As not-Hepzeeba, I have long said that I would never bet against Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House and for 50 years a mainstay of the publishing biz. Epstein is that rare bird: an intellectual heavyweight, who shepherded many of his authors to the Pulitzer Prize, and at the same time a shrewd, enterprising, and shamelessly profit-oriented businessman.

Among the innovations he can lay claim to are:

the trade paperback (which has all but overtaken the mass market paperback format in popularity)

The New York Review of Books (co-founder, with his late ex-wife, Barbara Epstein)

The Reader’s Catalog

The Library of America

and now the Espresso Book Machine, featured as part of his new venture, On Demand Books.

“In theory, every book printed will be digitized, which means the market will be radically decentralized,” Epstein tells Publishers Weekly. The machines are expected to cost about $100,000 each and they will join similar quick-publish efforts such as the InstaBook machine. On Demand Books hopes the Espresso will be used by stores and libraries to print books that are out of stock or hard to find. The New York Public Library has already installed one in its Science, Industry and Business Library.

If you build it, they will come.

More power to Epstein.

Viewed one way, it looks like Matt Damon is a fan of capitalism and has a great sense of humor. The wall of the building where he lives is bedecked with a huge ad for the Bourne Ultimatum, as Fishbowl reports:

The Smoking Gun notes that the 50-foot-tall billboard was placed on the East Village co-op building where Matt lives with his wife and daughter at the beginning of the month. It turns out the spot on the side of Damon’s building is leased by Universal

What The Smoking Gun and Fishbowl NY haven’t considered is that the leasing arrangment with Universal to hang giant advertisements on the side of Damon’s building is also a giant Fuck You to the builders (and inhabitants—not that there are too many of them) of this turkey, which was built about five inches from his building and blocks Damon’s view of uptown.

I’m with Matt. I only wish he could get my building a deal to lease advertising space to Universal. We could use the dough.

The father of sociology, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” has been greatly misunderstood as a social Darwinist, claims a new biography. Carl Rollyson, writing in the New York Sun, explains:

The clinching scene of this intellectual biography is Spencer’s appearance at Delmonico’s, the famous New York City restaurant, where, on November 9, 1882, 200 of his admirers gathered to honor Spencer with a farewell banquet capping off his only American tour. Spencer told his American acolytes there was too much emphasis on the “gospel of work” — a direct blow to [his fan Andrew] Carnegie and his ilk. Now it was time, he said, to emphasize the “gospel of relaxation.”

The audience was in a state of shock, but Spencer was not attempting to be provocative. He had come to believe that overwork had ruined his own constitution, and that the evolutionary progress he believed in should lead to a world where people worked less and lived for pleasure, especially aesthetic enjoyment.

Hear, hear! So why was the audience shocked?

… Spencer saw an opportunity to level with sympathetic listeners. Or as Mr. Francis puts it, “Since he was addressing Americans, who he had mistakenly assumed liked to hear the truth, he had spoken more plainly than usual.” [e.a.]

Yes, that’s a mistake many made before Spencer, and that many make every day.

No one likes to hear the “awful truth, which hurts.” Billy Wilder said that about moviegoers. And we are all moviegoers.

I was going to get all huffy about this banal headline from the San Jose Mercury News

Bergman defined art-house genre

until I remembered that, in America, artistic movies—the real deal, as in the masterpieces created by the genius director Ingmar Bergman—indeed comprise nothing but just another genre.

When they’re not being dissed as inferior to the work of

Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson — two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman’s heyday.

Bergman’s films were inferior, says Jonathan Rosenbaum in his consideration of Bergman’s “overrated career,” because he merely had the power to entertain, whereas Dreyer and Bresson dared to challenge “conventional film-going habits.”

Surely people go to the movies to have their film-going habits challenged!

Following up on Kos’s declaration that the netroots are the center of the Democratic Party, Open Left’s Matt Stoller is quoted in today’s NYT:

” …a campaign to destroy the brand of the Blue Dogs is not far away.”

Oooooooh, who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?