From ArtNet News: A thorny lawsuit making its way through the courts pits Harvard University against a woman who claims she is the direct descendant of slaves depicted in several 19th-century daguerreotypes owned by the school’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. In a case filed on March 20 in a Massachusetts court, Tamara Lanier … Read more
PG did a quick Google search and couldn’t find any mention of iBooks in Apple’s big “moving to services” announcement yesterday. Is there any reason to think Apple is going to pay much attention to iBooks going forward? Anything Amazon should be worried about?
From Medium: There’s a joke in the creative industry that “everyone is a designer”, making light of how infuriating it is to have someone (without a visual background) tell a designer how things should look. It’s a huge and common problem, caused by a “client is always right” attitude — something we’ve all experienced, and all must … Read more
Not exactly to do with books, but PG is reading dystopian science fiction at the moment (Winter World by A.G. Riddle) and enjoying it, so, inasmuch as the OP felt a bit dystopian, it piqued PG’s interest and he thought it might also be a writing prompt. From Just Security: While the world grapples with … Read more
From Fast Company: Voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are women rather than men. You can change this in the settings, and choose a male speaker, of course, but the fact that the technology industry has chosen a woman to, by default, be our always-on-demand, personal assistant of choice, speaks volumes about our … Read more
From Slashgear: Walmart plans to launch an Android tablet designed to compete with the cheapest iPad model, according to a new report. The sources claim Walmart’s tablet will be ‘kid-friendly’ and sold under the retailer’s ONN store brand. The company has confirmed plans to offer this tablet, but didn’t provide any official details about it, … Read more
From Fast Company: Have you ever searched for a product online in the morning and gone back to look at it again in the evening only to find the price has changed? In which case you may have been subject to the retailer’s pricing algorithm. Traditionally when deciding the price of a product, marketers consider … Read more
From Fall Into The Story: Current totals on #copypastecris as of this morning: 51 books, 34 authors. Blowback’s inevitable when you go public–especially on social media–about any issue. With this one, I’m finding (unsurprisingly) people who object, complain, or smack at me and others tend to be protecting their own interests. It’s all, yes! Fix … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: After the death of a king or queen, a royal biography is duly commissioned. It appears, appropriately reverent, its subject cleansed of blemishes and imperfection. Such was the case in 1959, six years after Queen Mary, the wife of King George V and grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II, had died … Read more
From The Literary Hub: The first person to photograph the underground of Paris was a gallant and theatrical man with a blaze of red hair, known as Nadar. Once described by Charles Baudelaire as “the most amazing example of vitality,” Nadar was among the most visible and electric personalities in mid 19th-century Paris. He was … Read more
From The Washington Post: Both men have gobs of money. They didn’t make it the old-fashioned way, with steel and brick, but instead with big, disruptive, life-changing ideas. After they got rich, after they’d achieved a titan status imaginable only in the digital age, that’s when the tabloids came for them. And that’s when they … Read more
From BuzzFeed News: When artist Susie Ghahremani first came across a seller impersonating her on Amazon, she stayed up until 6 a.m., clicking through hundreds of the seller’s listings and reporting over two dozen URLs featuring counterfeit products. The rip-offs of her designs on Amazon were blatant: One listing used Ghahremani’s photo of a necklace she’d … Read more
From The Hollywood Reporter: For the past decade, a number of prominent musicians including Tom Petty and Bob Dylan have quietly attempted to reclaim rights to songs by serving notices of termination to publishers and record labels. Often, like in the case of Prince, these notices become invitations to renegotiate deals for more favorable royalty … Read more
From The Trichordist: This data set is isolated to the calendar year 2018 and represents a mid-sized indie label with an approximately 250+ album catalog now generating almost 1b streams annually. 2018 is the year we saw streaming truly mature as the dominant source of recorded music revenues. In parsing the data provided we find that … Read more
From The Deseret News: If you’re one of the 1.5 billion people who use Gmail, you might have noticed last year that your emails suddenly started writing themselves. But did you notice that the autocomplete feature never uses gendered pronouns like she/he or him/her? In May, Google introduced Smart Compose, which helps users finish sentences. … Read more
From Electric Lit: [T]he Authors Guild published its 2018 Author Income Survey. . . . . This was the largest survey ever conducted of writing-related earnings by American authors. It tallied the responses of 5,067 authors, including those who are traditionally, hybrid, and self-published, and found that the median income from writing has dropped 42% from … Read more
