On a door:

Are there some businesses that only work as monopolies? A lot of people would say that utilities and railroads and such fall into this category, but those just depend on critical masses of customers. There are plenty of places that are served by two railroads, each in its own right-of-way; and if you could get the permits to install the pipes, you could easily run two water systems in most cities. It might be most efficient to operate a single series of (water) tubes, but there’s no particular reason why there has to be only one.

A short story recently in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has me thinking, though.

Verizon will sell ads for its first St. Louis directory

Verizon joins more than a half-dozen competitors selling Yellow Pages ads in St. Louis this week.

[...]

AT&T Directory Operations, based in downtown St. Louis, distributes more than 1 million copies of its Greater St. Louis directory, as well as smaller numbers of neighborhood directories. Other local competitors include Yellow Book, Megabook, Impact Directories, the St. Louis Black Pages, Women’s Yellow Pages of St. Louis and Chinese Yellow Pages.

Jeff Oberschelp, a Verizon regional vice president, said the company decided to enter the St. Louis market because it believes it can offer a competitive value to advertisers here. [...]

Competitive? Is this actually a good thing for the consumer (and thus the advertiser) in the phone-directory business?

At Tino Manor in Front Royal, VA, we get at least four phone books.

This is the official phone book; it was issued in March 2006 by Sprint (now ‘Embarq’), who also send the phone bills and drive around in trucks maintaining wires. It’s actually published by Donnelley, but for Sprint. That’s not important, though. What’s important about this directory is that it is almost entirely useless.

It’s useless because it’s full of errors, in both the white pages and the yellow pages parts. Call a number listed in this book, and there’s a better than even chance that you’re going to get a wrong number or an out-of-service recording. I am in there twice, despite having only one phone line: and neither entry lists my actual phone number. The phone book has been like this for as long as we’ve lived here. Every year they print up and deliver another edition with a fresh set of errors.

It’s also useless because it covers a totally arbitrary area: it has complete listings for Front Royal and Washington (VA); white pages only listings for Culpeper and Sperryville; and business listings for Winchester.

Then there’s the Yellow Book.

This covers a much wider area, but of course it only covers those people who choose to advertise in it.

There’s also the EZ To Use Big Book:

Or, as we call it, PLUMBER, as PLUMBER is the biggest text on the cover. This one has offered up for sale its very identity.

And, finally, the Shentel Pages:

Shentel used to be the local phone company in the northern Shenandoah Valley; now they’re just an ISP and a brand name for an off-brand yellow pages.

In the end, we’ve stopped bothering with any of these books, even though at least one of them probably contains the information we’re likely to look for, because the time and consternation involved in hunting through all of them just isn’t worth the trouble.

This suggests an interesting hypothesis:

Consumers and businesses both are best served, in advertising, by monopolies or oligopolies.

And this goes double for classified advertising: every additional place that an advertiser has to buy space, and every additional place a consumer has to look for an ad imposes large costs on both the advertiser and the would-be consumer.

Classified advertising is absurdly easy to do online, but it was only when Craigslist came along and established a monopoly that it became very useful. Newspapers had been reluctant to put their classifieds online, because the classified ads drove the sale of a lot of newspapers. And all the non-Craigslist, non-newspaper classified advertising sites — of which there were thousands — didn’t achieve the critical mass that’s necessary to make them useful resources for consumers.

Last November, I complained about the user interface hoops that SourceForge, the open-source repository, needlessly makes you jump through in order to download anything. SF’s annoyances rise above the noise by virtue of the sheer number of times you’re required to choose from a list of n items, where n is equal to 1.

Today, I found something that trumps even that, though. CoRD, or Cocoa Remote Desktop (which you download from SourceForge), starts up after installation with this:

Yes, indeed. At least the developer of CoRD has the excuse that this is probably a bug.

The New Yorker has updated its DVD archive version, which I complained about here. For $20, you can get a replacement DVD 1 (of the 8 DVD set), which includes an improved version of the application and issues of the magazine up through April 2006.

The new application is better; it is noticeably faster. I suspect that what they have changed is not in fact the application but the database, but I haven’t looked into it. If they have just changed the database, this would go some way toward excusing them for not distributing the update (minus new issues) to everyone who paid for the old, defective version. The database is over 500MB, and it’s not really practical to distribute it online.

