Thinking About Poverty, Part 1

This is the first of a two part article.

Part 1: Inequities and Child Poverty

Starting Over, 1935 by Dorothea Lange

People don't really like to think about poverty, let alone talk about it. I'd go so far as to say many people simply ignore it. Too depressing, I guess. For those of us that have, it seems as if turning a blind eye to the have-nots is all too easy. It's definitely less painful, if you're a person with even a modicum of conscience. But looking around these days, I think we're getting to the point where we need to talk openly about the homeless, the poor, the working poor and what is of absolutely no help to any of those groups: blaming them instead of coming up with some kind of meaningful plan. Sometimes, I think that as a people, and likely eventually as a planet, we need to start over and perhaps see things from different perspectives on the issue of poverty and its causes and responsibilities. What steps, seemingly random or calculated, have set a segment of the population on the path into poverty or assure that the impoverished stay poor.

Not everybody shrinks from talking frankly about poverty. Last week, I read an impassioned blog post by one of my favorite authors of fiction, Seanan McGuire. An author of fantasy, her post was pure non-fiction advocacy. It isn't the first time that she's stopped me in my tracks with one of her posts, either. She's written more than a few on her blog that cut through all the (excuse the English) bullshit and strike at the heart of what it was like growing up poor, bullied, and so bright that every indignity of what you were living was fully and painfully absorbed. She's processed her experiences in an insightful way for those of us who haven't quite walked that same path but ought to spend more time thinking about such paths if we are to be decent human beings.  Her post last Friday, titled The Digital Divide, was about how many Americans cannot afford e-Readers, and that printed paper books must not be allowed to be die out because it effectively means that books will become all but inaccessible to many impoverished Americans. In her powerful post she speaks poignantly about what living in poverty and struggling to acquire books to read was like for her. (She is now a best-selling, Campbell/Hugo Award-winning author.) How, she asks, will our future generations of young people too poor to afford those light and sleek e-Readers or too easily robbed of them even if they had them, read? How indeed, I wonder. Because reading is knowledge and knowledge was supposed to be a path out of the hell that is poverty. As Seanan McGuire eloquently puts it, e-Books dominating the publication market now represent, in her mind, a deepening of the social and economic inequalities and threaten to become a barrier to the access of knowledge, enjoyment, and simple escape, for the poor.


Driving the idea of a digital divide still deeper in my mind was a link on Sociological Images, forwarded to me over the weekend by Cynical Nymph. It shows an image of a job posting in QR (Quick Response code). QR codes are those little square images you've probably seen in catalogs and ads. You scan the image with your phone by snapping a picture and details embedded in that image lead you, by way of a QR application, to a uniform resource locator (URL) with information. Great plan but in this instance that job listing is only accessible to those looking for jobs who are also fortunate enough to own smartphones. Steve Grimes, who found the image, also remarks on a growing reliance on technology that only the not-impoverished can afford. (Need a job? Hey, don't be so poor you don't have a smartphone with internet access and a QR reader app, okay? If you don't have a smartphone, this job isn't for you. Really, not smart of you not to have the money for that smartphone and its data package. Don't you be poor, you job-needer, you.)

QR code job listing, from Cyborgology

McGuire didn't just talk about the digital divide, though. She talks about what I've been surprised more people haven't been shouting about in the past week: the societal divide, as in wow, at least 15.1% of the population is living now in poverty in America and is that even really an accurate number?

