Pippa Middleton gets £400,000 for a party planning book. Amusing assessment from the Independent :The party tome is a classic Sudden Fame Cash-In Book, a low-brow genre even less dignified than the celebrity memoir. Whereas the latter tends to appear towards the end of a lengthy entertainment career, the former tends to be rushed out in haste soon after the author's first exposure to the...
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Conor Friedersdorf writing in The Atlantic asks What Orwell Can Teach us About OWS and Police BrutalityIn Burma, Orwell remembers, every British police officer was a target of constant ridicule. "When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter," he writes. "This happened more than once. In the end the sneering...
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Joe Sharkey the peripatetic business traveller is like me having to deal with a life with no status - frequent flyer that is (NYT):Lacking status, I was unable to choose a seat assignment at booking. At check-in, my seat assignment was 36C, an aisle seat in the next-to-last row for the first long leg of the flight, on an A320 operated by United with 138 seats — 90 in basic economy, where the seats...
Sunday, November 20, 2011
A long article on how government lobbying activities have brought about significant changes in the prospects for online learning companies (Nation):Despite the clear conflict of interest between her lobbying clients and her philanthropic goals, Levesque and her team have led a quiet but astonishing national transformation. Lobbyists like Levesque have made 2011 the year of virtual education reform,...
Friday, November 18, 2011
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The Economist takes a look at how Springer has approached the digitization of their entire backlist/archive of books. They already provide electronic access to 50,000 titles published since 2005 but now they are looking at the remaining archive of 65,000 titles. Springer has been at the forefront of book digitization efforts and some may remember in the early days of the Google Scholar effort they...
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
About four years ago when I realized I was not only running out of book shelf space but that I had many books that I would never touch again, I decided to open a book store. I do like collecting books and as with many book lovers each title exerts some type of talismanic feeling when you look at them and...
Sunday, November 13, 2011
An archive trove of documents relating to the first world war is to go online (Guardian):Living witnesses to the war may no longer be with us, but British archives still hold a wealth of original documentation from those years and, although much of it is in danger of crumbling away, the range of testimony held by the British Library helps to broaden understanding of the war.In an unprecedented effort...
Friday, November 11, 2011
Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.There are six or seven images from this scene at a snake farm in Bangkok (August 1969). Yes, there are such things as snake farms and here the guy in white is showing the audience the snakes innards and in particular its fangs. I've...
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
BISG released the next edition of their consumer study yesterday and among the findings they reported:Power Buyers are spending more. More than 46% of those who say they acquire e-books at least weekly (considered “Power Buyers” in this survey) report that they have increased their dollars spent for books in all formats, compared with 30.4% of all survey respondents. This statistic is important because...
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
From CCC's Beyond to Book series, How Social Media is Keeping Alive the Journal Article:Scholarly communication is rapidly changing, and information managers in private companies and other sectors are finding new ways to serve their users. Social media, mobile devices, data mining, semantic technologies and other developments are creating a whole new environment for publishing. Yet the old standby...
Monday, November 7, 2011
For any Frankfurt book fair attendee the idea that the average German trade publisher would publish some erotic fiction would be met with a shrug. More surprising would be a publisher that didn't, but when the publisher in question is the Catholic church then the whole thing degenerates into a race to characterize the entire Church as a porn broker.From the Independent, there's pornography in...
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Changing the way music stars are made (Economist):David Joseph, who runs the British arm of Universal Music, says A&R men used to be alchemists, discovering base talent and turning it into gold. “They made dreams come true,” he says.These days they are venture capitalists. Particularly at big labels such as Universal, A&R executives increasingly expect acts to have built a self-sustaining,...
Friday, November 4, 2011
Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.It was race day in Melbourne this past week and the annual big race produced the closest finish in history. I am not 100% certain this is the actual race from 1973 but it was taken in the right month and there would have been little...
Thursday, November 3, 2011
From their press release this morning:Sales up 6% and operating profit up 13%*All businesses trading as expectedAdjusted EPS now expected to be approximately 83p per share, benefiting from lower interest and taxPearson, the world’s leading learning company, is today providing its regular nine-month interim management statement.Pearson increased sales by 6% and operating profit by 13% in the first...
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Lewis Hyde in the Chronicle of Higher Ed has some interesting observations and proposals for reforming copyright:Focusing on the benefits of an initial registration requirement tells only one part of the story. Whenever copyright offers a second term, the renewal formality has even stronger commons-enhancing effects. After all, the commercial value of most creative work is exhausted fairly early....
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