Category: Books

Once Great A.&P. Was “Going Out of Business for a Long Time”

(p. 17) Linda Fisch stopped at the A.&P. on Riverdale Avenue in the Bronx on Thursday and bought eight prepackaged containers of cottage cheese and fruit. She did not realize the store had become a footnote to history.
That A.&P. is the last in New York City, where the once-mighty chain was born just before the Civil War. Now the company has filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time in five years. Once its plan for liquidating is approved, the store’s A.&P. signs will come down. And the A.&P. name will vanish from New York.
. . .
Once, A.&P. had no competition. It all but invented the grocery store in the 19th century, and in the 20th century, it reinvented itself as a low-price, cash-and-carry chain. Its thousands of stores were “so devoid of frills that they are simply machines for selling food,” according to “The Great Merchants,” a history of retailers and retailing published in 1974.
But it had been fading for years. In the mid-1980s, a former A.&P. executive published a book “The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company” even as A.&P. continued to expand, buying Waldbaum’s and the Food Emporium chain in New York City and the Farmer Jack chain in the Midwest. A.&P. acquired Pathmark in 2007 for $679 million in a deal that involved significant debt. It also operated Super Fresh and Food Basics stores.
. . .
It began as a sideline for a hide and leather importer, George H. Gilman. “At some point around 1859 or 1860, there’s no precise date, he started selling tea,” said Marc Levinson, a historian and the author of “The Great A.&P. and the Struggle for Small Business in America.” “In 1860 or 1861, he gave up on the leather business, gave it to his brother, and decided to go into business as a tea wholesaler. He leased a property on Front Street. It’s the area where most of the ships carrying tea would come in.”
Mr. Levinson said a Gilman employee, George Huntington Hartford, became involved in the new business. Some accounts say it was Hartford who proposed eliminating middlemen — and cutting prices to consumers. From its earliest years, the little tea company promised in advertisements, it would “do away with various profits and brokerages, cartages, storages, cooperage and waste, with the exception of a small commission paid for purchasing to our correspondents in Japan and China.”
. . .
“I grew up on Long Island and the A.&P. was the only supermarket in the town I grew up in, which was Lynbrook,” said Ms. Fisch, 71. “Of course that’s where we shopped. It was bright and it was clean, which is totally different from the one in Riverdale. It’s like it’s been going out of business for a long time.”

For the full story, see:
JAMES BARRON. “A.& P. Bankruptcy Means New York, Chain’s Birthplace, Will Lose Last Store.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., AUG. 2, 2015): 17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 1, 2015.)

The first book mentioned above, is:
Mahoney, Tom, and Leonard Sloane. The Great Merchants: America’s Foremost Retail Institutions and the People Who Made Them Great. Updated and Enlarged ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

The second book mentioned above, is:
Walsh, William I. The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. Secaucas, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1986.

Levinson’s great book, mentioned above, is:
Levinson, Marc. The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

Peter Thiel Asks “What Happened to the Future?”

(p. B4) Mr. Thiel has been an important player in Silicon Valley since the first dot-com boom, but he has recently taken on a much more public role. He was born in Germany and came to the United States as an infant when his father, a chemical engineer, found work here. He was raised in Silicon Valley and went to Stanford, where he developed the views in his first book, “The Diversity Myth,” about the multiculturalism debate on campuses, written with the entrepreneur David O. Sacks.
In 1998, Mr. Thiel helped found the online payments company PayPal, an immediate success. He was the first outside investor in Facebook. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.7 billion. Last year, he became a part-time partner at Y Combinator, a loosely defined advisory position.
A handful of others in Silicon Valley have similar investing track records. Where Mr. Thiel really separates himself from his peers is his skepticism that Silicon Valley is building a better world for all. His investment firm, Founders Fund, used to begin its online manifesto with the complaint, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters,” a reference to Twitter. Now it says simply, “What happened to the future?”
San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington, D.C., are doing well, but the presidential campaign has laid bare the angst of many other places. Feelings of decline are rampant. “Most of the millennials have lower expectations than their baby boomer parents,” Mr. Thiel said. “Where I differ from others in Silicon Valley is in thinking that you can’t fence yourself off. If it continues, it will ultimately be bad for everybody.”

For the full story, see:
DAVID STREITFELD. “Peter Thiel, Contrarian Tech Billionaire, Defends His Support of Trump.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 31, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 29, 2016, and has the title “Peter Thiel Defends His Most Contrarian Move Yet: Supporting Trump.”)

The book mentioned above, that was co-authored by Thiel, is:
Sacks, David O., and Peter A. Thiel. The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 1995.