I had posted a link, and even an image, about that 15.1% statistic on that my personal FB page (with about 300 friends) about a week ago and there were no takers. Not a single comment. I had also read a post by Suzy Khimm on Ezra Klein's WonkBlog at the Washington Post, in which she pointed out that the National Academy of Sciences estimates indicate that poverty is significantly higher than the Census Bureau estimates because the metrics the US Census uses to gauge poverty are so out of date. Some new methodology estimates from the NAS suggest the rate is higher, perhaps closer to 16% but other metrics say it's lower. Still, even if the poverty level in this country is merely 15.1%, it's a frightening figure. However, if we look at Census estimates of childhood poverty, the rate is stunning: 22% of Americans under the age of 18 are living in poverty. As someone advocating for child welfare, that is a stunning statistic to me. More than one in every five children in the USA is living in poverty. I had an article about that figure on my personal Facebook page and it didn't garner a single comment, either, although three people commented on my Bright Nepenthe Facebook page posting, including the former head of the Guardian ad Litem program here in Miami, who said that she recalled that in the 1980's it was one in four. I checked but the only figures I can see are those at ChildStats.gov which show that at its peak in 1983, child poverty was pretty much what it is now- 22%. But surprisingly it was equally bad in 1993-94. What is interesting though, rather than just looking at the number of children living in poverty, is the comparative distribution of income relative to the poverty line over the past thirty years. While the number of children living in extreme poverty and below the poverty level but not in extreme poverty has increased from 17.9% in 1980 to 20.1% in 2009, the number of children ages 0-17 living in high and very high income homes has increased dramatically, from around 21% in 1980 to around 40% in 2009. Low income (defined as a family of four at roughly twice the poverty income level or less) and medium income families have dropped sharply, from 65% of all children in 1980, to about 52% in 2009. While some families may have gotten better off in the past thirty years, the poor largely stayed poor. The increasingly stratified population was still, as of the measures in 2009, skewed toward children living better. But the middle economic class for children was thinning. In fact, the most current figures from the National Center for Children in Poverty state that in addition to the high level of children in poverty, they estimate 42% of all children now live in low income families, indicating a pronounced shift away from middle incomes is occurring, giving credence to the whole income gap and and growing perception of inequity in this country.

Anyway, as a voracious childhood reader and avid buyer of used books, I really grokked what Seanan McGuire was saying in her recent post. Eliminating print books potentially steals something from already poor children. Her recollections about being poor and wanting to read also made me recall an earlier post of hers, in which I'll never forget her mentioning that in her family, they were so poor that ketchup really was considered a vegetable. The memory of that post, and its reference to how you perceive food when you're poor, takes me to a few other things I've been reading.

In 2011, as the economy and joblessness have worsened, how many kids are going to sleep at night hungry? How many don't know where their next meal would come from? We don't really know, do we? (And in general, feeding the poor or homeless has become an increasingly embittered topic, especially in my state of Florida.)

First off, going back to ChildStats.gov, they have this table that talks about food insecurity, which basically means not knowing where your next meal is coming from, or if you'll even have one that night. From 1995, when they began tracking this figure, to 2009, the percentage of children ages 0-17 living in households with overt food insecurity increased from 19.4 to 23.2%. Not all that sharp an increase, unless you're a hungry child, of course. Food insecurity for children in low income and poverty income households increased from 70% in 1995 to 85% of those households in 2009. And among those living at 200% of the poverty level, surprisingly food insecurity increased from 4.8% of households to 9.1% of households, a pronounced increase in the number of children who, though not living in poverty or even low income families, didn't have the security of knowing where their next meal was coming from. We'll revisit that table briefly when considering the effects of education on poverty in Part 2 of Thinking About Poverty. 


But, as something for you to think about today, consider this: the 2009 estimate of the child population in this country was 74.5 million. The USDA's National School Lunch Program, which provides free or reduced cost lunches (in addition to free breakfast and free after school snacks to qualified students in programs through Child Developmental Services departments), estimated that in 2009 some 31 million children qualified for free or reduced cost lunches. Children living in households with less than 130% of the federally defined poverty level income for their family are entitled to free lunch. Children living in households with 130 - 185% of the poverty level income are entitled to reduced cost lunch. So here's the thought: in 2009, the total number of children living in poverty and low income households (defined as up to 199% of the poverty level income) was 41.7% of the population. That comes out to about 31 million, actually. Well, more like 31.4 million. But does that mean if you were in that unlucky sliver of low income families with incomes between 185% and 199% of the poverty level income, you didn't get a reduced cost lunch? Yes, it likely does. That's falling through the cracks of the system, right there.  It's quite possible to be poor even when you're not strictly speaking, in federal terms, living in poverty. It's possible to be poor and hungry.*


Current estimates for children in America: 22% live in poverty, 42% live in low income households.