From Indie Digital Media: Zoë Keating is a cellist and composer whose music has appeared in tv shows like Breaking Bad and the Sherlock Holmes drama Elementary. She’s released several albums and EPs of her original music, and has recorded with artists such as Amanda Palmer. All of this Keating does with a “100% DIY” approach, as she wrote … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Publishing analysts have said for years that if the disruption hadn’t hit with ebooks, the story of publishing in the past decade would have been audio. By that, the analysts mean audio rights. They have become increasingly important and will remain so. Here in the States, where so many of us commute … Read more
Not exactly about authors and books, but perhaps a writing prompt. From The Intercept: Facial recognition has quickly shifted from techno-novelty to fact of life for many, with millions around the world at least willing to put up with their faces scanned by software at the airport, their iPhones, or Facebook’s server farms. But researchers … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Amazon.com Inc. is the latest technology titan to claim the crown of world’s most valuable public company, signaling the industry’s enduring market dominance even after turbulent months in which investors pummeled their shares. Amazon finished Monday’s session up 3.4% at $1,629.51, with a market capitalization of about $795 billion, the first … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: The biggest issue for the latter half of 2018 was book sales. Indies and traditional publishers both complained that book sales were down, and that a crisis was imminent. Their ideas of crisis were different, but they come from a similar source, which is the current state of disruption in the … Read more
From OZY: “Hey, Dad. I want to show you a song.” The speaker was my 16-year-old daughter. Music for her? Primarily visual and to be enjoyed in video clips. Video clips that did not always feature videos. Sometimes it was just some clip art and the music. But no record store, no record album, no tape — … Read more
From Draft2Digital: For sure, 2018 had a few bumps in the road. Amazon shook up the industry first by a shift to favoring paid advertising over organic search results, then with policy changes that led to decreased revenue and even canceled accounts, with effectively no recourse for affected authors. Other interesting turns included dubious trademark claims, … Read more
From The Atlantic: It’s my holiday tradition to bring tidings of discomfort and sorrow to my colleagues in the news business. One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while The New York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising. Twelve months later, … Read more
From Anne Allen’s Blog: By Laurie McLean, Founding Partner of Fuse Literary Agency . . . . Diversity Continues its Dominance One of the unforeseen yet marvelous results of the democratization of publishing is the emergence of #ownvoices authors and the increasing desire for marginalized voices to be heard and read. Top Ten and Best … Read more
From Venture Beat: Smart speakers, tablets, and set-top boxes with Amazon’s Alexa built in flew off the shelves this holiday season, according to Amazon. The Seattle retailer didn’t break out exact stats, but revealed that shipments of Alexa-enabled devices like the Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick 4K, Alexa Voice Remote, and Echo were up “millions” of … Read more
From Copyright and Technology: Seventeen years ago, the U.S. Copyright Office — Congress’s official advisor on copyright issues — published an opinion for Congress on whether there should be a first sale right for digital content: a right for consumers to alienate (sell, lend, rent, or give away) digital files, like the one that exists … Read more
Not necessarily to do with books, but quite possibly helpful for writing. From Medium: In 2012, I realized I had a problem. My iPhone made me twitchy. It called to me from my pocket, the way the Ring called Bilbo Baggins.My moment of clarity happened in my living room. I was sitting on the floor … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: Devised as an annual season-closer, the FutureBook conference is positioned by The Bookseller to focus on the digital context of the publishing business that’s more compact in the UK and, in some ways, more easily sorted than are other markets. Presumably next year’s FutureBook Live will be seated in a non-European UK—something both emotionally … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: In October 2018, Sears filed for bankruptcy. The form of bankruptcy the corporate heads chose was something called Chapter 11 here in the U.S. It means that the company—once the largest retailer in the entire world—will be able to reorganize and, if they’re lucky and the folks running the company are … Read more
From CNBC: This could be the most crucial holiday season in Barnes & Noble’s history. Its sales have been in a decline for six years as the bookseller cedes market share to Amazon and consumers turn to their phones or portable tablets instead of books. There’s been a revolving door in the retailer’s C-suite, and activist investors … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Amazon.com Inc. is gearing up to challenge Apple Inc. in the mobile-payments race. The e-commerce giant is working to persuade brick-and-mortar merchants to accept its Amazon Pay digital wallet, according to people familiar with the matter, attempting to expand a service now used primarily for purchases online. To start, the company … Read more
From Publishing Trends: Are you a good listener? More and more people consider themselves to be, and the evidence is impressive: according to NPD Group, audiobook sales grew 22.7% with over 46,000 audiobooks published in 2017, and podcasts now total more than 500,000, up from 150,000 last year. According to eMarketer, 73 million people in the US will … Read more
