Short takes from the New Statesman: Over 150,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the UK government take “decisive action [to] make Amazon pay its fair share of UK corporation tax”. The petition drafted by Frances and Keith Smith, independent booksellers from London, was inspired by Margaret Hodge’s questioning of representatives from Google, Amazon and Starbucks last November.John le...
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Author Neil Gaiman addressed the crowds at London Book Fair last week and it may not have gone well. "All I remember from the musicians union was that I got these yellow stickers" (YouTube)From the New York Times on Amazon singles.Besides luring luminaries like Ms. Orlean, Mr. Blum has tried to maintain the brand’s prestige by tightly limiting the number of offerings. Although the digital...
Friday, April 19, 2013
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Is the announced acquisition of BetterKnow a sign of innovation in the Follett higher education group? Under new CEO Mary Lee Schneider the company has made few announcements since she moved from the board to the CEO role but this could be an indication that Follett is committed to investing in new technology, services and business models to support their position in the higher ed market.From the...
From the Chronicle of Higher Ed a 20 minute interview with Fred Dylla, executive director at the American Institute of Physics, and Brian D. Scanlan, president of Thieme Publishers on the costs of publishing journals.LINK to the articleAcademic journals don’t happen by magic, and even online editions are expensive to produce in ways that scholars may not realize. That’s the argument by two scholarly...
Monday, April 15, 2013
Fun to experiment - View this in Flipboard: http://flip.it/GoiH1From the digital minds pre-conference at London Book Fair over the weekend this summary from The Bookseller: Author Neil Gaiman, in a wide-ranging and complex talk, said people in the book business needed to become more like 'dandelions', experimenting by spreading numerous seeds around and accepting that most would fail. "The model...
Friday, April 12, 2013
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It was dusk and getting dark and I couldn't hold the camera still enough. The busker (and his mates - one with a double base) is captured in full action as a result of camera shake but it works.In those days children, the American mall atmosphere of today's Covent Garden was but a wishful hope of some government...
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Eric Hellman over at the eponymously named Go To Hellman has an interesting idea that chips away at one of the last foundations of big publishing; the 'investment banking' attribute that big publishing brings to the industry. Here's a snip from his blog post this week:There's nothing intrinsic about crowd-funding that restricts this sort of fund-raising to unknown authors looking for a first...
From OCLC a selection of links to some of the sessions at last months Washington meeting on MOOCs and libraries:MOOCs and Libraries event videos now availableThe “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?” event took place 18–19 March at the University of Pennsylvania and was broadcast live online. Hosted by OCLC Research and University of Pennsylvania Libraries, the event...
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Confessions of a window cleaner now back in print and coming from Harpercollins. (Independent):While the films quickly ran out of steam, the books that inspired them didn't. Written by a former advertising executive called Christopher Wood under the pseudonym Timothy Lea, they ran to 19 titles, and Wood penned a further eight under the name of Rosie Dixon. They were overwhelmingly of their time (and...
Friday, April 5, 2013
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In the old days you used to be able to walk out onto these roof gardens as part of the tour of Rock Center - at least I assume so since I have a photo from this set of Mrs PND senior standing on the grass down there. Now you can get something of a view of them if you go to the top floor of SAKs which I did a...
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Buying content is way too cumbersome. I don't mean the Amazon 1click buy but rather the individual article or chapter you might want to read. We are seeing how video and audio (Netflix On Demand and iTunes for example) are morphing into single transaction type activities and this should happen for print. Eliminating all impediments to the efficient sale or transaction of content...
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