Michael Szenberg

Overview of Price and Nonprice Competition

When supply is drastically modified by new technology, it takes on a dimension of shock, resulting in models that contain incomplete information content and more challenging exogenous and endogenous phenomena. We identify new demand parameters for the industry. Consumers can now comparison-shop for bargains and choose between different ways to read books and allocate their time. These options determine their consumption and human capital formation. While technological advances in this industry are now at the General Purpose level, their role still seems unsettled. Advancement in the book industry is of the modern endogenous growth type associated with increasing returns as capital accumulates. The resulting competitive behavior between firms adheres to discriminating pricing in an imperfect market structure within the new global technological environment.

Production Aspects: Employment, Manpower, and Productivity

Production aspects of the book industry are in a state of perpetual mobility, with printed books facing strong competition from virtual space, Print on Demand (PoD), and e-books technologies. Our empirical analysis attempts to reconcile contrary views about increasing and constant returns to scale, using generally available data and standard econometric techniques. We embrace both the simple Cobb-Douglas and CES models of production. The Cobb-Douglas model indicates constant returns with weak statistical results, while the CES model indicates increasing returns. The overall results are subject to wide interpretation, underscoring a monopolistic structure, or a bilateral monopolistic model. The results also reached with modern discussion of increasing returns, which is normally sourced to the socialization of modern technological advances.

Printing and Publishing

International competition requires the estimates of consumer, producer, and welfare optimum in a general equilibrium framework to account for how agents make substitution within countries. The world flow of GDP and FDI concentrates among the three regions of North America, Europe, and Asia. Our analysis proceeds with an eye for free trade according to the classical hypothesis, and a preference for domestic adjustment according to the Keynesian hypothesis for these regions. North America and Europe did much better under the classical than under the Keynesian hypothesis. Some countries, such as China and India in Asia; the United Kingdom, France, and Germany in Europe; and the United States in North America are spotlighted for more extended analysis.

Distribution Aspects of the Industry

Distribution channels for books have evolved from small bookstores, to larger superstores, to the more impersonal Internet. Larger bookstores seem to have a dominant position in these activities through mergers and cooperations, yet this does not show up as high concentration for the industry. On the average, the concentration seems to be held in check from cooperation with smaller independent firms for the purpose of reaching customers in the suburbs or as independent suppliers on the Internet. Nevertheless, sales remain responsive to concentration, which in turn is responsive to mergers and an index of market power. Some modern distribution problems are also related to inventory management.

Consumption Aspects: Empirical Findings

Consumption is a driver of the book industry, and therefore impacts profits as the state of the economy changes. The overall state is that production rates are almost twice as large as consumption rates—but prices remain high, partly because they are traditionally cost-push in nature. The highest-cost aspects of the industry have traditionally been paper, platemaking, printing, binding, and book returns. Information technology is changing those costs as book production moves online or overseas. As a result, the industry has experienced some severe short-term business cycles that have been devastating to firms like Borders Books, which exited the industry in 2011. Our empirical study shows that price is elastic for all major book categories, indicating that price competition is still alive, though the industry also practices nonprice competition.

Internet Technological Aspects of the Industry

Books possess inherent characteristics that make them a natural product to buy and sell online. They are easy to ship, inexpensive to warehouse and inventory, easy to review and rate, can be test read, and can easily be searched. The Internet provides a widened audience with low-cost, 24-hour access to a diverse world of selections. The Internet is the battlefield at the conjunction of production, consumption, and distribution, and has become more and more competitive for book publishers. The Internet has made value chains more efficient, particularly in the area of digitized books, where digital information is available to intermediaries who produce books from the digital copies. Accounting records are kept of various sales transactions by region, creating a source of information economies.

Examples of Irony in the Humanities

Writers from the Judaic persuasion, such as Derrida, speak of silence, a fundamentally unspoken aspect of irony. Carolyn Sharp wrote of this silence as seen in the Jewish Bible, both in terms of deconstruction and reconstruction (Sharp 2009, 7; 11). While Derrida underscored the term “deconstruction,” he rejected the term “reconstruction” because it implied a structure that had to be demolished. His work stands on a foundation without a beginning, holding no reality beyond the text, namely, “There is nothing outside of the text,” or “there is no outside-text” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 1974, 158).

Examples of Irony in Philosophy on the World Stage

We want to study irony on the metaphorical stage because it helps us to understand and know our true selves. If we do not try to understand our true selves, then what we do can backfire on us. One example of this is King Oedipus character in Oedipus Rex, a play by Sophocles. Oedipus was obsessed with finding out who killed his father, Laius. Aristotle (Aristotle 1963, 6, 27, 30) presents him making an error in judgment on this matter because he did not include himself in the search of who had committed the murder of Laius. Oedipus searched for the killer in ignorance, and in the end found out that he was actually the murderer. Sigmund Freud has dubbed an aspect of this irony the “Oedipus Complex,” making the actions and doings of this protagonist the most ironic of all time.

Judeo-Christian Religion and Ethics

We are predisposed to see anything unknown or outside of our control as dangerous. While the innate instinct for self-preservation ensures our survival, its use beyond the immediate has contributed to human conflict on many levels. The challenge remains to transcend xenophobia and seek out our commonalities instead of exclusively noting our differences. The first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), referred to as Pentateuch and also known as the Torah, as well the Prophets and the New Testament speak for the acceptance of and respect for the stranger. There are many allusions to the idea that compassion for and welcoming of strangers is of greater importance than other commandments, yet this principle is so often overlooked in daily life.

Politics and War

The threat of nuclear attack generates strident criticism of the global refusal to address this existential risk. The desire to curb all unacceptable behaviors, both major and minor, may have at its core individual preservation and not the collective good. Human nature appears to respond most determinately to physical threat rather than giving way to moral or philosophical imperatives. On August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb (A-bomb) was dropped on Hiroshima. It contained about two pounds of uranium and resulted in 130,000 casualties. Subsequently, scientists developed the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), which generates up to several thousand times the explosive power of the A-bomb. The destructiveness of nuclear weapons results from their explosive blast, tremendous heat, and radioactivity, which can contaminate large areas. Although these weapons have the power to destroy mankind, the existence of nuclear deterrence has prevented the use of such weapons. The greatest destructive material is also the greatest equalizer in human history.1