From Fast Company: Last week at Orgatec, a leading European trade show for contract and office furniture, the Swiss company Vitra previewed a set of office seating prototypes, called Soft Work, which you might more likely find in a chic hotel lobby or airport lounge. That’s exactly what the designers, London studio Barber Osgerby, intended. … Read more
PG has been a Windows user for a very long time and an MS-DOS user prior to that. All of the PG offspring are Mac users. On many occasions, PG has had the Windows vs. Mac discussion. Several years ago, with the help of one of his offspring, he purchased a lightly-used top-end Mac desktop and … Read more
PG couldn’t make a firm connection between this article and the writers’ world (other than some horror fiction), but thought it was interesting. From National Geographic: Clowns are creeping across America, lurking in the woods and generally freaking out the general public. Over the past few months, “clown sightings” have become a thing, occupying a dark … Read more
From BookRiot: The Chelsea Hotel, currently closed for renovations, sits at 222 West 23rd Street between Seventh and Eight Avenues. It is a beautiful red-brick building, built with a mixture of Victorian gothic and Queen Anne style. There are wrought iron balconies and a grand staircase located in the middle of the hotel. . . … Read more
From The Motley Fool: Barnes & Noble . . . has been a slowly sinking ship for many years. You can blame some of that on Amazon and some on the chain’s own incompetence. The bookseller botched its digital strategy by waiting too long to have one. Now, the company’s NOOK line of digital readers barely exists, … Read more
From The New York Post: When Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon would be raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour last week, the reception was rapturous. The Seattle Times called it “the just thing.” “Good for them,” said President Trump’s chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow. “I’m in favor of higher wages.” Bloomberg called it proof that “an even higher minimum … Read more
From Medium: Several years ago, I was sitting in the audience at a big tech conference, learning about a startup that made it easy for people to rent rooms in other people’s houses for short stays. In a world where people can now travel to any part of the world and share someone else’s home, … Read more
From SSRN (footnotes omitted, a few paragraph breaks added): “Data is the new gold. It’s the new oil. It’s the new plastics.” — Mark Cuban, 2017 Over the last decade the music, motion picture, and publishing industries have faced what many have characterized as a crisis. Online piracy and the digital technologies that enable it are … Read more
From MarketWatch: The head of the European Commission’s antitrust authority used a visit to the U.S. to describe in greater detail the latest American tech titan that’s the subject of possible action, Amazon. As European Union Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager has had a lot of influence on U.S. technology companies like Google which was fined … Read more
From BenZinga: On Tuesday, Congress passed the Music Modernization Act, which President Trump is expected to sign into law within the next two weeks. . . . . Despite the complete digitization of the music industry, today’s business operates under the same royalty laws established back in 1909. The MMA will update many of these … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Imagine my surprise, as I scanned through Twitter a few weeks ago, to see a writer I follow go after Tor for its library policies. Um…what? Turns out that Tor, through its parent company Macmillan has started a program in which libraries cannot get ebooks of the latest Tor releases until four months … Read more
From The Washington Post: Europe’s antitrust regulators have opened a preliminary probe of Amazon.com to see whether the e-commerce giant has stifled smaller competitors who sell clothing, toys and other goods through its website, marking the region’s latest inquiry into the business practices of a U.S. tech giant. The concern at hand is whether Amazon’s use of … Read more
Although visitors to TPV are an intelligent and widely-read group of individuals with many interests, it occurred to PG that some might not know that this is the beginning of Crypto Week, so declared by Cloudflare, a cloud services company. Although this is not the standard fare on TPV and is not intended to become so, “Welcome … Read more
From T. Thorn Coyle: Under capitalism we are all for sale, and most labor is grossly underpaid.” –– Maggie Mayhem Nothing in this world is clean. Everything supports, depends on, tears down, or eats something else. Sometimes these cycles feel useful and nourishing, like soldier fly larvae in their wriggling, pale masses, slowly eating compost … Read more
From Two Cents: When you purchase music, movies or books from Amazon or Apple’s iTunes store, you might be under the impression that that material is yours to enjoy forever; that’s how CDs and paper books work, after all. Why rent You’ve Got Mail for $3.99 every few months when you can “own” it and watch it … Read more
From The New Republic: When Penguin and Random House announced in the fall of 2012 that they intended to merge, Hurricane Sandy was barreling toward New York City, America’s publishing capital. It was an instant metaphor for headline writers: “As Sandy Loomed, the Publishing Industry Panicked.” People inside both companies worried about their jobs; people outside the companies worried … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: The European Parliament on Wednesday adopted a draft copyright bill with provisions aimed at forcing tech giants to pay more to media companies for music and news content that is used on their platforms. The vote, which was delayed for several months amid intense lobbying from publishers and internet companies, sets the … Read more