to understand as a company that you are upsetting these people. you are pushing the envelope of copyright. you are pushing the issue of fair use the new want to be able to delay search and search is wonderful. i love the idea that the now 11 books i've written could be searched and people can have access to and maybe a book that didn't sell so well of mind can be brought back alive because of google. that is terrific. on the other hand i would like to be consulted as an author before someone puts my book on line at makes it available in a one point i tell a story in my book of my second interview with sergei and he comes in the room and he says to me ken, let me ask you a question. he said, why don't you just public your book-- publisher book for free online.

many more people will read it. i said that may be true, so i said let me ask you a question. i said who is going to pay me to write this book? i am now on leave from the new yorker to do a book so i need to make a living. who is going to pay for my trips out here and who is going to pay for my airfare and my hotel and who is going to add my book and who is going to send me on a book tour like i am on now? sergei at that .1 a to change the subject because the truth as he was approaching it like an engineer does, but he was also approaching it i would argue as someone who didn't have a full appreciation of copyright and an appreciation that you need the cooperation of people who own the content in order to share. i want to share my comment but i also want to make sure i can earn a living because that is how i make my living, so one of the reasons you got sued

initially by the publishers in the authors guild is exactly for this reason, that larry had this brilliant idea starting in 2002 to digitize all the books and would it be great, and it would be great in you got the permission of the libraries but didn't spend enough time as google executives admitted in reporting this book seeking permission from the people who own the copyright, the publishers or be it the authors. obviously you bump into when you buy youtube common you bump into viacom which the sides and i think they are trying to hold you up, but nevertheless they see you for-- sue you because they say you can't take jones to work off the air. so i saw that and i saw basically i think in the course of the two and a half years i spent that you are a brilliant engineer, but you often are narrow and your approach to the world and copyright is one issue. i would argue you are sometimes

narrow about the privacy issue and one reason you have come getting static not just from the u.s. government but governments particularly in europe is on the issue. eric is very sensitive to that, but the truth is that there is a belief and i encountered this when i reported for this book, there's a belief that if you spend time on facebook, you say how can people be concerned about privacy? people put anything on facebook, so you have to be convinced the privacy is not an issue, but it might be because you collect a lot of information about people, not by name unless it is someone on your sights but most people have a name. but you have a lot of information and people get concerned, so you now face i would argue three issues that you deal with that aroused the concern of governments around the world. one issue is concentration of

power and back to microsoft, when i was interviewing microsoft for a book i did covering their trial one of the things i was quite astonishing was how out of touch they were and bill gates almost pleadingly talk to me with about, how could you think that we are not doing good? how could my government think that microsoft is not doing good? the thought of 95% of the people were using his operating system it was like he was building one tract to work for every railroad all over the world so he was a common source he was providing. he wasn't thinking that in fact, and it is one of the distinctions i make between my visit to planet microsoft in my visit to planet google. microsoft were cold businessmen. gates and bomar and company wanted to destroy netscape.

i came away from my visit to your plant thinking you were not cool businessmen. you are cold engineers. [laughter] but, you don't mean to harm people, but inevitably as larry page said to me at one point, i said is it true you will sometimes mount traditional media and he said to me without any plea, if bill gates were answering the question he would have been gleeful, larry said to me i wouldn't say sometimes, i would say always. you are engineers and you are figuring outweighs to do things more efficiency. the old media world seems to do it inefficiently but there a lot of people doing it. i learned something else although let me finish. won his concentration of power. americans don't like powerful companies in you are a powerful company today and not only a powerful company but as happened with microsoft you have got a lot of interest is the want to

create competition to lessen your power or use the government to attack in leaking google and they have a lot of influence, the companies do and advertisers to and advertisers in washington that not just here. you are talking about europe and you were talking about china in the new pump into authoritarian gum purtenance in tiananmen square so you are dealing with that issue. you are also dealing with the copyright issue which is something i am particularly sensitive to and the government is concerned about and you are dealing with the privacy issue and that too is an issue that different governments deal with in different ways. and so i would worry about that if i were you more than i think you are late to understand that menace to you, the government and man is to you as i think traditionally was late to understand the digital man is. i learned something else. i learned as i sat in the engineering grooms here that i