Breakthrough Surgeon “Defied Skepticism”

(p. D8) Dr. Johnson was a reluctant surgeon — early on, he once recalled, “I disliked surgeons and their pompous attitudes” — but he applied the crocheting skills he had learned from his mother, who was a home economics teacher, and the needlecraft he was taught in a seventh-grade sewing class (he got an A), to perform more than 8,500 heart bypass operations over four decades.
. . .
Doctors had experimented with coronary artery surgery since the 1950s, the goal being to remove accumulated plaque caused by cholesterol deposits, which can block blood flow and cause the stabbing pain of angina. One method was to remove the clogged portion of an artery and graft on a replacement patch of cardiac membrane or a segment of vein from a leg.
In 1968, Dr. Johnson and his team took another path, sewing segments of veins from multiple arteries end to end and stitching them directly into the aorta, the body’s main artery, bypassing cardiac ducts where the flow of blood was impeded.
His breakthrough, reported the next year, defied skepticism within the medical profession and heralded a new era of successful double, triple and quadruple bypass surgeries.
“It was perhaps the presentation of Johnson in the spring of 1969 that had the greatest impact on the widespread use” of coronary artery bypass grafting, Dr. Eugene A. Hessel II wrote in “Cardiac Anesthesia: Principles and Clinical Practice,” published in 2001.
To facilitate surgery, Dr. Johnson made another breakthrough by temporarily stopping the heart and slowing the body’s metabolism by cooling and circulating the blood through a heart-lung machine.
. . .
Dr. Johnson’s multiple bypass surgeries, which could take as long as nine hours and were often accompanied by classical music in the operating room, were credited with saving an untold number of lives.
But in an interview with Dr. William S. Stoney for “Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery” (2008), Dr. Johnson said “the single biggest thing I ever did to lower mortality” was to prescribe the drug allopurinol, which is ordinarily used to inhibit the production of uric acid (high levels of it can cause gout), but which has also been found to improve survival in cardiac patients by improving their capacity for exercise.
. . .
“The coronary artery bypass graft operation does nothing for the basic cause of the disease,” Dr. Johnson said, adding, “Prevention is, of course, the ultimate answer.”

For the full obituary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “W. Dudley Johnson, Heart Bypass Pioneer, Dies at 86.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 31, 2016): D8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date OCT. 30, 2016, and has the title “W. Dudley Johnson, Heart Bypass Surgery Pioneer, Dies at 86.”)

Stoney’s book mentioned above, is:
Stoney, William S. Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008.

GE Shifts Away from Six Sigma and Toward Innovation

(p. B1) One of the biggest engineering projects under way at General Electric Co. these days isn’t a turbine or locomotive. It is reinventing the way the company’s employees are assessed, reviewed and even paid.
For decades, an ideal GE worker was one adept at squeezing out product defects and almost allergic to admitting uncertainty.
Now, as the 124-year-old company refocuses itself on industrial businesses, executives say top performers are those willing to take risks, test new ideas with customers and even make mistakes.
Leaders say GE’s multiyear effort to remake itself into a leaner, innovation-driven company requires a nimble workforce that can develop products faster and more cheaply. The shift is significant for GE, whose corporate ethos had long been embodied by Six Sigma, a manufacturing system designed to eliminate error, enshrining certainty and consistency.
. . .
(p. B6) The new style of measuring employees has roots in FastWorks, a companywide initiative intended to hasten product development and ensure that customers want new products before GE spends millions building them. It is based on Lean Startup, a management system popularized by Eric Ries, a 37-year-old author and consultant GE brought in with the blessing of Chief Executive Jeff Immelt to help employees get comfortable with trial, error and experimentation.

For the full story, see:
RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN. “GE Tries to Reinvent the Employee Review, Encouraging Risks.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., June 8, 2016): B1 & B6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “GE Re-Engineers Performance Reviews, Pay Practices.”)

Ries’s Lean Startup management system is advocated in his book:
Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business, 2011.

