Radley Balko what will happen to the court-document stealing deputy of Maricopa County: "I can't think of another case where a judge has ordered someone jailed for contempt and the police department has refused to carry out the order. I'm not sure what would happen next. A duel? Arm wrestling?"

A new study conducted in Florida has given scientists reason to believe that hammerhead sharks may have vision comparable to that of humans. The researchers measured electrical activity in the eyes of half a dozen sharks from three different hammerhead species. They then put electrodes under the sharks' corneas and recorded electrical activity while shining lights in horizontal and vertical arcs around each eye. Compared to normal-headed sharks, the hammerheads had three times the visual overlap — that's what creates stereo vision and depth perception in animals with eyes that face forward. This, of course, helps them be faster and more efficient at hunting prey. But there's a catch: because their eyes are so far apart, hammerheads have these giant blind spots right in the middle of their head. As study leader Michelle McComb put it in an interview with National Geographic:

There's actually been anecdotal claims by divers that they see little fish schooling right in front of the hammerheads' heads. It's like the fish are swimming by and saying, Ha, ha, ha, you can't see me!

Hammerhead sharks have "human" vision [National Geographic] Image via Eric Charlton's Flickr

I'm very happy to welcome my friend Paul Spinrad back as a guest blogger. If you missed him the first time around, do yourself a favor and check out his previous posts on Boing Boing.

Paul is one of the most original thinkers I know, and a warm, friendly person. He's a freelance writer/editor with catholic interests, and is the Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He was also an early contributor to bOING bOING when it was an online zine. He lives in San Francisco. Please give him a warm welcome!

Clay Shirky's essay on the past and future of bookselling is provocative. I think he really nails something with his taxonomy of the reasons that people worry about bookstores, but I'm not sure I buy his conclusion -- that bookselling might be best served on an NPR/nonprofit model.

In my experience, people make this argument for one of three reasons.

This first is that some people simply dislike change. For this group, the conviction that the world is getting worse merely attaches to whatever seems to be changing. These people will be complaining about kids today and their baggy pants and their online bookstores 'til the day they die.

A second group genuinely believes it's still the 1990s somewhere. They imagine that the only outlets for books between Midtown and the Mission are Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble, that few people in Nebraska have ever heard of Amazon, that countless avid readers have money for books but don't own a computer. This group believes, in other words, that book buying is a widespread activity while internet access is for elites, the opposite of the actual case.

A third group, though, is making the 'access to literature' argument without much real commitment to its truth or falsehood, because they aren't actually worried about access to literature, they are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.

I have been a bookseller for most of my life, off and on (I directly sell over 25,000 books a year through reviews on this site, which makes me a fairly large independent bookstore all on my own). I've worked in big, small, chain and specialist stores. I also obsessively check out bookstores, dragging my family into them wherever I go.

I think that Clay's probably right that the most traditionally profitable sector of bookselling -- mass-produced bestsellers -- is going to keep on migrating onto the web (that's where I get most of my mass-produced bestsellers, certainly). But I also think that there's something to be said for physical street-level stores de-emphasizing those products in favor of the simultaneous pursuit of the top- and bottom-end of the markets.

On the bottom-end of the market, there's the Espresso book printer, as currently in operation in the wonderful Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. This thing will print any public domain book that Google has scanned, in about 4 minutes, for $8. The margins are usually pretty good (they're lower on longer books, and a fat-enough book could be a money-loser, of course). And there are no warehousing, ordering, shelving or other expenses associated with them. Also, it's unlikely that we'll have them in our houses anytime soon (though we may get them at the library and community center).

At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself. This is a purely curatorial role, the classic thing that a great retailer does, and it's one of the most exciting bookstore sections I've browsed in years. And even so, there's lots of room for improvement: Google Books produces the blandest, most boring covers for its PD books, and there's plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers, with customer-supplied covers (the gift possibilities are bottomless), and so on. I can even imagine the profs across the street producing annotated versions -- say, a treatise on Alice in Wonderland with reproductions of ten different editions' illustrations and selling them through the store's printer and shelf-space, restoring the ancient bookseller/book-publisher role.

Of course, most of the mass-produced catalog will probably end up in the print-on-demand catalog some day, and stores will be able to fill those orders, too. But if you already know what book you want, why bother going to a store? (Unless you're in too much of a hurry to wait for the mail).

On the other hand, there's plenty of ways that a physical store could offer added value on mass-market titles: localized covers, signed books, high production-value gift editions, a point-of-sale "donate to our neighborhood schools" kiosk that lets you print a book on the spot for a classroom that's requested it...

At the other end of the scale, the high-end, there's the book-as-object phenomenon. Taschen and a few other art-book publishers have figured out how to make a market out of this, and what's more, they've aggressively pursued non-bookstore retail channels (Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, etc) where the margins are lower, but the foot-traffic is much, much higher.

