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Read20: April 2008
Sorting through Layers of Copyright
Peter Brantley
April 30, 2008
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John Mark Ockerbloom writes about the discrepancies between organizational policies toward copyright and database policies:
The AAA [American Anthropological Association] relies on JSTOR for providing its older issues online. JSTOR has the American Anthropologist back-run going to the very first issues in 1888, but it won’t actually give me access to the articles in the public domain issues unless I use my institution’s subscription. (And even then, JSTOR’s standard terms and conditions, which institutions normally agree to when they subscribe, prohibit downloading and redistributing full issues, whether or not they’re copyrighted.) It would be nice if JSTOR’s policies were liberalized for their public domain content, but at least AAA has acknowledged that their articles can be reproduced once obtained by legitimate means.
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The Key to Web Success: Pretend Print Doesn't Exist
Peter Brantley
April 29, 2008
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Josh Gordon at Folio explains why pure-play Web businesses are beating established publishers are their own game:
Print people are spoiled. Too often when a magazine launches a web product the editorial focus [is] the same or similar to the positioning as the print product. As for functionality, too often the mission statement is, “To extend the magazine brand onto the Internet.” Big mistake. Your website needs its own editorial focus, and mission. While it should complement your print product it cannot just extend it.
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Newspaper Circulation Falls to WWII Levels
Peter Brantley
April 29, 2008
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Population growth and newspaper circulation are going in opposite directions. From Reflections of a Newsosaur:
Though circulation has fallen back to pre-Baby Boom levels, the population has more than doubled since 1946. If you divide circulation by population, you will find that fewer than 18 out of 100 Americans today buy a daily or Sunday newspaper. Back in 1946, 36% of the population bought a daily paper and 31% took a Sunday edition.
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Kindle's All-Encompassing Future Path
Peter Brantley
April 29, 2008
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Jeff Nolan writes about the path of the Kindle:
It's clear that [Jeff] Bezos sees a day when any and all content can be delivered to a Kindle and not only won't Amazon have to store inventory, they also won't have to ship anything but the Kindle itself to support their book business. In that light, the Kindle totally fits and is an impressive disruptive strategy to boot. Having said that, we have 550 years of mechanical printing to overcome and in terms of simplicity and cost, it's hard to beat a hard copy book.
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"Dilbert" Embraces User-Generated Content
Peter Brantley
April 23, 2008
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"Dilbert" creator Scott Adams and his distributor, United Media, are supporting user-generated content through Dilbert.com. Visitors can rewrite captions and redistribute the results, and the full "Dilbert" archive will eventually be available for free. From Webware:
I asked Adams why he and United Media are opening up the Dilbert intellectual property like this, and he sent me a response by email: "We're accepting the realities of IP on the Internet, and trying to get ahead of the curve. People already alter Dilbert strips and distribute them. If we make it easy and legal to do so, and drive more traffic to Dilbert.com in the process, everyone wins. Plus it's a lot of fun to see what people come up with in the mashups.""
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Shelfari Rolls Out Editable Author Profiles
Mac Slocum
April 23, 2008
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Each author's page will feature an open wiki in addition to a message board and a list of written books. Shelfari hopes to set itself apart from other big name wikis (namely Wikipedia) by encouraging authors themselves to join the community and modify their own pages. Many sites tend to discourage this practice because of obvious bias concerns, but Shelfari believes the interaction to be seen between authors and their fans will compensate for this drawback.
LibraryThing, another community-centric book site, also offers a level of editable profile information.
(Via Peter Brantley's read20 listserv.)
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Simplifying Semantic Tagging
Peter Brantley
April 22, 2008
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Adaptive Blue has released a header/meta tag scheme to simplify semantic tagging of content items. From ReadWriteWeb:
Semantic web company Adaptive Blue has published what it hopes will become a standard for publishers who want to signal in their header tags when a webpage is primarily about a particular book, film, wine or other type of objects ... Called AB Meta, the format was developed in concert with a number of other web companies and is aimed to be part of a larger effort to pick up where existing Semantic Web and microformats markup leaves off. It's simple and extensible.
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Speculation on Kindle 2.0
Peter Brantley
April 22, 2008
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Ars Technica speculates on what the Kindle 2.0 might provide:
... the general hardware configuration appears to be here for a while. The fact that they're still selling the current version also suggests that they have committed to this design in all its white-plastic glory. In the long term, there's still the option of moving some of the awkwardly-placed controls and of improving the E Ink screen (color and improved contrast or faster response times, seem inevitable) ... All of this leaves changes to the software as the most likely candidates for 2.0 improvements. Realistically, we could only infer what Amazon considered to an acceptable interface based on what was released as 1.0. If this doesn't reflect what they "wanted to release in the first place," then all bets on what may change are off.