Those Who See, and Fill, Big Unmet Needs Are Often “Weirdos”

(p. A11) . . . “A Truck Full of Money” provides a portrait of a strange, troubled man who happens to be one of the smartest minds in the Route 128 tech corridor.
. . .
The book is being marketed as inspirational, but I found it to be the opposite. No one could read it and become Paul English, or want to. Most tech startups think too small, but the few people with the vision to identify big unmet needs seem to be, for whatever reason, weirdos. The split-second fare comparison that Kayak did is something no human being could do–it requires super-computing–and it has an enormous value, since 8% of the U.S. economy is travel. But once you’ve solved a problem like that, what do you do next?
Paul English hasn’t figured that out, so this book sort of peters out–he may do his once-in-a-lifetime charity project, or he may follow through on Blade–and he has retreated back into the familiar, running a company called Lola that is sort of the opposite of Kayak: It gives you live access to travel concierges. But how could Mr. Kidder’s ending be anything but inconclusive? Mr. English is just 53. Undoubtedly he has another billion-dollar idea nestled in that overactive brainpan, but his investors have to make a leap of faith–that they’ve bet on the right weirdo. God bless these genius geeks, who make our economy leaner by constantly finding more efficient ways to do old things. And God bless the pharmaceutical industry, which protects and preserves them.​

For the full review, see:
JOHN BLOOM. “BOOKSHELF; The Man Who Built Kayak; During one episode of hypomania, Paul English bid $500,000 on an abandoned lighthouse. Recently, he decided to become an Uber driver.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Sept. 27, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 26, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Kidder, Tracy. A Truck Full of Money: One Man’s Quest to Recover from Great Success. New York: Random House, 2016.

Making Technologies Useful to End Users Can Be Hard

Sharma’s theory sounds somewhat similar to that of Bhidé in his The Venturesome Economy.

(p. B4) Anshu​ Sharma,​ a venture capitalist at Storm Ventures, thinks he knows why so many companies that should have all the resources and brainpower required to build the next big thing so often fail to. He calls his thesis the “stack fallacy,” and though he sketched its outline in a recent essay, I found it so compelling that I thought it worth a more thorough exploration of the implications of his theory. What follows is the result of that conversation.

“Stack fallacy is the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours,” Mr. Sharma wrote. And as someone who worked at both Oracle and Salesforce, his exhibit A is these two companies. To Oracle, which is primarily a database company, Salesforce is just a “hosted database app,” he wrote. and yet despite spending millions on it, Oracle has been unable to beat Salesforce in Salesforce’s core competency, notably customer-relations management software.
It helps to understand that in tech, the “stack” is the layer cake of technology, one level of abstraction sitting atop the next, that ultimately delivers a product or service to the user. On the Internet, for example, there is a stack of technologies stretching from the server through the operating system running on it through a cloud abstraction layer and then the apps running atop that, until you reach the user. Even the electricity grid required to power the data center in which the server lives could be considered part of the technology “stack” of, say, your favorite email service.
. . .
The reason that companies fail when they try to move up the stack is simple, argues Mr. Sharma: They don’t have firsthand empathy for what customers of the product one level above theirs in the stack actually want. Database engineers at Oracle don’t know what supply-chain managers at Fortune 500 companies want out of an enterprise resource-planning system like SAP, but that hasn’t stopped Oracle from trying to compete in that space.

For the full commentary, see:
CHRISTOPHER MIMS. “Why Companies Are Being Disrupted.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Jan. 25, 2016): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the title “Why Big Companies Keep Getting Disrupted.” The last sentence quoted above appears in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)

Sharma’s blog essay mentioned above, is:
Sharma, Anshu. “Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy.” On Crunch Network blog, Posted Jan. 18, 2016.

The Bhidé book that I mention way above, is:
Bhidé, Amar. The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

A briefer version of Bhidé’s theory can be found in:
Bhidé, Amar. “The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World.” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance 21, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 8-23.

Modern Technology Adds to Knowledge of Culture and Religion

(p. A6) Nearly half a century ago, archaeologists found a charred ancient scroll in the ark of a synagogue on the western shore of the Dead Sea.
The lump of carbonized parchment could not be opened or read. Its curators did nothing but conserve it, hoping that new technology might one day emerge to make the scroll legible.
Just such a technology has now been perfected by computer scientists at the University of Kentucky. Working with biblical scholars in Jerusalem, they have used a computer to unfurl a digital image of the scroll.
It turns out to hold a fragment identical to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible and, at nearly 2,000 years old, is the earliest instance of the text.
The writing retrieved by the computer from the digital image of the unopened scroll is amazingly clear and legible, in contrast to the scroll’s blackened and beaten-up exterior. “Never in our wildest dreams did we think anything would come of it,” said Pnina Shor, the head of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority.
Scholars say this remarkable new technique may make it possible to read other scrolls too brittle to be unrolled.
. . .
The experts say this new method may make it possible to read other ancient scrolls, including several Dead Sea scrolls and about 300 carbonized ones from Herculaneum, which were destroyed by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
. . .
The feat of recovering the text was made possible by software programs developed by W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky. Inspired by the hope of reading the many charred and unopenable scrolls found at Herculaneum, near Pompeii in Italy, Dr. Seales has been working for the last 13 years on ways to read the text inside an ancient scroll.
. . .
He succeeded in 2009 in working out the physical structure of the ruffled layers of papyrus in a Herculaneum scroll.
He has since developed a method, called virtual unwrapping, to model the surface of an ancient scroll in the form of a mesh of tiny triangles. Each triangle can be resized by the computer until the virtual surface makes the best fit to the internal structure of the scroll, as revealed by the scanning method. The blobs of ink are assigned to their right place on the structure, and the computer then unfolds the whole 3-D structure into a 2-D sheet.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Technology Unlocks Secrets of a Biblical Scroll.” The New York Times (Thurs., SEPT. 22, 2016): A6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 21, 2016, and has the title “Modern Technology Unlocks Secrets of a Damaged Biblical Scroll.”)