So yes, there's something really beautiful, and commercially compelling about a shelf or table full of books that are themselves beautiful -- beautifully made, beautifully presented. But what if there were more to it? What about hand-made books? Limited runs? The kind of thing that you mostly see today on the web (because the audience is spread too thin for physical retail to make sense), where they show poorly and make a less compelling case. Books in crazy trim sizes -- huge books like the Little Nemo treasuries, or even the gargantuan Bhutan book.

These are very expensive to inventory, and that suggests that they should probably be consigned, rather than sold (indeed, booksellers could serve as fulfillers for direct orders taken over the Web, since they're apt to be closer to the customer).

Both of these ends of the market are ripe for heavy localization, curated to suit local tastes and aesthetics. They can feature local artists, local choices, in a million ways, and serve as creative hubs for their communities. And both these ends of the market have good, healthy margins and (with the right consignment model) are also cheap to stock.

In that world, booksellers become a lot more like bloggers who specialize in all things bookish -- wunderkammerers who stock exactly the right book for the right people in the right neighborhood.

Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization

Former beauty queen Solange Magnano died from plastic surgery complications on Sunday. She was Miss Argentina in 1994, and is the mother of 7-year old twins. 1 in 30 Argentines have had plastic surgery, according to CNN.

Dan Gillmor sez,

As everyone knows, the nation's scam artists, monopolists and market-riggers have all gone into hibernation during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This has given the Federal Trade Commission the breathing room it needs to intercede in an arena where its role is, at best, unclear.

This week, the commission is holding a two-day workshop entitled How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? -- the purpose of which is 'to explore how the Internet has affected journalism.'

The commission has discovered that the advertising model which once supported many kinds of journalism has eroded. Quoting several economists, the workshop notice says 'public affairs reporting may indeed be particularly subject to market failure.'

Market failure? What about the market failure -- which as far as I can tell never got any attention from a succession of FTC people during the past half-century -- of the monopolies and oligopolies created by media organizations during that period? The public affairs journalism was, for the most part, a modest spinoff of the extortionate advertising prices they charged when they had near-absolute market power to charge anything they wished. Only when there's real competition does the FTC get interested.

?FTC's Shallow Dive into Journalism's Future (Thanks, Dan!)

Brian Klug noticed a dumpster in his parking lot painted incorrectly. He fixed it in 'shop.

Adventures with Chocolate: 80 sensational recipe is chocolate genius Paul A. Young's first foray into cook-books, and, like his wonderful shops in London, it's playful, inspiring, delicious and surprising.

Young's gifted touch with truffles, brownies and drinking chocolate have made his Islington store a fixture in our orbit around London. My wife's pregnancy was eased with his sea-salt caramels; we celebrated the birth with kalamansi truffles. The baby practically melted when she first tried a crumb of his cherry brownie. I am visited by Paul's chocolate in my dreams. I have been conditioned to start salivating when I reach the end of Camden Passage, and by the time I reach the shop, I need a bib to catch the dribble.

And here are all of Paul's secrets, laid bare in a superbly designed and printed book whose pornographically chocolated pages make you want to surreptitiously taste them (I tasted them. Tasted like clay-coated heavy paper stock). Paul's recipes are easy to follow and are equal parts inspirational (he makes it clear enough that even ham-fisted me believes that I can make them) and aspirational (in reality, it's a lot more likely that I'll just pop in on the Camden Passage shop and buy another box). And his essay on how he became a chocolatier, as well as his essays on buying and preparing chocolate, are sensational.

And truth be told, there are some recipes here I'd like to try for a special occasion: the savory chocolate recipes, if only because Paul doesn't actually sell these in the shop and I want to find out what a honey-cured bacon, Stilton and chocolate sandwich tastes like, or sip some cocoa-bean infused vodka, or try a salted black-olive bar with 600g of Ghanian tempered 68% dark chocolate.

I've just heard that the entire first run of Adventures with Chocolate has already sold out, but the second printing is due in less than a week, and should arrive in time for Christmas.

Sea-salted chocolate and pecan tart

Venezuelan chocolate pancakes with chocolate maple syrup

Adventures with Chocolate: 80 sensational recipe

Diane sez,

We are starting up a shiny new SF convention in downtown Toronto, called SFContario. The inaugural convention will take place November 19-21st 2010 at the Ramada Plaza Hotel in downtown Toronto. It's a lovely hotel that overlooks Allan Gardens and is a stone's throw away from all the restaurants and attractions downtown Toronto has to offer. Our confirmed guests of honour are:

Michael Swanwick Author GOH
Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden Editor GOH's
Geri Sullivan Fan GOH
Karen Linsley Filk GOH

We're going to have a great con! Anyone wishing to register can do so online. Current registration rate is $35 and will be increasing to $45 on December 9th.

SFContario (Thanks, Diane!)

Gnat sez, "YouTube video of national treasure/musician Tim O'Brien, singing his song about the phantom phone call syndrome. In the words of the song:

You feel it vibrate, you reach for the cell
But no one's there, that's how you tell

Tim O'Brien: Phantom Phone (Thanks, Gnat!)