Sharecroppers Children Gather Food by Dorothea Lange

Look for Part 2 tomorrow, where we will focus on the homeless, the poor, how we count them and one of the most disturbing comments on the homeless I've ever heard by an elected official. Of course, it was from right here in my own proud state of Florida.

---

*I have seen more than a few area public schools scramble trying to provide food for children who fall through those cracks. Teachers recognize when their students are hungry.  I have seen kind-hearted teachers who will bring extra food for a child who didn't qualify or whose qualifications have been delayed, as sometimes happens when a child enters the foster care system and the paperwork for a free breakfast and lunch was not completely properly. I have also personally known children in foster care who were told by foster parents that they could not eat those meals at home on school days and who refused to provide those meals on the weekends. Foster children who feared a long, hungry weekend without those school meals. No kidding. Of course, when you see stuff like that, you report it. And hope the foster parent loses their license. But they don't always. If fact, one foster parent that I reported for not adequately feeding the three children in her care actually adopted a child after that report.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2011

More on the topic of eBooks, pricing and those pirated PDFs

There are so many interesting opinions to be found on the subject of Amazon, eBook price manipulation, release date manipulation and such. One of my recent blog perusers found me on a link that also led to:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-a-stackpole/who-benefits-from-high-eb_b_522137.html

And my lovely friend Sally sent me this gem from Aussie author Narrelle M. Harris. I'm ordering her book and showing it off here just because I like her classy, subtle and dry humored take on the issue. No cement bats for this lady... 

narrellemharris.com

All readers should remember that it's the authors who are affected by these battles far more than the readers. They get the emails, they get the pressure, they get the losses of royalties when eBooks aren't available and people start doing torrents of PDF files of their books or swapping them on share sites. If you're frustrated with Amazon or B&N or Sony or Apple about their price structure, their politics of reading materials, write THEM. Call them out on it. You, as the buying public have power that your favorite authors sadly do not have.

Thoughts on the quiet battle between Publishers and eBook Distributors

(photo attribution unknown)

It's become clear in recent months that there's a quiet war going on. Unless you're a reader who owns an electronic bookreader, or someone who reads electronic books on a computer eReader app, you probably haven't heard the battle cries. The opposing parties are The Publishers (who include Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, Ace Penguin and a variety of others) and The Distributors of eBooks (who include most notably Amazon's Kindle division but also Sony's eReader, Barnes and Noble's Nook and the new kid on the block, Apple's iPad iBook app). The collaterally damaged parties include the reading public and especially the authors, who are caught in the middle between their readers and their publishers.

The initial shots were fired back in December 2009 by Simon and Schuster, as mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. The tactic of delaying the release of eBooks appears to be geared toward getting more actual hardcover sales versus virtual e-hardcover sales. Basically in this scheme the pricing strategy places eBooks in between hardcovers and paperbacks. Hardcovers can net as much as $25-30 for NY Times Bestselling authors at straight retail. If you have a mass-seller discount of perhaps 20% (think buying a new release on sale in your local Barnes and Noble) that hardcover price is still well above the electronic book price of a product like a Kindle bestseller priced at $9.99 - 12.99, but even that eBook costs more than a paperback version of a bestseller, marketed in the $7.99 - 9.99 price range. So you can look at a publishing industry strategy take shape. Get the hardcover revenue first, then get the eBook revenue shortly thereafter, then at the one year mark, get the low-end mass paperback revenues.

Sounds like a reasonable plan, right? A sound marketing strategy. And Apple has entered the market with the bold strategy of saying that it will allow publishers to set the prices for the eBooks sold through iBook. 

Well, as a reader, I have several thoughts on the subject. I'll own up to the fact that I have a Kindle DX, my child has a Nook, and I've thought about getting the iPad and would buy books in iBook, Kindle or eReader formats for that device. What are my problems with the The Publishers and The Distributors?