was allowed to sit in and i probably understood have the words that were spoken. you could be speaking swahili. i did not literally understand but i had the luxury to ask people, tell me what that word means, but i kept on thinking as i'm sitting there of terry at yahoo! in 2003. he was not an engineer or john scully of apple in late '80s and early '90s, and he was an engineer and is that why these two companies for instance who fell behind as engineers because the people of the top on my eric and larry and sergei could understand the language that their engineers were speaking. as they listened to the engineers in those meetings and as they listened to larry and sergei and eric asked provocative questions and saying wait a second i heard what you said but that doesn't make any sense because of xyz, i kept on

thinking that the engineers would be content creators that the company. you don't think of engineers as content creators but in fact i came to think of many engineers at places like google as the martin scorsese's of this world. the applications you create become content and if i spent two hours doing research on google maps or one of your other products, if i spent two hours on that i'm not spending two hours on cbs or with a book and if i spend time-- facebook is content. anything that occupies a retention i would argue is content including houck content changes for the internet. storytelling is not the same etc. so i learned that in my visit here. i also learned, as i went through here back to the world of traditional media, to book publishers and television

executives and movie executives and newspaper and magazine and microsoft and advertising agencies and telephone companies and i interviewed those folks, i came to realize how retrograde they had then. there are two types of people in the world i thank, particularly people dealing with challenges. they are people who lean back in there are people who lean forward. the people who lean back are the people who are protected, defensive, worrying about how do i preserve what i have. the people who lean forward our pro-active and they are people who say, this is a challenge and i'm going to seize the day. i am going to be an optimist. i'm not going to be a pessimist. i am going to forge forward. i'm not going to whine. i'm not going to complain, what was me. the internet is harmful and in fact you hear more of that wining and it really makes me sad because i actually think

many people for pointing particularly say people at the "new york times" are doing god's work. the blogosphere is never going to replace the kind of reporting and expenses that the "new york times" invests in a place like afghanistan today or that some newspapers, nosed newspapers are not very good newspapers i have argue but there are some better wonderful newspapers and sometimes spend too, three, four months in and doing investigative report or covering state and city capitols. and the digital world you have a way of proving who is reading or watching what, and editors in the digital world, larry page and i talked about this. he said to me once, i worry that people, editors or publishers are going to see britney spears bett i addressing government news and those papers will start what is most popular with

people, and that worries him and it should worry him. it worries him and turns of search. so he said to me as did eric that we really want to see if there's someone to help the "new york times" and in fact it one point they acknowledge when asked him this question that they discussed internally the idea of buying the "new york times." they never talk to the "new york times" about it and never did anything about it because in the end they decided you have to be as the search engine you have to be neutral. you can't take sides in you cannot be perceived as favoring one content over another. in fact one of the things that actually and throw me in the reporting of this book, and i look at my friend david crane who is spent many hours with, and most people interviewed here i would ask, where did these two founders of this company get the clarity that they had? how did they come at 25 years old to say i'm going to have a

simple homepage. i'm not going to allow $300 to have an ad on my homepage and i am not going to build what yahoo! and a 00-- aol were doing which was a portal. i'm going to send them to their search destination that they want, and advertising. i'm not going to milk them. i am going to charge them only a penny more than the second and third highest bidder. how did they know that building trust of the user was essential? and if you think about it, if you have that as your guidance you automatically know you can't buy the "new york times" because if you buy the "new york times" he may be helping save a great institution but you are undermining the trustee need to function. justice i would argue that you should be worried much more than i know you did. certainly one that finished reporting this book this spring about governments and if you think about it, as brilliant as

many of the engineers at google are, as brilliant as the founders are and eric is, there is, like bill gates at microsoft, they are not necessarily the best people to determine things that are not easily measurable. that is to say something like people's fears. if people fear microsoft, as they did or they fear google, as many do, certainly other companies do, that is the fear that can build and go to washington, go to the european union, go to other countries that you are dealing with and that is not something that as sergey said to me when i asked him about this, he said look were not a strong emotional intelligence department and that is true. so, where does that leave me?