The new issues — which, in any case, it is entirely fair to require people to pay for — look great, and everything’s wonderful. I cannot comment on the DVD-swapping speed, as I gave up on that idiocy some time ago and just copied everything onto a hard disk. They now sell a version of the archive already loaded onto a portable hard drive, and that’s probably the way to go. I’d want to know what their response would be when that disk inevitably fails, though, before I bought one. Do you get another copy of the data when the hardware dies?

So it’s an improvement, but there are still problems — and they still seem to stem from what you might call a lack of perspective.

The most annoying problem, for me, is that the application still takes over your whole screen. On the Macintosh, the application opens a giant window that can’t be resized or moved, and that covers everything except for the menu bar and the Dock. You can close the window, or you can minimize it: that’s it.

Now, I cannot figure out why they decided to do this. The only thing I can think of is that they didn’t think they could trust the users to make the window large on their own, so they’d make it large for them.

The thing is, I don’t have this problem, and their attempt to ’solve’ it — I am being charitable in not just accusing them of being jerks — actually makes things worse for me.

I have a 30″ monitor, with a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels: I can easily fit a New Yorker spread on the screen at full size with room to spare. But The New Yorker greedily takes up that room, and renders the pages larger than actual size, making some of the images — they’re scanned at a lower resolution than the text — look bad.

Here’s the magazine on the screen, with a recent (paper) issue of The New Yorker for comparison:

When I use The Complete New Yorker, half of my screen, or about $1000 worth, is a useless, featureless gray, for no discernible reason. It’s as if when you opened a paper magazine, it blotted out the rest of your living room until you were done reading it. This is The New Yorker damn it, you’re going to pay attention! Look at that cartoon of the dog talking to the bartender! Now really think about it! Focus, damn you!

I ascribe this to arrogance, but it’s probably just a failure on the part of the developers to think that some people have very large displays. (And it’s even worse if you have multiple displays, because you can’t reposition the window to take advantage of the space you have.)

The other screen-size problem I complained about last October is still there, too: while the viewer is too large, the search tool is too small, and there’s no way to make it any larger. The search tool is sized to fit on a 1024×768 screen, and if you have a larger screen than that, it’s still sized to fit on a 1024×768 screen. This significantly reduces its utility, because you can’t see as much at once.

Here’s a snapshot of my whole screen, with the search tool outlined in red:

That’s it. That’s the only possible size or position for the search tool. If you’re looking at a long list of articles, this means scrolling, even if there’s room to make the window twice as large. If you’re looking through a bunch of articles, and you want to have the search results and the articles visible, tough luck. You can’t do it on a computer with a 1024×768 display, so The New Yorker has seen to it that you can’t do it on any display.

The other day, I complained about finding some places near here selling the Washington Post for fifty cents, instead of thirty-five cents. I’m sure that if I checked — if I could have figured out who was responsible, and asked them — they would have said something about gasoline prices.

Gas around here is back down to $2 a gallon now. I haven’t bothered to check whether the price of the Post has also dropped, because the machine I usually buy my paper from never raised its price.

Maybe it should, though. I don’t try to buy a paper every day, but on the days when I do try to buy one, more than half the time lately I have been finding the machine entirely sold out before 9 a.m.:

It’s been like this three days in a row now; the next time I’m passing, I will probably not bother to try to buy a paper. Burger King maintains house copies of both the Post and the appalling Northern Virginia Daily, and the demographics of Front Royal are such that I am usually the first person to pluck the Post from their rack. I save $0.35 (or $0.50), and the back seat of the Tinomobile doesn’t fill up with old newspapers.

But it’s not really the customer service failure that I’m interested in; it’s the corporate idiocy angle. If you do a search for Washington Post circulation on Google, you will not find words like ‘booming’ or ‘growing’ or even ‘holding steady’.

The media navel-gazers have a lot of explanations for this, but I have never seen them even mention the one thing that is within newspapers’ control. They can’t abolish the web, and they can’t get rid of TV, or reader apathy. But it is fully within their power to make it easier to buy the newspaper.

There’s precisely one place that I’m aware of on my end of Front Royal where I can buy the Post without having to wait in line or traipse all over a grocery store, or both. Is this machine outside a restaurant that serves breakfast? No. Is it outside a place that is open at all in the morning? No. Is it reliably stocked? No. In short, it’s placed and stocked for the convenience of the newspaper route guy, not would-be readers.

The newspapers are so focused on their external enemies, and their low opinion of their readers (a lot of big newspapers now produce a free daily tabloid full of celebrity ‘news’ and short, easy-to-read articles because they think that the public is too dull to understand the regular news), that they cannot see the most obvious and easily-correctable problems.