First, let me say that I correspond with a couple of authors on an occasional basis because of my book discussion board. The author that I have the most congenial relationship with had a new release delayed back in February and she actually told me that one reader sent her a complaint email that was mean enough to make her cry. Authors that I'm generally aware of who are enduring publication delays for eBooks of their new releases include Jodi Picoult, Kim Harrison, Seanan McGuire, Charlaine Harris and Ilona Andrews. (All popular authors, one of whom was just nominated for a Hugo Award for new authors.) Some of these authors are really faced with anger from their readers for something an author has absolutely ZERO control over. And I feel for these authors because as a person running a book discussion board, you see that interest comes in waves. It swells and then wanes on the author threads on my modest site. People read a book, discuss it with a burst of interest and enthusiasm then that author's thread may lie dormant for weeks or even months. What gets more readers for an author is people discussing your books. But if you can't get the book being discussed, you may not get back to it once it's available to you. So it's a Carpe Diem kind of deal when you have a new release. If readers tied to a particular platform or format don't have the option of purchasing, especially with the issue of popular fiction authors, you may not get that reader back very soon as they move on to the next available popular fiction book. And there are always other books in that crowded market. I actually asked people on my book discussion board to lobby Amazon for release of the eBook for the author who had that reader who wrote her the mean complaint. I felt so terrible for her that some of her fans had been mean enough in their complaints to upset her enough to make her cry. It took about three to four weeks but eventually Amazon released the Kindle edition of her novel, which comes from a smaller publishing house, not tied to one of the megapublishers who has the hold-off stance. Was it Amazon's ePublisher that delayed or was it the author's contracted publishing house? Hard to say but it wasn't the author's fault, no matter how you slice it.

So my thoughts about The Publishers' eBook marketing strategy, and the Distributor's price structuring contribution to how this strategy evolved, beyond the fact that they may jointly lose part of their fickle readership market, which has a short attention span when it comes to waiting and a limited budget in this economy:

1) Continuing to drive sales of books printed on paper is environmentally irresponsible.

This is my chief reason for shifting to reading books electronically. Other than my nuclear-powered electrical usage, appropriate battery disposal and initial production of the silicon components, eBooks are mostly clean, green books for the reader. And probably for the publisher, too. They don't kill trees and aren't even using recycled paper (which as a chemist, I can assure you is nowhere near as environmentally friendly as you'd like to believe). They take up less space, and aren't a fire hazard, a point you'd surely give thought to if you ever visited my house and looked at the libraries of its three resident and diehard readers. 


Trying to make your money back on paper products is anti-green. No two ways about it.

2) As the parent of a visually impaired child, and the daughter of a visually impaired parent, eBooks allow the visually impaired to read more easily with an adjustable font size. 

I will never forget the image of my child trying to wade through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in large print. When Order of the Phoenix came out, he told me he'd read the regular print edition slowly and with a magnifier if he had to, rather than strain his 10 year old arms with a heavy large print edition of the book. And then there was the whole issue of the publication delays for production of large print books. Do they ever get released on their promise date? I'm looking as I write this post at NY Times Bestselling author Charlaine Harris's new book, which is currently #1 in Sales ranks at Amazon. No promised Kindle release date and a large print edition promised for release today but still not released. Did I mention that it is also three times the cost of the current Amazon price for the regular print edition? So if you're visually impaired you should not just wait but pay much more? This is an issue that I just don't see anyone mentioning about eBooks. They're a life-saver for the visually-challenged. Many publishers are also refusing to let books be published in text to speech mode. Again, a slap to the visually or learning disabled who WANT to read. Not everyone can afford the audio book with its slick production values, and the print version of the book that will allow a struggling reader to read along with spoken text. I know a number of adults who are non-native speakers as well who love the text to speech option. They want to read in, and improve, their English. No such luck with some of the current publisher marketing strategies. Allowing text to speech clearly cuts into the audiobook revenue in their mind. 

3) International readers and Piracy are an issue when you delay eBooks.

