#simon and schuster

[sharkchunks]

Why Amazon Sucks Reason #928374982

Almost a year ago, I ordered a copy of Rube Goldberg: Inventions from Amazon. My mistake for supporting them in anything but an emergency. I got the book on the right:

The book on the left however is the one I ordered. To be clear, this was not from "a seller on amazon," this was from AMAZON itself.

Note that it shows and claims to be the authentic book on the left above. But it was not, it was a shit-tier print-on-demand bootleg, made by Amazon itself and not Simon and Schuster as the page claimed:

They did this to others as well. Though they refused to post my review, this one got through-

Here is the print on demand page in the back of my Amazon book-

Here is how bad the reproductions are-

Best seen on the spine where Simon and Schuster's logo is literally a blurry mess-

I tried to report this to the publisher but the only thing I could find was an email address on their site that nobody replied to.

If anyone out there knows anyone in copyright law or the publisher, please let them know about this. Amazon is literally turning the publisher trademark into unreadable crap.

[brokehorrorfan]

Stephen Graham Jones (My Heart is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians) will publish The Buffalo Hunter Hunter on Match 18 via Saga Press.

Set in the American west of 1912, the 496-page horror novel follows a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.

Pre-order The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lisa Needham at Public Notice:

Reading the complaint in Donald Trump’s lawsuit against pollster Ann Selzer over her 2024 poll that found Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa, it’s hard not to give in to thoughts of how comically obscene it is. The suit stretches the interpretation of the relevant law — Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act — well past the breaking point. It leans heavily on “facts” that are nothing but Trump quoting Trump about being mad. It spends a good deal of time citing hard-right outlets like Breitbart as if they are neutral. It’s hard not to laugh at how absurd it is. But then you remember that ABC just gave Trump a total of $16 million rather than fight the paper-thin defamation lawsuit he brought against them. And that even after ABC knuckled under, Trump still has lawsuits against CBS, Simon & Schuster, and CNN. And then you also remember that Trump has stated he’s going to use all his might — and that of the government — to bury media he doesn’t like. All of this makes trying to rationally assess whether the lawsuit will succeed nearly impossible.

Trump can afford to go scorched earth whether his claims have any merit or not. He has bottomless wealth, particularly regarding legal fees, as he’s made his donors cover at least $100 million of them so far. He’s utterly unconcerned about whether something is true, and he seems to have a never-ending stream of lawyers willing to step up even though several have ended up facing sanctions, criminal charges, or both. Put simply, he has no incentive to back down, ever. All that being said, the lawsuit against Selzer is still straight-up trash, even if it’s trash that somehow manages to succeed because of the unique blend of horrible characteristics exclusive to Trump.

The nonsense is the point

Trump is alleging that Selzer, her Selzer & Company polling company, the Des Moines Register (the paper that published the poll), and the Register’s parent company — media behemoth Gannett — broke Iowa’s consumer fraud statute. To demonstrate this, Trump would have to prove actual fraud — as in that Selzer, the paper, and the publisher knew or should have known that the poll was fraudulent and that they intended people would rely on that fraud. But Trump doesn’t argue anything like that. What he does instead are include random quotes slamming Harris from places like Breitbart and a list of other times Selzer got poll predictions wrong.

[...]

Bullying the press into submission

So what happens now? Regrettably, the answer isn’t necessarily the same for all the defendants here. Gannett has already removed lawsuit from the Iowa state courts to the federal courts. There’s nothing particularly odd about that as such — cases can be shifted to federal court when the parties are in different jurisdictions and the damages claimed exceed $75,000. However, this also puts any loss Gannett would suffer in federal district court in Iowa as getting appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, where only one of the 11 current judges was nominated by a Democrat, and then on up to the exceedingly Trump-friendly US Supreme Court. To be fair, it isn’t clear that Iowa state courts would handle this case well either, and it may be that Gannett thinks that the federal courts, which deal with media lawsuits more often, are a better bet. But the one thing that is clear is that Gannett is also only looking out for Gannett. The notice of removal filed by the company is only on their behalf. The other defendants get dragged along, but Gannett is not, at least as of yet, providing a defense on behalf of Selzer, her company, or the Register. The party with the shallowest pockets and the least ability to withstand the juggernaut of endless Trump litigation is Selzer, which makes it hard for her to be the face of taking a hard line against Trump’s war on the media.

Donald Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register is a gross attack on the freedom of the press.

