Shiny gadgets and clever computers
An interesting post on the appallingly named tech site Pandodaily: Confessions of a publisher, written by an unnamed “industry insider”.
Amazon could probably afford to lose $20 million/year in their publishing arm just to put the other publishers out of business. I think that’s what they’re trying to do–throw money around in an industry that doesn’t have any, until Amazon becomes not only the only place where you buy books, but the only place that publishes books, too.
Today’s the big protest against SOPA, the latest bit of dangerous anti-internet legislation. I’ve written a wee column suggesting that it won’t change much in the long term, because lobbyists are fighting a long war:
Copyright industries want the net regulated, and they’re willing to spend huge sums to make it happen: SOPA is a battle, but the lobbyists are waging a war.
You don’t fight that by turning sites black. You fight it by supporting the EFF, and the ACLU, and the ORG, and by lobbying your elected representatives, and you fight it it in the ballot box. In the last general election just 55% of 25-34 year olds voted, while turnout for the 18-24 age group was a pathetic 44%.
We need to do better, because the best way to fight bad laws is to stop clowns from getting into power in the first place.
According to somebody on Twitter, that’s akin to telling women of the 1960s to shut up and know their place. I’m a bit baffled by that.
iTunes Match, Apple’s music-in-the-cloud service, is very good – but it’s worth a look even if you don’t want or need cloud-based music. For your £21.99 you get two things: a backup of your entire music library (more than 10,000 songs, in my case, saving me the hassle of getting a bigger backup disk) and an upgrade for all your low bitrate music.
If you’re anything like me you’ve been ripping CDs and buying downloads for years, and back in the day file sizes mattered – so you’d rip at, say, 160Kbps to get as much music as possible on your player. Now, though, space isn’t the issue it used to be, and if you listen on good speakers or good headphones you can hear the flaws.
The problem is that actually re-ripping all that music (assuming you still have the CDs) is an enormous job: as of yesterday I had 6,500 songs at lower bitrates.
That’s where iTunes Match comes in. It takes a while, but it works brilliantly.  Jason Snell explains how to do it.
I spotted this little nugget yesterday:
Barnes & Noble said Monday that it will offer discounts on its Nook devices to customers who buy a digital subscription to People magazine and The New York Times.
For New York Times subscribers, it’ll offer a free Nook Simple Touch, a 6-inch e-reader that is priced at $99, or take $100 off on Nook Color, normally priced at $199.
It won’t be the last time an e-reader comes bundled with a digital subscription, especially as the devices are getting cheaper and cheaper. Tablets will inevitably follow – the Nook Color mentioned above is similar to the Kindle Fire tablet. I’m surprised Amazon isn’t giving free devices to its Amazon Prime members already.
The business model already exists: if you subscribe to cable or satellite TV, you essentially get the hardware for free; many mobile phones are free on contract, and so on. It isn’t hard to imagine somebody such as News International giving away a “free” Kindle Fire if you subscribe to the full-fat version of its digital service.
Simon at No Rock’n’Roll Fun has written a typically excellent piece about the BPI’s latest sales figures.
Despite all this “chronic” piracy going on, Adele’s album has sold more copies in a year than any album has ever sold. More than a Michael Jackson album managed in a year, even the good one. More than a Beatles album ever managed to whisk out the shops in twelve months. More, even, than the third Charlatans album sold in a year.
So, how come Adele’s album was not only immune to the chronic piracy, but thrived in a world so stricken? Had there been secret umlauts sewn into the hemlines of the choruses, rendering it impossible to torrent?
Were any of the many pirate-busting measures deployed? Did the pre-release circulate solely on a tape glued into a Walkman? Was every copy watermarked? Did a fleet of fake files get launched onto the internet to foil downloaders? Did Derren Brown hypnotise the world so that if they typed ‘Adele 21 free’ into Google they’d die?
Nope. The success of Adele’s album seems to be nothing to do with avoiding piracy, and more to do with sticking out an album that people liked and wanted to buy.
Worth remembering the next time you see the entertainment industry demanding new laws and filtering to fight the menace of piracy.ikoni
John Walker is always worth reading, and his review of Modern Warfare 3’s singleplayer campaign is just superb.
Videogames often allow us to live out fantasies, to be who we could never be with our saggy, regular-person frames and lives. A soldier fighting in a near-future war, with access to the finest in military hardware? Maybe I could be the squad leader? Maybe I could be the hero? Maybe I could be the one who’s allowed to open doors? But no, of course not, you are – as ever – the grunt, being barked at throughout, forced to do whatever the game/game characters tell you to, which is usually to sweep up after them and the party they’re having in front.
It fascinates me that this is the successful formula, the secret behind being the biggest FPS series of all time.
I’m really taken by children’s book apps, and you can get an award-winning one for free: the Jack and the Beanstalk iPad/iPhone app is available here. I haven’t tried this one yet, but it looks like fun.
On the face of it, Internet Explorer doesn’t have much in common with Sugababes: IE isn’t beautiful, doesn’t sing and isn’t likely to dress in a primary-coloured PVC dominatrix outfit to perform at G-A-Y.
However, they’re not as different as you might think.
Nokia’s keynote this morning wasn’t quite what I was hoping for.Â
“Our ambition is to surprise you at every turn,” said Kevin Shields, a man whose job title – senior vice president of program and product management for the smart device – is longer than many people’s lives.
And then he started shouting.
“It looks AWESOME!” he bellowed, channelling his inner Ballmer and scaring the hell out of the first six rows. “It feels GREAT in your hand!” he added, frightening everybody again. “It SCREAMS premium!” he screamed.
“Gary Marshall,” writes Amazon.com, “are you looking for something in our Tablets department? If so, you might be interested in these items.”
It’s almost as if Amazon wants you to look at one tablet in particular, isn’t it?