woman behind the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog landing a book deal from Da Capo Press, publisher of pop culture best-sellers such as Toby Young’s “How to Lose Friends And Alienate People.”

It also came to light today that the mysterious fake Steve Jobs “has leaped across the Atlantic to secure a British publisher”. Fake Steve’s agent, Emma Parry, said the author has signed with The Friday Project, a boutique publisher in the UK that specializes in developing books out of Web sites and blogs.

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Bertelsmann’s decision to buy out Time Inc.’s interest in Bookspan, their book-club joint venture, will make it the only major operator of book, music and DVD clubs in the U.S., with the purchase of Randowm House in 1998 and Columbia House music and DVD clubs in 2005.

The deal betrays the German media conglomerate’s confidence that there’s still life at book clubs of yore in the age of Amazon.com.

Unlike Columbia House, which bombarding college students with offers, book clubs usually target women in their 40s. In fact, we would not have heard of Bookspan were it not for one of our friends who worked there. Our recollection tells us she was mandated to squeeze pennies in the operations, and has since moved on to greener pastures.
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In the consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories, sales of carbonated beverages and milk continued to be eroded kast year by growing “preference” for bottled water (12% jump) and ready-to-drink tea/coffee - the No.1 growth performer with 28% increase - and to a lesser degree, sports drinks and wine. While beer consumption rose by 2%, the sweet spot was microbrews (up 16.9%) and imported brands, the sales of which more than outweighed the losses among domestic beer varieties.

Consumer perceptions of health benefits associated with ingredients such as ginseng, green tea and white tea are behind the upswings. The trend “will likely gain momentum in 2007″. This harkens back to the “Bobos in paradise” era - are we seeing a repeat of the Gore- and Dems-eque “tofu and bottled water” of the late 90s?

Book publishers have taken a step into cyberspace by introducing online services that let people browse books on the Internet. This effort to update their businesses comes at a time when more young readers consume media via the Web, a trend that already has affected the music, movie and newspaper industries.

Random House, owned by German media giant Bertelsmann AG, is rolling out Insight, which will allow consumers search and browse through more than 5,000 of its titles online. And as if not to be left out on the social media craze, it will introduce a service to let users add material from titles to personal pages on social networks such as MySpace or to a retailer’s Web site. This function is similar to what HarperCollins Publishers, part of Murdoch’s News Corp empire, is making available to users, who will be able embed pages of books onto networking sites such as MySpace.