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Local Focus through Community Newspaper Book Reviews
Peter Brantley
April 22, 2008
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It seems to me that there is likely to be no better market for the general-interest titles that we all publish from time to time than the college towns in which many of our presses are located, and if we all were to organize ourselves in such a fashion as to help our local newspapers run reviews of these books written by people in our own communities, we can thereby help offset at least some of the damage done by the disappearance of reviews from the major city dailies. Naturally, I have an interest in this idea's catching on elsewhere because I feel a conflict of interest in having any of our Penn State Press books reviewed by the CDT [Centre Daily Times], at least while I'm serving as coordinator. So I hope some of you will piggyback on our effort and get in touch with your own local paper's editor to see if there might be interest in creating such a "user-generated" book review operation in your community. Our CDT editor is really keen about this initiative, and I wouldn't be surprised if editors elsewhere would echo that sentiment.
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Books and Mobile Coupons
Peter Brantley
April 22, 2008
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Imagine if every book had a semacode or QR code associated with it, with ties to a book or author site. From VentureBeat:
A previous Jupiter Research report stated that 70 percent of consumers surveyed had no interest in using mobile coupons, but the mobile world is evolving quickly. Semacodes or QR codes, two dimensional square barcodes, are one example. Using a cellphone camera, a consumer simply takes a picture of one of these codes and a phone with the correct software can translate it into a coupon or a URL leading to where a coupon can be found. These ads are popular in Japan and can be found everywhere from coffee cups to billboards. Now Google is working with the technology in the U.S. under AdWords.
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Bezos Hopes for Longer Attention Spans
Mac Slocum
April 21, 2008
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In his annual letter (PDF) to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos discusses the Kindle's place in an "info-snacking" world:
... networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They've shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans ... If our tools make information snacking easier, we'll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.
(Via Peter Brantley's read20 listserv.)
UK Service Brings Audiobook Downloads to Mobile Phones
Mac Slocum
April 21, 2008
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UK-based GoSpoken has partnered with Random House to make 50 audiobook titles available for purchase through the GoSpoken mobile download service. GoSpoken is currently aimed at early adopter UK residents who have broadband-capable cellphones (specifically, HSDPA-enabled) and mobile data plans.
Managing director Tony Lynch describes the genesis of GoSpoken on the company's blog:
As I travel round London, I am staggered by the amount of people traveling with earphones attached and because I have a vested interest and never stop wondering what they are actually listening to. Now those people who have seen me staring at them through buses, trains and their daily commuter work will be able to download the audio version of best-selling fiction and non-fiction anywhere where their network gives them broadband coverage.
(Via Peter Brantley's read20 listserv.)
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Open Source Textbook Adoption Grows
Peter Brantley
April 17, 2008
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Inside Higher Ed notes the slowly growing open source textbook movement:
Colleges and individual faculty members continue to experiment with putting course information and material online, and "open textbooks" typically are licensed to allow users to download, share and alter the content as they see fit, so long as their purposes aren't commercial and they credit the author for the original material. This allows instructors to customize e-textbooks and offer them to students for free online or as low-cost printed versions.
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Pan Macmillan Plans Ebooks Showing Edits and Changes
Peter Brantley
April 15, 2008
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Pan Macmillan is releasing ebooks with extra sauce. From thedigitalist.net:
The idea that a special edition eBook can contain marginal material produced before, during, or after a print edition features in two other eBooks to be published by Picador this year. Sid Smith’s China Dreams, which we published in hardback in January 2007 and in paperback in January 2008, will be issued in a uniquely up-to-date edition, in the author’s latest version, with corrections, changes, and new material, and a foreword in which he considers the process of composition and revision.
Cliffhanger, by T. J. Middleton (the alias of our established Picador author Tim Binding), takes this idea in the opposite direction: alongside the print edition, which we publish in October 2008, will be an urtext: a composite version of the novel as it was before it was edited here at Picador, with the text in its original form, reinstated and modified scenes and characters, and a radically different ending, also with a foreword by the author explaining the urtext’s conception and the editing process that turned it into Cliffhanger."
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Free Doesn't Work for Every Company
Peter Brantley
April 10, 2008
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Hank Williams of Why Does Everything Suck? does an informal economic critique of Chris Anderson's "things tend to free" hypothesis:
"Some of you will argue that Google does fine based purely on advertising. But just because one company can commoditize everyone else's work and make pennies on things that used to generate dollars, is that sustainable across the whole economy? Or would we really be reducing the overall amount of money flowing into the digital market and therefore to the overall labor force?"
Williams continues ...
"I do believe we are in an era of artificial digital abundance in large part driven by over zealous VCs and companies like Google that are supporting money losing services with their massively profitable search engine. But this cannot continue indefinitely. Google cannot do the best job of making every category of everything. Scarcity of important useful products will indeed return. These products will be designed by companies that do not want to lose money and don’t have a search engine to subsidize money-losing efforts. Therefore they will have to be supported by direct (i.e. non-advertising) revenue streams."
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