[oh-bother-stickers]

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Julian Gloag - Our Mother's House - Simon and Schuster - 1963 (jacket illustration by Milton Glaser)

[stone-cold-groove]

Pan Am Jet Flight Story Book - 1972.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster

Going to Defcon this weekend? I'm giving a keynote, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse," on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

Last November, publishing got some excellent news: the planned merger of Penguin Random House (the largest publisher in the history of human civilization) with its immediate competitor Simon & Schuster would not be permitted, thanks to the DOJ's deftly argued case against the deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

When I was a baby writer, there were dozens of large NY publishers. Today, there are five - and it was almost four. A publishing sector with five giant companies is bad news for writers (as Stephen King said at the trial, the idea that PRH and S&S would bid against each other for books was as absurd as the idea that he and his wife would bid against each other for their next family home).

But it's also bad news for publishing workers, a historically exploited and undervalued workforce whose labor conditions have only declined as the number of employers in the sector dwindled, leading to mass resignations:

https://lithub.com/unlivable-and-untenable-molly-mcghee-on-the-punishing-life-of-junior-publishing-employees/

It should go without saying that workers in sectors with few employers get worse deals from their bosses (see, e.g., the writers' strike and actors' strike). And yup, right on time, PRH, a wildly profitable publisher, fired a bunch of its most senior (and therefore hardest to push around) workers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/books/penguin-random-house-layoffs-buyouts.html

But publishing's contraction into a five-company cartel didn't occur in a vacuum. It was a normal response to monopolization elsewhere in its supply chain. First it was bookselling collapsing into two major chains. Then it was distribution going from 300 companies to three. Today, it's Amazon, a monopolist with unlimited access to the capital markets and a track record of treating publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/#the-internet-con

Monopolies are like Pringles (owned by the consumer packaged goods monopolist Procter & Gamble): you can't have just one. As soon as you get a monopoly in one part of the supply chain, every other part of that chain has to monopolize in self-defense.

Think of healthcare. Consolidation in pharma lead to price-gouging, where hospitals were suddenly paying 1,000% more for routine drugs. Hospitals formed regional monopolies and boycotted pharma companies unless they lowered their prices - and then turned around and screwed insurers, jacking up the price of care. Health insurers gobbled each other up in an orgy of mergers and fought the hospitals.

Now the health care system is composed of a series of gigantic, abusive monopolists - pharma, hospitals, medical equipment, pharmacy benefit managers, insurers - and they all conspire to wreck the lives of only two parts of the system who can't fight back: patients and health care workers. Patients pay more for worse care, and medical workers get paid less for worse working conditions.

So while there was no question that a PRH takeover of Simon & Schuster would be bad for writers and readers, it was also clear that S&S - and indeed, all of the Big Five publishers - would be under pressure from the monopolies in their own supply chain. What's more, it was clear that S&S couldn't remain tethered to Paramount, its current owner.

Last week, Paramount announced that it was going to flip S&S to KKR, one of the world's most notorious private equity companies. KKR has a long, long track record of ghastly behavior, and its portfolio currently includes other publishing industry firms, including one rotten monopolist, raising similar concerns to the ones that scuttled the PRH takeover last year:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/books/booksupdate/paramount-simon-and-schuster-kkr-sale.html

Let's review a little of KKR's track record, shall we? Most spectacularly, they are known for buying and destroying Toys R Us in a deal that saw them extract $200m from the company, leaving it bankrupt, with lifetime employees getting $0 in severance even as its executives paid themselves tens of millions in "performance bonuses":

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/03/private-equity-bosses-took-200m-out-of-toys-r-us-and-crashed-the-company-lifetime-employees-got-0-in-severance/

The pillaging of Toys R Us isn't the worst thing KKR did, but it was the most brazen. KKR lit a beloved national chain on fire and then walked away, hands in pockets, whistling. They didn't even bother to clear their former employees' sensitive personnel records out of the unlocked filing cabinets before they scarpered:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/23/exploring-the-ruins-of-a-toys-r-us-discovering-a-trove-of-sensitive-employee-data/

But as flashy as the Toys R Us caper was, it wasn't the worst. Private equity funds specialize in buying up businesses, loading them with debts, paying themselves, and then leaving them to collapse. They're sometimes called vulture capitalists, but they're really vampire capitalists:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/private-equity-buyout-kkr-houdaille/

Given a choice, PE companies don't want to prey on sick businesses - they preferentially drain off value from thriving ones, preferably ones that we must use, which is why PE - and KKR in particular - loves to buy health care companies.

