Although the study points out that there is “virtually no quality assurance” in Amazon’s consumer reviews, which can also be “gamed” by publishers or competitors submitting false reviews, they found that, nevertheless, experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.
Amazon reviewers were more likely to give a favourable review to a debut author, which the Harvard academics said suggested that “one drawback of expert reviews is that they may be slower to learn about new and unknown books”.
Professional critics were more positive about prizewinning authors, and “more favourable to authors who have garnered other attention in the press (as measured by number of media mentions outside of the review)”.
Confirmed: New iPhone Will Be Longer and Thinner and Have Smaller Dock Connector
Confirmed? Not so fast. iLounge editor Jeremy Horowitz posted some rumours, and…
These details match up with and expand upon his earlier reports, so this is seeming pretty credible.
That isn’t confirmation, and the Forbes piece was quickly and rightly mocked for its headline. The writer was quick to publish an apology:
Confirmed or Not, New iPhone Screen Size Makes Sense for LTE and Personal Cinema
Skipping gaily past the bit where the writer says that of course, nothing is official until Steve Jobs unveils it — a task that, as we know, has become more difficult since his death — the writer then explains all.
The old model of journalism, which I am as steeped in as anyone (even if I have spent most of my career on the visual side of the equation), was great for absolute quality, but tended to suppress individual voices in favor of institutional ones. What’s great about the blogging model, which Forbes.com has embraced full force, is that we are all out here trying to add ideas to the news cycle.
Yesterday afternoon: Virgin Media and other UK ISPs begin to implement the court-ordered block on The Pirate Bay.
Yesterday evening: various sites publish in-depth guides on how to evade the court-ordered block on The Pirate Bay. In some cases, evading is simply a matter of clicking a single hyperlink.
It’s an old comparison, I know, but the copyright wars are very similar to the drug wars. Nobody really believes the war can be won; the best the authorities can hope for is to make things a little bit more difficult for the users.
When I first got an iPad, I rushed to download some big-name digital magazines. They were rubbish.
You’d think that tablets and magazines are made for each other — tablets are the perfect size, big enough that you don’t spend half your time zooming and scrolling but small enough that they aren’t uncomfortable — and they are, but it’s all too easy to make the reading experience worse than it is in print. For me, too many magazines did just that.
I felt that the digital magazines I tried failed in three key areas: the text; the size; and the return of the interactive CD-ROM.
Text was the biggie. With very few exceptions text on a screen can be tiring to read, and if that text is poorly rendered in the first place it can be particularly sore on the eyes. I found that many magazines exported their text as image files, and in many cases those image files were fairly low-res. After five minutes, my head was bursting.
The second issue, size, is related to that. If you’ve got an entry-level iPad, 16GB of storage fills up fast — so when magazines require more than 500MB of space for a single issue, downloading the latest one usually means having to delete some video or apps first. That is an enormous pain in the arse, and it could well get worse as retina-display assets become more popular. If you think a quarter of a gigabyte is excessive, wait until issues hit the one or two gigabyte mark.
The third issue is the return of the interactive CD-ROM. For a while in the 1990s, interactive CDs were the future of media: you’d get magazines as interactive apps, or training materials published on CD-i. They failed because they were shite: they were all about the bells and whistles, not about the content. Some of the magazine apps I tried reminded me very much of those discs.
The upshot of all this? I’m on my second iPad now and hopefully upgrading to a third-generation one soon, but I’m still not reading my newspapers or magazines digitally. I think, though, that’s about to change. The reason? Aggregators and dedicated magazine apps.
Aggregator apps such as Flipboard and Zite do a very good job of repackaging things that other people are sharing, and I think that Zite is the closest I’ve yet come to having a Daily Me, the personalised newspaper we’ve been promised for so long. It isn’t perfect — its filtering is fairly blunt and its Scotland category is particularly laughable, giving me either sport or the rantings of crazed SNP activists who live in ditches — and it deprives publishers of revenues by stripping all the ads from their content, but it’s pretty good at tech stuff. Between Zite, Instapaper’s recommendations and The Browser’s list of interesting links from around the web, I’ve usually got something interesting to read.
Aggregators are handy things, but one thing they don’t have is a single voice. They can’t do, because they’re collections of many different voices. David Hepworth, founder of Q and publisher of Word magazine, once wrote that a new issue of a good magazine is like receiving a letter from a good friend, and I think there’s a lot of truth in that.
Many of the magazines I write for are like letters from friends, I think, and while I’m clearly biased I think the digital editions of titles such as MacFormat, PC Plus and .net work really well on the iPad. They’re cheap, too, which is a happy bonus. What they don’t offer, though, is interactivity. Tap! does, and it manages to do so without invoking the ghosts of horrible crappy interactive CD-ROMs.
Tap!, I think, gets interactivity right. The app doesn’t make the editor’s head float around the place or annoy you with unnecessary animations; instead, it uses interactivity where it’s actually useful — so you can spin product images to get a better idea of what they look like, or see how a game plays as well as read about it. In the current edition there’s a nifty sliding feature that shows you the difference between the old and new iPad screens, which is a great example of how interactivity can add value when it’s used sensibly.
Here’s a wee video about the current issue:
I think Tap! offers the best of both worlds: the clarity and serendipity of print (it’ll be something special on a retina display), and the benefits of digital publishing (embedded video, interactive elements and so on).
As one of my editors, Dan Oliver, put it this morning on Twitter: “If magazines have a future on the iPad, it’ll be down to people like [Tap editor] Chris & team pushing things on.” I think he’s right: if you have an iPad and like magazines, I think you’ll really like Tap!