Let's face it, for every reader out there who has access to buying (if they can afford it) a hardcover, there's a reader who doesn't have that access. There are slews of international readers of English language print books who bought international versions of the Kindle and Sony eReader because they wanted to read books in English. Hey, my own brother in law is one of them. And what are these international readers going to do when Ace or Macmillan or Simon and Schuster say you can't have the soft copy of a new release until one, two, three, four months later? They're going to get a PDF copy via a torrent or some internet sharing site. And what's the risk of that? If they get ticked or feel generous, they're going to share with their friends. Maybe even their US or UK based friends. The loss of potential international purchases of a new release is a substantial loss. Fully half the members of my book discussion board are non-US based. How do they get their books? Well, I've sent quite a few books off to places like Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and such. But a lot of them? They'll get a book they covet any way they can. Sure they may buy a used copy of that same book if they enjoyed it when they come across it later. But the publishers have to hope they enjoyed it enough to want to own it when they're done reading it. Can I blame these readers? Really, in a lot of ways I can't. They bought into the idea that international versions of eBook readers would allow them to own and read their favorite authors legally and along with all their friends who are better placed for timely access. When you have steep discounts for hardcovers on sites like Barnes and Noble and Amazon, and international buyers who don't want to bear the cost of expensive shipping (that in some cases rivals the purchase price of the book!), buying the eBook format makes sense. The overhead costs of production of an eBook are much lower than for a print book. For an international market, you can at least garner a wider readership. All of which brings me to my final point.

There's been much talk of distributor greed (was Amazon gunning for a monopoly? Most definitely. But they surely won't get one with Apple entering the competition, as their Kindle Reader for the iPad and iPod Touch apps clearly demonstrate a bow to the almighty Steve Jobs) and reader greed (wanting cheap books- hey who doesn't? Understandably, authors and publishers, that's who). Yes, it's true that distributors and readers can be greedy. Authors need to make enough money to keep themselves writing and that publishers need to recover their production costs. But an eBook is just a file, people. A file  with very low production costs compared to printing and binding even a paperback. And a dirty little secret is the fact that many authors will tell you that they get a larger royalty from an eBook than a hardcover or paperback. Do I mind giving an author whose books I like a higher price for the digital version than $9.99? You know what? Really, I don't, Amazon. I just don't. If I like iBooks better, I'll probably buy the iBook version over the Kindle version, in fact. How's that? Maybe they have fewer typos and format errors? For $3-5 more per book, you can bet I'd go with iBook. In fact, I even feel happier knowing that an author I like may get a larger share. There's also the interesting fact that other than the Nook, digital rights management makes an eBook very, very hard to loan. And even the Nook only allows the purchaser to loan the book file for 14 days. So if I like a Kindle eBook, I can recommend it to a friend but not loan it and lose the publisher their revenues by loaning. And quite a few of my friends and I share book recommendations and subsequently purchase eBooks for the Kindle or the iPad or the Nook.

So who's really losing out here? Seems to me that there's quite a bit of losing to go around for everyone. But in a world of dwindling readers, the biggest losers seem to be authors and publishers. I can always find something else to read. Why, I have a book on reserve request at my library even now. No Kindle edition for four months? Hey, if I decide I like it, I might even buy a hardcover copy later on, just as I've done with a number of books that I read first. On my Kindle. That's right, if I really loved the book, and think it's paperworthy, I buy it again, preferably in hardcover. So distributors who want buyers had better think about what they're doing with their price structure and publishers had better think about what they are as well. Punishing authors and readers is not going to make any of us happy. I'm sure it's going to make authors, especially, unhappy.


There has to be a way to make this work better for everyone involved. Alienating readers is a bad place to be. For publishers, distributors, and most of all, for the people who give us the written words we enjoy. And that's what is most unfair about this whole situation. They're the people that can say the least about it. But readers... now we can speak out loud and clear.

Edited to add a few more links on the topic... And make no mistake, it's a complicated topic, since many publishers are targeting more than just Amazon's Kindle, ultimately because of Kindle pricing tactics.


From Ilona Andrews:
http://www.ilona-andrews.com/2010/05/05/whats-the-deal-with-kindle/


From Lili Saintcrow:
http://www.lilithsaintcrow.com/journal/2010/04/im-not-the-jerk-in-e-book-pricing-and-trunk-novels/


From Kim Harrison:
http://kimharrison.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/battle-of-the-e-books-has-spilled-onto-my-desk/


From the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta


From the UK's Guardian an article on the wrongheaded tactics of some readers in revolt and punishing authors with bad reviews rather than complaining directly to Amazon:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/19/kindle-revolt-delays-ebook-editions

Readers can follow the evolving pro-eBook manifesto at iReaderReview.