Heard of the "surprise billing epidemic"? That's where you go to a hospital that's covered by your insurer, only to discover - after the fact - that the emergency room is operated by a separate, PE-backed company that charges you thousands for junk fees. KKR and Blackstone invented this scam, then funneled millions into fighting the No Surprises Act, which more-or-less killed it:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

KKR took one of the nation's largest healthcare providers, Envision, hostage to surprise billing, making it dependent on these fraudulent payments. When Congress finally acted to end this scam, KKR was able to take to the nation's editorial pages and damn Congress for recklessly endangering all the patients who relied on it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

Like any smart vampire, KKR doesn't drain its victim in one go. They find all kinds of ways to stretch out the blood supply. During the pandemic, KKR was front of the line to get massive bailouts for its health-care holdings, even as it fired health-care workers, increasing the workload and decreasing the pay of the survivors of its indiscriminate cuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#socialized-losses

It's not just emergency rooms. KKR bought and looted homes for people with disabilities, slashed wages, cut staff, and then feigned surprise at the deaths, abuse and misery that followed:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/kkr-brightspring-disability-private-equity-abuse

Workers' wages went down to $8/hour, and they were given 36 hour shifts, and then KKR threatened to have any worker who walked off the job criminally charged with patient abandonment:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

For KKR, people with disabilities and patients make great victims - disempowered and atomized, unable to fight back. No surprise, then, that so many of KKR's scams target poor people - another group that struggles to get justice when wronged. KKR took over Dollar General in 2007 and embarked on a nationwide expansion campaign, using abusive preferential distributor contracts and targeting community-owned grocers to trap poor people into buying the most heavily processed, least nutritious, most profitable food available:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

94.5% of the Paycheck Protection Program - designed to help small businesses keep their workers payrolled during lockdown - went to giant businesses, fraudulently siphoned off by companies like Longview Power, 40% owned by KKR:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#ppp

KKR also helped engineer a loophole in the Trump tax cuts, convincing Justin Muzinich to carve out taxes for C-Corporations, which let KKR save billions in taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/02/broken-windows/#Justin-Muzinich

KKR sinks its fangs in every part of the economy, thanks to the vast fortunes it amassed from its investors, ripped off from its customers, and fraudulently obtained from the public purse. After the pandemic, KKR scooped up hundreds of companies at firesale prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#blackstone-kkr

Ironically, the investors in KKR funds are also its victims - especially giant public pension funds, whom KKR has systematically defrauded for years:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/22/stimpank/#kentucky

And now KKR has come for Simon & Schuster. The buyout was trumpeted to the press as a done deal, but it's far from a fait accompli. Before the deal can close, the FTC will have to bless it. That blessing is far from a foregone conclusion. KKR also owns Overdrive, the monopoly supplier of e-lending software to libraries.

Overdrive has a host of predatory practices, loathed by both libraries and publishers (indeed, much of the publishing sector's outrage at library e-lending is really displaced anger at Overdrive). There's a plausible case that the merger of one of the Big Five publishers with the e-lending monopoly will present competition issues every bit as deal-breaking as the PRH/S&S merger posed.

(Image: Sefa Tekin/Pexels, modified)

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/08/vampire-capitalism/#kkr

[knickknackgalore]

"I'm Your Huckleberry" Autobiography Memoir by Val Kilmer

[garadinervi]

June Jordan, (1981), Civil Wars, with a new introduction by the author, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1995 [Wendy's Subway, Brooklyn, NY]

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Ph Simon and Schuster, NY, 1958

[balakinlb]

It's been a hot second since I posted anything, mainly because I was moving house and it was ... A LOT, but A bite of Pepper is still coming out in August!

Here is another preview from the book!

Clickitty-click to pre-throw money at it in my pinned!!!

[brokehorrorfan]

I Was a Teenage Slasher by New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians) will be published on July 16, 2024 via Simon & Schuster.

A slasher story told from the killer's perspective, the 384-page horror novel will be available in hardcover, e-book, and audio book. Jon Bush designed the jacket cover. Read on for the synopsis.

1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.

Pre-order I Was a Teenage by Stephen Graham Jones.

[andiree]

GUYS, the cover for Ready or Not was just revealed by SimonTeen! 🤗 I’ve been sitting on this for what feels like millennia, and I’m so excited to finally get to share it with you 💞 And I miiiight be biased, but this is my fave cover yet. It’s really really wild seeing my name up there. TY to Karyn Lee for the direction, my color balancing queen 👑 Pre-order yours today, tell your friends, tell your mom, tell the rando on the subway 🗣️ And read more about Ready or Not and other upcoming titles of Summer 2024 here!