“My Fate Lies with Me, Not with Heaven”

(p. A7) . . . Dr. Unschuld, who is as blunt as he is outspoken, stands at the center of a long and contentious debate in the West over Chinese medicine. For many, it is the ur-alternative to what they see as the industrialized and chemicalized medicine that dominates in the West. For others, it is little more than charlatanism, with its successes attributed to the placebo effect and the odd folk remedy.
Dr. Unschuld is a challenge to both ways of thinking. He has just finished a 28-year English translation of the three principal parts of the foundational work of Chinese medicine: the Huangdi Neijing, or Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, published by the University of California Press. But unlike many of the textbooks used in Chinese medicine schools in the West, Dr. Unschuld’s works are monuments to the art of serious translation; he avoids New Age jargon like “energy” or familiar Western medical terms like “pathogens,” seeing both as unfair to the ancient writers and their worldviews.
But this reflects a deep respect for the ancient authors the detractors of Chinese medicine sometimes lack. Dr. Unschuld hunts down obscure terms and devises consistent terminologies that are sometimes not easy to read, but are faithful to the original text. Almost universally, his translations are regarded as trailblazing — making available, for the first time in a Western language, the complete foundational works of Chinese medicine from up to 2,000 years ago.
. . .
. . . then there is the issue of efficacy. With his extremely dry humor, Dr. Unschuld likens Chinese medicine to the herbal formulas of the medieval Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. If people want to try it, they should be free to do so, he said, but not at taxpayer expense. As for himself, Dr. Unschuld says he has never tried Chinese medicine.
. . .
His purely academic approach, . . . , makes him a difficult figure for China to embrace. While widely respected for his knowledge and translations, he has done little to advance the government’s agenda of promoting Chinese medicine as soft power. Echoing other critics, he describes China’s translations of the classics as “complete swindles,” saying they are done with little care and only a political goal in mind.
For Dr. Unschuld, Chinese medicine is far more interesting as an allegory for China’s mental state. His most famous book is a history of Chinese medical ideas, in which he sees classic figures, such as the Yellow Emperor, as a reflection of the Chinese people’s deep-seated pragmatism. At a time when demons and ghosts were blamed for illness, these Chinese works from 2,000 years ago ascribed it to behavior or disease that could be corrected or cured.
“It is a metaphor for enlightenment,” he says.
Especially striking, Dr. Unschuld says, is that the Chinese approach puts responsibility on the individual, as reflected in the statement “wo ming zai wo, bu zai tian” — “my fate lies with me, not with heaven.” This mentality was reflected on a national level in the 19th and 20th centuries, when China was being attacked by outsiders. The Chinese largely blamed themselves and sought concrete answers by studying foreign ideas, industrializing and building a modern economy.

For the full story, see:
IAN JOHNSON. “The Saturday Profile; An Expert on Chinese Medicine, but No New Age Healer.” The New York Times (Sat., SEPT. 24, 2016): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 23, 2016, and has the title “Gandhi the Imperialist – Book Review.”)

The recently finished book mentioned above, is:
Unschuld, Paul U. Huang Di Nei Jing Ling Shu: The Ancient Classic on Needle Therapy. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016.

Income Redistribution May Hurt Innovation

(p. A13) Edward Conard is on a dual crusade. First, he is out to prove that technological innovation is the major driver of the creation of wealth. Second, that government programs to redistribute income are at best futile and at worst the enemy of the middle class.
. . .
“The late Steve Jobs,” Mr. Conard writes, “may have made huge profits from his innovations, but his wealth was small in comparison with the value of the iPhone and its imitators to their users.”
. . .
“Redistribution–whether achieved through taxation, regulatory restrictions, or social norms–appears,” he asserts, “to have large detrimental effects on risk-taking, innovation, productivity, and growth over the long run, especially in an economy where innovation produced by the entrepreneurial risk-taking of properly trained talent increasingly drives growth.”