what do i take away from this book? i called this book "googled" because they think google has basically change the world. as how barre in said to me at one point, the chief economist, he said the internet make information available. what google did was make it accessible, the grade navigation system for the universe. and that change the world. change my life as a reporter. i have a library at my fingertips and every day i find that i can have a google at my fingertips and the thought that i can have books as well as scholarly journals available to me is very efficient for my time. i am getting up to the public library and i can work it night or early morning. it is just fabulous, but the reason for the subtitle in my book, the end of the world as we

know it, is that the world, the traditional world of all those media institutions i spoke about is forever changed and that is a profound change and some of that is wonderful and some of that is not so wonderful. when i hear bloggers say what is important for instance about journalism is just preserving the journalist, and you could have one individual with good journalism and that is enough. in fact bloggers can do wonderful things and the individual can do wonderful things. people like i.f. stone bernsten stilling great reporting but journalism, really good journalism is a team effort and you need editors and you need in "the new yorker"'s case fact checkers but when you do an investigative report right to a piece for the new yorker i have lots of people that are constantly involved in my life

in one hand that piece into then they will say they-- k4 deberry delete in paragraph 20, now were you put it or think the story is all off. i think you need more of the following and i would do more reporting. that is the nature of what journalism is. the team is essential for great journalism. that is the truth for the new york times. you can replicate that unless you have the resources in some kind of institutional support to do that. if we lose that, we lose a lot in our society and in our democracy and we have checks and balances and trying to keep government and powerful institutions honest. but i came away thinking come to finish my remarks and welcome any questions you may have, i came away thinking you are a really great company. and i mean that. i'm not saying that just to placate an audience, and just to prove that, you also are

tremendously challenging and it seems to me you face both externals threats and internal threats. the externals fritz are the obvious competition, being the other search engines or being not done as well certainly they expected to and when i was reporting i went to microsoft conference and literally microsoft executives were whispering to me, we have a game-changer here. we are going to announce something called cache back in it is going to change the world. has anyone heard of cash back since then? so you have to worry about facebook and twitter and the vertical search that they might do. would be much more valuable search for me to be able to consult with the want to buy a camera 20 friends on facebook or twitter then getting 10,000 answers from a google search. i did a search that i described in the book, i said who is the real william shakespeare?

a pension and my google search box and how many answers to you think i got? anyone have a guess? how about if i said 5 million? that is preposterous. that is totally inefficient and violates every rule you say ubl believe in at google. you could not get one answer to that because it is a controversy with their shakespeare did exist through someone else, but 5 million guys? no. governments and internally you have to worry about your size, with a move with the same speed you have come in your loss of good people and you have to worry about hubris. i saw this at microsoft too and i know all the difference, i know some of the differences between you and microsoft. people are locked into their operating system. you are one click away from escaping google.

i understand that but when you are that successful as you have been, and, i mean you were given lots of things from your laptop to your fin to your boss's etc.. is very easy to lose sight of the real world and if he were an engineer and may be living in this type of community, you have advantage of being on the internet and microsoft avoided and didn't have that kind of exposure that you have to other opinions, you are at risk, and it is worth probably thinking about. in any case, in my visits to your planet, and i'm not coming back in any regular way, well, i will miss the food, i learned a lot and i thank you for that. i had nothing but hospitable people and wonderful interviews here. thank you and i welcome your

questions. [applause] just raise your hand and i will call on you. yes. >> how do we save the "new york times"? >> i wish i knew. i wish i knew how to save the "new york times." obviously, they are going to come i think newspapers are going to create a peril and i address this issue in my book. i think they have to figure out how to get another stream of revenue, just as you do. i think the notion of being totally dependent on one source of revenue advertising-- i will tell you a story for instance. eric schmidt in my 11th interview with eric last december, i said to him, i just left the president of stanford in he said he thinks the original mistake that was made

