A few weeks ago, I bought an audio recording of Great Expectations from thebestaudiobooks.com. I bought it from a handheld iOS device, and so I when I received the download link by email, I didn’t download it right away. The next time I was sitting at my laptop and remembered the link, it had expired.…
In a way, Bug Chucker also suffers from the same direction problems most were able to overcome with the original Myst. Experimentation was as vital in that as it is in Bug Chucker and the senselessness of testing is every bit as grating. You’re never sure if what you’re doing is right. End of the day, I look…
Even the access to paying customers is hard to justify. The terms of the deal mean that for each Skype customer, Microsoft is paying about $1,000. And on average, those customers are worth a profit of about $30, presuming most of Skype’s income comes from subscriptions and call charges. That’s a huge disparity. Windows Live…
“Arrogant” doesn’t begin to describe this pompous drivel. Be forewarned that the following email you’re about to read from this lifeguard-cum-BMW intern will make you angry. Meet the workplace prototype for the next 10 years: welcome to Generation “I.” — An Incredibly Arrogant Email From A Young Neighborhood Pool Lifeguard To His Former Boss (Deadspin link…
Come Monday, AT&T will begin restricting more than 16 million broadband users based on the amount of data they use in a month. The No. 2 carrier’s entry into the broadband-cap club means that a majority of U.S. broadband users will now be subject to limits on how much they can do online or risk extra…
Today, a group of bloggers led by union organizer and journalist Jonathan Tasini will file a class-action suit against the Huffington Post, founder Arianna Huffington, and AOL, which acquired the news-and-blogs site in February. AOL, Arianna Huffington Hit with Class Action Suit – Jeff Bercovici – Mixed Media – Forbes. Similar:By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9…
The move would transform the electronic market and add to Rowling’s already impressive net worth. J.K. Rowling is considering releasing digital versions of her lucrative Harry Potter books. Though she has declined eBook deals for years, her agent Neil Blair now says, “The e-book format is now something that is being actively considered,” according to the…
Highly-paid superstars aren’t preventing the exodus of TV viewers. The mind boggles that the fight to keep TV news profitable led CBS to pay Couric $15 million a year. That expense would provide an attractive living wage to 150 experienced journalists, or 300 cub reporters in feeder markets. Pelley, a Texan who began his career…
USA Today designed its coin-operated dispensers to resemble TV screens, but today’s flatscreen TVs don’t have rounded corners anymore. The content is getting a refresh, though. That breezy approach has reinforced perceptions that USA Today lacks the intellectual heft and sway of the Times and another national newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Both those newspapers…
A good analysis. Beyond that, $15 per four-week period gives you access to the website and also its smartphone app, while $20 gives you access to the website also its iPad app. But if you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you’ll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately,…
From the NYT press release, an interesting compromise, that recognizes the value of traffic from search engines and blogs. Full digital access will cost an eye-popping $420/year, or $35/week. Will subscribers have to put up with online ads? All users of NYTimes.com are able to enjoy 20 articles at no charge each month (including slideshows,…
What if each ebook came with a black box with wires and a red LED.. Or maybe a computer voice intoning a countdown… HarperCollins has informed libraries that henceforth, ebooks will be sold on the condition that they can only be circulated 26 times before they self-destruct. HarperCollins argues that this reflects the usage characteristics…
Twitter started out, years ago, as a social service for a common techno-clique who all attended the South by Southwest music conference, so trending topics made sense. But since then, it’s expanded and fragmented into a mass medium made up of non-overlapping micro-communities. Everybody uses Twitter differently, but almost everybody consciously or unconsciously cultivates their…
My blog title is from a comment on this story: The estate of JRR Tolkien is embroiled in a fierce legal battle over an American novel that uses the author of The Lord of the Rings as a central character. via JRR Tolkien novel Mirkwood in legal battle with author’s estate | Books | The…
If Apple forces the iOS Kindle app has to change to a Safari-based system (requiring web access) that would seriously damage the value of the ebooks I have purchased. Of course, that is part of Apple’s strategy, since Apple is not getting its cut of the income Amazon makes by selling books within the Kindke…
Somebody controls Facebook, and makes decisions about what Facebook will be like, and how Facebook will make money. Same goes for Twitter. Blogs are different, because no single company decides what blogs will be. Now that people who want to express themselves online have many different choices, and blogs are just the more writerly of…
Amazon’s recently introduced digital “delivery fee,” charging publishers 15 cents per megabyte to transfer a book’s file to the Kindle, has forced some comics publishers to rethink using the Kindle platform. While novels are text-based and unlikely to run up a delivery charge much over $0.02, graphic novels have a much higher bandwidth, and could…
Thoughtful analysis of the economics of the Huffington Post sale. The indie bloggers (which were a prominent part of the original mission of the site, and were responsible, through their inbound links, for giving the site its initial buzz, contribute only in a small way to the site’s income. One reason that The Huffington Post…
When the Huffington Post launched in 2005, I wondered, “What will be the contributions of a large bunch of people, who could have blogged on their own if they wanted to, but were motivated to do so by the Arianna Huffington brand name?” On launch day, Many of the celebrities-turned-writers wrote initial entries that amounted…
Life is too short to muck about with electronic news sources that don’t let me save text, email annotations, and blog excerpts. I can understand restricting the free stuff that’s given away on web sites, but punishing paid subscribers by taking away the flexibility and mash-up-ability of etext? This is all rather amusing, not unlike…