There's news this week the the long running and well loved UK TV show Only Fools and Horses may be adapted for the US. Personally, I think this is an impossible task mostly because the show is so culture based and the two actors, David Jason and Nic Lyndhurst, who play the lead characters Dell and Rodney work so well together.Here's what the Independent said:A pilot episode is said to...
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Long article in The Nation this week about reforming copyright and makes deep reference to Bill Patry's How to Fix Copyright. The author of the article Caleb Cain is not convinced of the arguments Patry, who is lead council for Google and widely seen as an expert on copyright issues, makes and he makes his opinion know very early on:The non sequitur I’m objecting to here is a small one. Unfortunately...
Monday, January 23, 2012
The Chronicle of Higher Ed looks at the Research Works Act: (Chron) Whatever the executive branch decides to do about open-access mandates, it's not at all certain that the Research Works Act stands much chance of becoming law. In 2009, a similar bill, called the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, failed to make it out of committee.This is an election year, which makes it "a very difficult year...
Thursday, January 19, 2012
To the average Apple aficionado, today’s spectacle on Apple’s entry into the education space would have seemed just par for the course. Hype is about everything Apple does in these coordinated announcements and today was no different. To the average textbook publisher today’s hype would have seemed of another world; that another entity – Apple yet? - would view the staid, traditional and,...
Monday, January 16, 2012
JStore is experimenting with a new access model (IHeD)Under the new program, unsubscribed visitors will be allowed to check out three “items” from the JSTOR archive every two weeks, which they will be able to read for free. In order to prevent piracy, the texts will be displayed as image files (so that text cannot be copied). Users will not be able to download the files. The depletion of the traditional...
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
There’s little more to say about eBooks these days: The migration is now embedded into business operations across the industry. Yes, there remain some issues and problems day-to-day but it would seem that the issue of most concern to publishers for the past five years (trade particularly) is now subsumed under business operations as usual. And that bores me.Sure, we could argue about the future...
Monday, January 9, 2012
More Intelligent Life on what was going on in 1962. (They missed one important fact). Even Khrushchev’s decision to allow the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” (November), to highlight the evils of Stalin’s labour camps, made little impression in the West. No one can have foreseen how Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” (September) would inspire the environmental...
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
A fascinating article from the Christmas Economist last week on Albrecht Durer who may have been one of the first self-publishers to build a real business.For Dürer, this was an unusual incident. Then 50, he had been for some years the most famous artist in northern Europe; but he was not in essence a court painter. He thought of such people as “parasites”, hanging round great men, waiting for...
Sunday, January 1, 2012
I am re-posting these in advance of thinking about 2012 but in re-reading the post I could almost stand pat on this effort for 2012. This was originally posted on Jan 3, 2011. Things might have been worse: As 2009 came to a close, there wasn’t a lot of optimism about 2010 yet; as the year unfolded, things...
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