phil's out there and he will direct you and amy and i will be out there in just a moment. thank you very much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> today on book tv, live all-day coverage of the maryland book festival. starting at 10:00 a.m. eastern orioles and on her book, not the cleaver family. 10:35 a.m. melvin goodman, author whistleblower at the cia, insider's account of the politics of intelligence.

author sharon weinberger discovering-- discussing her book. @1:15 p.m. eastern craig shirley on reagan rising the decisive years, 1976 to 1980. 2:15 p.m. sidney blumenthal, the political life of abraham lincoln 1849 to 1856. 3:15 p.m. sally mauch freeman on the jersey brothers, a missing a blockbuster in the pacific and his family quest to bring him home. watcher live all-day coverage of the maryland book festival starting today at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span twos book tv. >> this morning i want to begin by introducing you to someone from our book and that is kim

power bridges. kim owns and operates bridges funeral home in tennessee, but she is not from tennessee. kim is actually from oklahoma. she started her first business there, but she had to leave oklahoma when she ran afoul of the law. turns out that kim was engaged in a very dangerous practice of selling caskets without a funeral directors license. before that in the early 1980s kim was on the executive fasttrack growing up in a family of hard-working people to learned the relationship between hard-working success and after she left college she enjoyed a lot of success in a number of different businesses and eventually she ended up at one of the nations largest funeral companies and their she sold preneed funeral services or she

saw this as a way to combine hard drive in business with her desire to help people through her work and as before she was very successful in that business , but after a few years she noticed there was a need, a niche to be filled and that was she saw in the funeral industry the merchandise that was sold was marked up a significant amount. caskets could be marked up anywhere from 250 to 600%, so she began to think how can i put together a business model that would enable me to sell the same merchandise, but at a much lower cost, so she eventually left the funeral business and joined up with dennis bridges who let the same company and they spent a year forming memorial concepts online. the name implies their business plan was to sell everything, all of their merchandise, particularly caskets over the

internet and they would take advantage of drop shipping for manufacturers enabling them to keep their costs low and then they passed on those savings to the consumers and they thought they had a winning business plan and they did, but they ran into a problem in the problem was oklahoma state law says that if you want to sell a casket to consumers in oklahoma and you aren't oklahoma-based company you must be licensed as a funeral director and kim was not she could have gone back to earn the license, but it would require her to go to school for two years. she would have to complete an internship during which time she would involve 25 bodies, then she would have to have a brick-and-mortar business in which she would have a selection room, preparation room, viewing room and she would have inventory on hand, none of which

they were interested in. as if it were not irrational enough to a court-- require a funeral dressed license to sell a box because that's what a casket is, an empty box. the law also created a circumstance where and oklahoma-based company had to be a licensed funeral director to sell to consumers in oklahoma, but companies outside the state who sold to consumers in oklahoma did not have to have it funeral directors license, so kim could have taken her business, which was essentially computer servers, she could have taken her servers and moved across the state line to kansas and there she could have sold caskets to consumers in oklahoma all day long, but she did not want to do that. she wanted to stay in oklahoma and raise her family in her hometown. she thought the law was wrong and not only wrong, but injurious because it enabled funeral directors to market

their merchandise to take advantage of people who work in a difficult time in their lives, so she stayed in oklahoma and fought the law. she was not feeling once got the law was wrong. legislators did so as well, some beginning in 1999 they began introducing a series of bills every year to remove the licensing requirement for casket sales. kim testified on behalf of several new bills and every year they lost. they lost for one reason and one reason alone and out was the licensed funeral directors, the industry would go to the legislature and lobby aggressively to protect their license and every year they succeeded, so today in oklahoma if you want to sell a casket and you aren't oklahoma-based company you must have a funeral directors license. what to kim and legislators ran into is what we call the

bottleneck verse. bottleneck for someone who advocates the creation or perpetuation of a government regulation particularly an occupational license to restrict the free flow of workers into an occupation in order to enjoy an economic benefit as a result. >> you can watch this and other programs online a book tv.org. >> this is book tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. we are on location at the university of arizona talking to a variety of professors who are also authors. joining us now is professor jennifer earl, her book "digitally enabled social change: activism in the internet age". first about what you do hear? >> , professor of sociology where i teach and research about social