with the internet was not having either michael payment subscription, not just being reliant on advertising. do you agree with hennesey? he said i do not. i think for use the best model, and our last interview with eric which was april of this year, so four months later, i said eric still agree with what you said to me in december? and he said, i don't. i've changed my mind. chris amazon reaudit book called free. it came out in july. he added a chapter of the end of the book which is called go to and essentially what he says in the last chapter seems to contradict a bunch of what he said in the book. he said free is not the answer and i think what happened, the recession which began in late 2007 really was a wake-up call for silicon valley and people whose businesses in the digital world to realize you were making the same mistake that the

broadcast networks may. you are going back to the future in relying on a source of revenue that was shrinking, advertising in you had to figure out some way of getting another resourced. the "new york times" has to figure another source of revenue. my last visit when i left ericks office, i came downstairs to the cafeteria and he was in the cafeteria? arthur sollenberger jr., the chairman and publisher of "the new york times" and he was going up to see eric and the founders. is there some way we can pump more advertising dollars, to pay them a fee for the content? so far there hasn't been a good answer. pit danger is that they created payroll as they are going to, what if every newspaper, and every newspaper want, have a similar pay were also people will get information from the wire services and maybe they will get it from "the christian science monitor" which is six days a week online or the seattle intelligentsia, and he

reinforced in commodity which the papers are trying to combat. the other problem is, how you change the culture of the web, which is a culture that basically says reclamation should be free? then you have the question, people who will hack around your payroll. i read what murdoch said to sky tv and we are going to stop google from searching, and i think of that in two ways. one is that murdoch, his e-mails are printed out of do you can read them. seriously by the way. to cup, he is negotiating. he is trying to put you guys on the defensive and get you to pay something as others that got me to pay. you pay 125 million to the book publishing industry in google lisk coming to realize as you have with you to the any professional content. reengineers youtube made a mistake. they thought user-generated

content would be the way. the truth is the advertiser does not want their friendly at next to some dog pooling so you have to have more professional content in you have to pay for it as you are starting to generate more income at youtube because of it. but i don't know, i wish i had a good answer for that question and i wish "new york times" had a good answer that question but i would rather beat the "new york times" and the st. louis post dispatch for the detroit news or san diego union or a lot of other newspapers. the times has some advantages. the particular problem like a lot of papers they have a huge debt loads and that's a coming to and they have to pay them and can they? >> in an interview u.k. fun and pr you said google culture is one that is full of contradiction. what are those contradictions you experienced in your time here? >> some of them are benign and some of them are less benign but one of them is, if i come here

and ask anyone if you, if i put my pad out and i say, how much does an engineer make, or how many people from india, how many indian citizens or indian descent working at google or u.s. in the factual question, i may as well be talking to a cia agent. i don't gaetan answer, so the notion of transparency has its limits add google about that, and some of that i know comes from-- to all his life he read a book early in his life about-- to arguably invented electricity but because he was generous and shared his secret on the dying a vet very bitter and poor man and thomas edison got all the credit so larry page talks about this. he is talked about not just to me but talked about it elsewhere, the importance of

keeping things secret and their secrets that are worth keeping. you keep your black box, your algorithm determines search is a secret for good reason. you don't want people to gain the system and if you did you would lose the kind of trust that is essential to your success. the other contradictions are there is a genuine idealism here and when this levin don't evil was created by-- that resonated on this campus because you can embrace that as being true, as the fitting who you were, yourself identity but in the real world you make compromises like you did in china, right? and that is a contradiction inevitably. here you are, with all your ideas. you have hired some nice price lobbies in washington, a contradiction. those are just some of the