[hardcore-gaming-101]

Top 47K - Star Trek: Borg

Join the HG101 gang as they discuss and rank an ambitious FMV game starring some (two) Next Generation cast members.

[cherryblossomshadow]

Capitalism's Washing Machine

Hamilton Nolan

Pete Stavros, the co-head of private equity at the gargantuan firm KKR, which recently bought the publishing house Simon & Schuster. Stavros was bragging about a KKR program that shares a small portion of the eventual profits of a private equity deal with the employees of the company in question. Reporter Megan Greenwell asked him why it wouldn’t be better to just raise the low salaries of Simon & Schuster employees instead.

Stavros replied:

We are managers of other people’s money - [wealthy people's money, yes, but also] teachers’ retirement funds If you’re managing teachers’ pension money and you want to just raise everyone’s salary, that is on the backs of teachers, which is not ethical, and it’s not our money.

.

Consider this typical process:

Oppressed by the unchecked power of capital, workers form a union.

Unionized workers use their united power to negotiate a pension plan for themselves.

That pension plan takes money from the workers and gives it to investment firms like KKR, with the mandate to grow it.

Investment firms take the workers’ money and buy other businesses, full of other workers.

The investment firms economically oppress the workers at the companies they own, in order to maximize profits.

The profits reaped by the exploitation of the new workers fund the retirement plans of the old workers.

This is a simple machine that reflects the incentives of capitalism. As soon as you begin to participate in this system (which anyone who wants to not retire in poverty must do) you find that your own incentives have been arranged in the same bloodless direction.

To hear a private equity executive speak of the idea of raising workers’ salaries as “not ethical” because it would hurt investors—who are hardworking teachers, after all!—is so emblematic of the monstrously clever nature of this system that I almost have to respect it.

(Note that this passion for being a good steward of every last precious dollar for the teachers does not prevent private equity executives from taking a huge slice of the profits for themselves.)

.

According to the excellent labor researcher Chris Bohner, the total combined financial assets (cash, investments, real estate) of American labor unions are a little more than $30 billion. But the total assets of private collectively bargained pension funds are nearly three fucking trillion dollars. And public pension funds have another four and half trillion on top of that. Lay your head back for a moment, close your eyes, and dream of what could be accomplished if organized labor could invest those trillions of dollars in ways that bolstered the power of the working class, rather than undermined it. Mmm. Yeah. That’s nice.

On the other hand, business interests understand quite well how bad such a thing would be for them, and so America has erected an entire edifice of laws reining in what can be done with pension money, and who can make the decisions. (The current Republican crusade against all forms of ESG investing is motivated by this underlying realization that it would be bad for right wing political goals if the largest pools of capital in the country can be wielded in service of non-right wing political goals.)

.

To be clear, this discussion is not about “Let’s take your hard earned pension money and spend it all on COMMUNIST LEAFLETS.” The general idea is that pension funds can create sets of standards that guide what they invest in, to make sure they are not funding the direct oppression of some other union workers (or child labor in their supply chains, or environmental destruction, or whatever), and also that pension funds can create lists of demands that they attach to their money, for any investment firms that want to manage it. To give one obvious example, a union pension fund could say that any private equity firm that wants its money has to agree to neutrality in any union campaign that arises at any of the companies it manages. Stuff like that. If you try to have this discussion in the political arena the other side will go directly to “They want to lose all your retirement money by giving it to freaking Ben and Jerry’s to build union ice cream shops in Palestine!” The quality of the public discussion, I’m afraid, tends to be low.

.

The post you are now reading has only scratched the surface of this topic … Mostly, this is a reminder that we can never do an accurate calculus of how far we’ve come on the road to salvation without reckoning with all of the interconnected pieces of where our own capital flows.

It’s easy to think, “Workers unionized. Workers got a contract. Workers got a pension. Workers are winning.”

But if all that pension got funded by, you know, throwing 30,000 Toys R Us employees out of work with no severance, it’s not really a win for the workers of the world.

We gotta think holistically, people.

Our money is part of our power. We have trillions of fucking dollars. Trillions. Wall Street will do the bidding of the working class for that kind of money. We just have to get it together to ask.

[stone-cold-groove]

Title page from Dale Evans and the Coyote - 1956.