For the full review, see:
RICHARD EPSTEIN. “BOOKSHELF; The Necessity of the Rich; Steve Jobs may have earned huge profits from his innovations, but they pale in comparison with the value of the iPhone to its users.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Sept. 15, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 14, 2016, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; The Necessity of the Rich; Steve Jobs may have earned huge profits from his innovations, but they pale in comparison with the value of the iPhone to its users.”)

The book under review, is:
Conard, Edward. The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class. New York: Portfolio, 2016.

“Giving Peas a Chance”

(p. C1) Thank heavens Gregor Mendel was a lousy priest. Had he shown even the faintest aptitude for oratory or ministering to the poor, he might never have determined the basic laws of heredity. But bumbling he was, and he made a rotten university student to boot; his failures drove him straight to his room, where he bred mice in secret. The experiment scandalized his superiors.
“A monk coaxing mice to (p. C4) mate to understand heredity was a little too risqué, even for the Augustinians,” writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in “The Gene: An Intimate History.” So Mendel switched — auspiciously, historically — to pea plants. The abbot in charge, writes the author, acquiesced this time, “giving peas a chance.”
Love Dr. Mukherjee, love his puns. They’re everywhere. I warn you now.
. . .
Many of the same qualities that made “The Emperor of All Maladies” so pleasurable are in full bloom in “The Gene.” The book is compassionate, tautly synthesized, packed with unfamiliar details about familiar people.
. . .
But there are also crucial differences. Cancer is the troll that scratches and thumps beneath the floorboards of our consciousness, if it hasn’t already beaten its way into the room. The subject immediately commands our attention; it’s almost impossible to deny, and not to hear, the emotional clang of its appeal. In Dr. Mukherjee’s skilled hands, the story of this frightening disease became a page-turner. He explained its history, politics and cunning biological underpinnings; he traced the evolving and often gruesome logic underlying cancer treatment.
And in the middle of it all, agonizing over treatment protocols and watching his patients struggle with tremendous existential and physical pain, was the author himself.
There are far fewer psychological stakes in reading about the history of genetics. “The Gene” is more pedagogical than dramatic; as often as not, the stars of this story are molecules, not humans.
. . .
But any book about the history of something as elemental and miraculous as the gene is bound, at least indirectly, to tell the story of innovation itself. “The Gene” is filled with scientists who dreamed in breathtakingly lateral leaps.
Erwin Schrödinger in particular was one visionary cat: In 1944, he hazarded a guess about the molecular nature of the gene and decided it had to be a strand of code scribbled along the chromosome — which pretty much sums up the essence of DNA.

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR. “Books of The Times; In Molecular Pursuit of the Genetic Code.” The New York Times (Mon., MAY 9, 2016): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 8, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s ‘The Gene,’ a Molecular Pursuit of the Self.”)

The book under review, is:
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: An Intimate History. New York: Scribner, 2016.

The Internet Favors Creators in the Long Tail of Distribution

(p. A13) Does the internet pose a threat to established entertainment companies? Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang lead a class at Carnegie Mellon University in which a student recently put that question to a visiting executive. He pooh-poohed the idea: “The original players in this industry have been around for the last 100 years, and there’s a reason for that.” As co-heads of CMU’s Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics, Messrs. Smith and Telang aim to counter this line of thought, and in “Streaming, Sharing, Stealing” they do just that, explaining gently yet firmly exactly how the internet threatens established ways and what can and cannot be done about it. Their book should be required for anyone who wishes to believe that nothing much has changed.
. . .
Then there’s the question of blockbusters vs. the long tail. In her book “Blockbusters” (2013), Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School professor, contended that digital markets, far from favoring the “long tail” of products that were mostly unavailable in physical stores or theaters, actually concentrate sales at the top even further. Messrs. Smith and Telang quietly but effectively demolish this argument, noting numerous instances in which the opposite happened. In the case of one large chain, the top 100 titles accounted for 85% of the DVDs rented in-store–but when stores closed and customers were shifted to the Web, the most popular titles made up only 35% of the DVDs rented online.
The authors also note that, by making it easy for writers, musicians, and directors to work independently, digital technology has vastly increased the number of works available. Between 2000 and 2010, an explosion in self-publishing raised the number of new books issued per year to 3.1 million from 122,000.

For the full review, see:
FRANK ROSE. “BOOKSHELF; We’re All Cord Cutters Now; At one chain, the top 100 movie titles accounted for 85% of the DVDs rented in-store. But online, the top titles make up only 35% of rentals.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Sept. 7, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 6, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Smith, Michael D., and Rahul Telang. Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016.