contradictions but the truth is that is the adult world and the adult world is full of compromise and contradiction. and it doesn't mean it is evil, but it doesn't mean it is good either, and if you think about it dooby evil is really a slogan. it may satisfy you and all of that bed i was it tee'd i have here and someone said, berry and sergey were up on the stage and i said how could you close the phoenix of this? is evil. to the people in the phoenix office that may have seen evil. i don't think it is. again, evil is often an eye of the beholder so it's kind of self-righteous and the way. yes, sir. >> a toka lot about how content creators at google have the book search issues. there's the viacom lawsuit in

newspapers and there's also the music industry that has similar issue so, to these issues versus fast-changing business with the internet? >> i think it is much more the changing business than it is google. goal is a surrogate for the internet. if you think about how the music companies i would argue committed suicide, they weren't murdered and the suicide is to have a business model liz says we are only going to sell cds. you have to buy all the records in this album even if you don't like them and along in 2001 comes itunes in the state for 99 cents you can listen to a portion of it before you decide to click and buy it. why didn't they make a deal with the online stuff that people-- would you call it, what was the company that they sit? why didn't they make a deal with

nafta? why did they resist? why do newspapers for instance, if you go back, newspapers can tell you honestly that 15 years ago or a dozen years ago they had on line editions but if you go back to that point in time and i was writing about this at that point in time, the online edition reported to the newspaper editor-- they didn't have a separate on line editor who was conversing with the internet and realize the internet was just not a print model. it was a multimedia and it was a different medium the newspaper. not only that but he couldn't break a story in your on line edition until it appeared in the next morning's newspaper. it is insane and by the way craigslist, the "new york times," people approach the "new york times" and other newspapers with the idea of the digital classified. newspapers used to get one-third of their advertisement revenue from classified advertising. before craigslist was born it was proposed to the "new york

times" and others to create a digital consortium to sell classified ads on line. oh no, we don't have to do that. hello? so again, this is the whole engineering point i was making. you did not set out to disrupt and kill businesses. you are disrupting people. inevitable the digital world this rubs them, the internet is robes them in either leaned forward and figure out what the hell you do about it and it would have been better if he thought about leaning forward ten years ago the now. yes, sir. >> i have two comments. one is, i was here recently and nobody asked me if i am indian. the other, and i have is, the internet is not actually free. i pay $10 a month to access the

internet. now, the content may be freed but the issue is, i don't mind paying for the internet but i do have a problem paying for individual sites when it looks like news is a commodity and i don't want to go on a particular side and pay for it but i don't mind paying for content effect gaither mia isd comment desai cable. i have 150 channels but i don't pay for each individual channel. >> let me understand. you are saying if you pay $35 a month for your broadband connection you consider that thing for news? >> i don't consider that thing for news. i'm just saying the internet is not free. and i know that i am paying the $35 for connectivity, but i wouldn't pay the $35 unless there was something-- so i'm not talking about myself presently but i'm saying people run the

country they paid, so why is it that the content providers can i get some of the money may be through i isby's? >> they can, but the basic problem they face is that, google is providing many more readers from the "new york times" of "the washington post" through google's search for google news. you only get the havlan basically of what is in the paper and you have to click on the "new york times" link to take you to the "new york times" and "the new york times" is allowed to sell advertising off that part of the basic problem is the advertiser will only pay about 10% of what the advertisers will pay for the same ad in the newspaper, so the revenue you generate online even if you have many more readers reading the "new york times" because at the online issue, the income, if they close the print edition and save all the money, there's not enough revenue that would come from the on line to make up for the loss subscribers

and lost advertising from the prentiss issue and that is the conundrum they phase brookwood maybe someday there will be 10%, will be 50% in the economics will work but right now the math doesn't work for the newspapers so they have to figure out, if they could get money from isp's great in that they could get money from you guys great, and if they could figure out some way to charge michael payment soares subscription for online, a great and if they can't, not so great and maybe they can't. >> in your extensive interviews said google, have you seen signs of hubris or alerts that will prevent google from going? do you think google is at its peak or do you think we have more opportunities? >> i did detect hubris on this campus.