Most of the debate over digital music business models is about the record companies and their digital successors, but what about the musicians? David Lowery of Cracker argues that for them, things are much worse: at least some pre-digital musicians actually got paid.
Things are worse. This was not really what I was expecting. I’d be very happy to be proved wrong. I mean it’s hard for me to sing the praises of the major labels. I’ve been in legal disputes with two of the three remaining major labels. But sadly I think I’m right. And the reason is quite unexpected. It’s seems the Bad Old Major Record Labels “accidentally” shared too much revenue and capital through their system of advances. Also the labels ”accidentally” assumed most of the risk. This is contrasted with the new digital distribution system where some of the biggest players assume almost no risk and share zero capital.
I don’t agree with everything he writes, but that bit there makes sense to me – and it’s being replicated in ebooks. What looks like empowerment can also be evisceration: the Apples and Amazons of the world aren’t getting rid of middlemen, but becoming them by getting writers to do all the work (editing, promotion, etc) that traditional publishers do. They still get a cut, but they don’t have to risk any of their money.
In the last few years it’s become apparent the music business, which was once dominated by six large and powerful music conglomerates, MTV, Clear Channel and a handful of other companies, is now dominated by a smaller set of larger even more powerful tech conglomerates. And their hold on the business seems to be getting stronger.
There’s a wider angle to this too, which I’m sure I’ll come back to in a proper post: the way in which the new titans are organised in such a way that they can destroy their foreign rivals without paying foreign taxes. By routing ebook sales and music downloads through Luxembourg and putting UK earnings through Irish subsidiaries – something that, as public companies, they arguably have to do; their responsibility is to maximise their share prices, not to be good corporate citizens – the new bosses get yet another advantage: not only are they largely free from the need to invest in content creation, but they’re freed from some of the main costs of doing business too.
Lowery:
Taking no risk and paying nothing to the content creators is built into the collective psyche of the Tech industry. They do not value content. They only see THEIR services as valuable. They are the Masters of the Universe. They bring all that is good. Content magically appears on their blessed networks.
As I say, I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s hard to argue against that one.
Another week, another faintly frightening bit of proposed state surveillance. Me, on Techradar:
What’s happening here is a classic bit of political manoeuvring. What’s supposed to happen is this: the security services ask for the power to do anything they like, plus some satellites with giant lasers and hats that can be used as guns, because that’s what the security services are supposed to do.
The government then tells the security services to get stuffed because we can’t afford gun hats, and because privacy is a fundamental human right.
Like Labour before them, the Tories have forgotten to do their bit. Instead of saying “get stuffed, you power-crazed doom-mongers!” they’ve said “Gun hats? What a brilliant idea!”
Airports are effectively rights-free zones. Security officers have enormous power over you as a passenger. You have limited rights to refuse a search. Your possessions can be confiscated. You cannot make jokes, or wear clothing, that airport security does not approve of. You cannot travel anonymously. (Remember when we would mock Soviet-style “show me your papers” societies? That we’ve become inured to the very practice is a harm.) And if you’re on a certain secret list, you cannot fly, and you enter a Kafkaesque world where you cannot face your accuser, protest your innocence, clear your name, or even get confirmation from the government that someone, somewhere, has judged you guilty. These police powers would be illegal anywhere but in an airport, and we are all harmed—individually and collectively—by their existence.
I’ve been thinking about Twitter racists and other unpleasantness. Techradar:
I’m no friend of racists, but the sentencing of Liam Stacyworries me. Stacy, as I’m sure you know, trolled Twitter users over Fabrice Muamba, posting vile racist crap when they responded, and as a result he’s been sentenced to two months in prison.
I’m not suggesting for one moment that what he did was acceptable – but two months in prison? For tweeting?
The point of the piece isn’t to justify what Stacy posted – it was vile – but to ask whether we’re throwing the book at the right people. As I’ve said in the comments:
It’s an interesting area of law: how do you protect free speech (even if you loathe that speech with every fibre of your being) while cracking down on the harassers and scum like the people who troll the recently bereaved?
I don’t know what the answers are. Fines? Community service among the communities being abused? Electronic ASBOs and cyber-curfews banning them from social media?
When I was young, a truck full of chocolate bars lost its load a few streets from my house. By the time the police turned up – which was, annoyingly, long before I found out about it – the cargo had gone. People didn’t take the chocolate because they were forced to; they took it because, hey! Free chocolate! The rewards were so attractive and the risk of being caught was so remote that half the town went on a three-day Wispa binge.
For only 5 bucks I will buy your .99 Kindle ebook, provide a 1 star rating and write a negative review that may demotivate customers from buying your book. This will allow you as the author to help further alienate potential readers by taking the unfounded criticism way too personally. I may also click the “Yes” helful button on other negative reviews of your book to dramatically decrease your books credibility, sales and exposure.
Gags aside, I wonder how much work people like this get:
I will review up to TWO different products. I will give a 5-star positive review for your kindle, book or whatever product you have on Amazon. We all know Amazon is the number one outlet for people buying books, CDs, kindles etc and it is vital that customers see favourable reviews. My reviews will be tailored to match your product and will have a “genuine” feel to it and not appear spammy, such “cool book” or “nifty product, go and buy one” etc
I wrote a column about this kind of thing, but it hasn’t made its way online yet: if it’s worthwhile to game a system, the system will be gamed.
I know it’s illegal for companies to pay for this kind of thing. Does anybody know whether EU anti-astroturfing laws apply to individuals?
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