and, particularly if you think about government, which i don't think this company was particularly sensitive about coming in part because you are full of the idealism and the kind of sense that we don't do evil. we are guts creatures. we are dancing in doing wonderful things and you do to wonderful things but you also ari giant, a powerful company, which is bumping up against issues that matter to people like copyright privacy in power, concentration of power and you have to much power and book publishers are worried you are going to be selling books against amazon, which you are going to be as you know and you have control over price point just as they were over walmart in amazon having that kind of power. there's a certain hubris i think that infects some of the leadership of this place in the belief that you are very close to the obama administration and you are. you have people like eric tulis

and adviser, people like david drummond was an early supporter, people who have left to go work in in the administration and i literally have been reporting a piece back at "the new yorker" and reporting a pull pisa i have heard people saying you've got to go down, anything we want we can get from the obama administration. the fcc in terms of open net and all those other things. i think what you miss, with the hubris mrs. in this case is that democrats tend to be pro-regulation. the moreso after what happened on wall street in the sense that it was the lack of administration the lettuce to some of the wall street and banking accesses. there's the same concern that you need more government intervention to prevent things. b, we have already heard the head of the justice department antitrust division, christine varney, she is going to look closely at companies like google and their market power and

market concentration issues and i think you delude yourself that you think you were not in for some tough years ahead because of your friend in the white house and made wonderful presentation here in 2007, and i think that would be coming you would be blind if you don't realize that. not to mention all the other government barriers that threaten you all over the world including totalitarian governments. >> so, we are all interested in learning from experience and since not many of us have experienced, were there any interesting dialogue between companies that have failed, the you have interviewed executives and google executives? >> there's a great book i would urge you to read by clinton christensen and is called the innovator's dilemma. he is a business school professor and he makes the point come in the talks about many companies in this book like

sears and roebuck, that essentially had a great business and they try to protect that business, and they saw new technologies coming along, and the walmart's and catalogs etc. or ibm, which says we are in the hardware business and let's give our software, lit microsoft to it. and microsoft, they are protecting their packaged software business, and suddenly the internet has come along and do we invest in that, and we take money from our existing business to do that? that is the innovators dilemma. to you sacrifice your existing business to make a bet on what you think might be the future but might not be? it is a wonderful book with many vivid examples of that in the

vader postal lemon and you are going to face that here. one of the reasons that i was told that you did make a bid to buy twitter last spring was because you were worried about the possibility of a vertical surge that we spoke about before and you know, that i don't think is a virtue from your existing business and arguably it enhances your existing business but for instance the issue of, do you do more content at youtube comment you have to invest in content in order to have the content that advertisers are going want to buy and as that at some point undermine the trust that you need for your success and search? maybe. that could be in innovators dilemma. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. [applause]

>> ken auletta is a columnist for the new yorker. he is the author "greed and glory on wall street" and appears regularly as a tv commentator. in 2000 duly received a national magazine award for one of his new yorker columns featuring ted turner. find out more. visit ken auletta.com. >> other ann coulter, we are a year into the obama administration. grade it. >> i would say worse than carter on foreign policy and worsen clinton on domestic policy, so other than that i think he is doing a great job. >> in what way were some president carter? >> i now understand the look on my father's face when carter was president. everything obama does is the wrong thing to do. you don't know what is going to happen but he is pouring gasoline all over the world, in

russia, in iran, in iraq and afghanistan, and china, and where the match will be lit we don't nowhere it is going to be but you can count on obama to do the wrong thing. every president is basically living off the foreign policy of his predecessor for the first year so right now we are still living off of bush just like the way bush was living off of clinton's farm policy for the first year but were about to move into the obama foreign policy and i think there's going to be a disaster and i don't nowhere or how or what it will be but i know obama's going to do the wrong thing. >> congress. >> congress, is there something below an f? the only good thing is they are not really getting things done. they pass the crazy captain trade bill, captain tabs as conservatives call it. this is unjust and coulter speaking and even the senate

looked at that bill len said, this is insane and it is just been sitting there so that may not get passed and that would like it not being passed but in the middle of a recession, and the middle of the housing bust, they have these massive energy taxes on homeowners, on manufacturers. you have to have an epa of some sort comes your house to make sure it is green before you sell it. this is all the cap-and-trade belland this is why when it went to the senate which is oddly the more sensible body right now, they said i think we will wait. the health care bill i think is a disaster. they have a majority in the house and the senate and the oval office said the odds are it will be passed but i have a nickel that running on it not been passed because i don't think americans want their premiums to go up, their taxes will go up, and most importantly perhaps the chinese don't want and, and they are keeping this country afloat. they are the only ones paying

for deficit, so they don't really like the profligate spending under this health care bill. that is why the obama administration keeps on bending the cost curve because they have to save that for the chinese. the chinese are going to stop buying our treasuries that we don't get the spending under control so they don't want this big spending program, unless as you keep hearing from the obama white house, don't worry we are going to bend the cost curve. ben in the cost curve is health rationing. >> your most recent, guilty, came out in 2008-- >> already endpaper back. >> is there an update? >> there is no update but it is a lot cheaper. >> what is your next book? >> that is top secret. it will probably include mia ward winning meat loaf recipe so stay tuned. >> ann coulter. >> here's a look of some of the

upcoming book fairs and festivals over the next few months. [inaudible conversations] steve david steinberger as the

president of the purse is publishing group. if you could explain your business model, a lot of different publishers, under perseus. >> you deserve thoughtful motion to table and have published to reach their potential so it is different from the traditional model of the the conglomerate controlled. and is their bidding huge amounts on trying that this dollars. our approach is independent publishing teams the hurt creative and entrepreneurial, focusing on the books that work in specific leashes and we provide the platform to enable kemal to succeed. >> whitter some of the group's undenied purse this? >> for the other publishing agreement with the weinstein company, a publishing the the conversion skeet's book. we have an arrangement with "the daily beast," and if we are doing a book called the attack of the wingnuts, halvey ouellette sick is undermining for hijacking america, and a big range of publishers.

>> the public affairs basic books, and what is your influence? how you interact with them? >> it is really interesting because of course of thing that is most exciting to get involved in the books themselves. for anyone in this business gets excited about that so right now for example i am reading a history book by one of our publishers cold, the last founding father. it is about james monroe, who the author says was the greatest president of the united states after george washington, and makes the argument to support it and that is the kind of book and love to sink my teeth into and get excited about the reality is a libel very often i'm dealing with things that go beyond the individual book desota sirri often dealing with the digital revolution in how that will affect publishing and how that will affect publishing or publicity questions and things like that. >> digital revolution, how is it affecting your business?

i know that is it for our answer to give us 30 seconds. >> i think it is very exciting because basically it is lowering the barriers to marketing and selling books so it is easier to connect consumers or readers with the publisher and it was it is a very exciting development. >> david steinberger is the president of the perseus publishing group and by the way you can watch the last founding father at booktv.org. the "new york times," publishers weekly, "the christian science monitor" and others are all releasing their editions of the best books of 2009, many of them featured on booktv. go to booktv.org, browse the list for ward winning bestselling in critically acclaimed titles of the year and then watch the authors talk about their books. title such as fordlandia, boards of finance, columbine, pulitzer prize winner the good soldiers and winner of the american book award, the first tycoon.

fine the books of the year at booktv.org. >> economics professor carmon reinhardt argues the 2008 economic collapse was not unique and solutions can be found from the past. politics and prose bookstore in washington d.c. hosts this hour-long event. >> good evening everyone. my name is connor. on behalf of the owners of politics and prose, welcome tonight in thank you ulfer. we have a few house cupping things before we get started. first is that everyone but silence or turn off their cell phones. we don't want carmon to be interrupted this evening. that goes for carmon too if you have it and also if you need books after the event they are located on the table in front of the store by the front doors, so you can have up there for your book. because we have c-span with us this evening, we have a