The industry’s great hope was that the iPad would bring electronic books to the masses–and help make them profitable. E-books are booming. Although they account for only an estimated three to five per cent of the market, their sales increased a hundred and seventy-seven per cent in 2009, and it was projected that they would…
For my money, memes on the Internet don’t get any better than the Hitler one. You know, the one in which you take some current event (the more mundane, the better) and shove it into the scene from the German film Downfall in which Hitler is told in his bunker that he cannot win the…
The world’s first copyright law was passed by the English Parliament on 10 April 1710 as ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’. The Queen Anne Statute, as it is known, marked the beginning of modern copyright law. Professor Gillian Davies, author of ‘Copyright and the Public Interest’, describes it as ‘the foundation upon which…
Responding to Apple’s most recent legal agreement governing the way apps are developed for the iPhone. Some popular apps have been written in Adobe Flash and converted to work on the iPhone; this is cumbersome, but at least it lets designers use the Flash skills they already have. I have no love of no love…
The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with…
A pre-release critique of the tablet culture. Compared to other kinds of information that computers process today, text has an exceptionally small footprint. With the arrival of the tablet, we have crossed a critical threshold: Where text is concerned, we effectively have infinite computational resources, connectivity, and portability. For decades, futurists have dreamed of the…
Yes, it’s stunning to watch the spinning images in the table of elements ebook that comes with the iPad. But what does the brave new world of ebooks hold for educational and nonfiction authors? In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission…
The digital photography course that SHU’s journalism students are supposed to take typically fills up, so that students can’t take the course until they are seniors. That rather defeats the purpose of requiring the course — I was hoping that students who take the course will be able to take photos for the student paper…
Doctorow is a do-it-yourself tech maven who hates the iPad, specifically because it makes it so easy to access online content on Apple’s terms. We don’t own the content we pay for on the iPad, and we aren’t trusted with owning the insides. The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it…
Someone tell me why this industry deserves to survive. Those paydays that New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger and President Janet Robinson received last year are once again coming back to haunt them. The Boston Newspaper Guild, which absorbed more than $10 million in pay and benefit cuts to members last year in order…
The Times of London will charge readers for Internet access starting in June, News Corporation announced on Friday, putting Rupert Murdoch at the forefront of a movement to erect toll gates on news sites.–NYTimes
For once we had the possibility of a global platform from which we had the power to make those in power listen to us. What we have ended up with is nothing more that a digital Madison Avenue and a whole lot of digital garbage that won’t shut up. I would like to hold out some…
The viral clip has been viewed almost 54 million times and gave rise to the catchphrase, “Is this real life?” It was the second most-watched video of 2009, according to YouTube, trailing only Susan Boyle‘s appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent.” It’s also been an unexpected bonanza for the boy’s Orlando, Florida-area family, who, despite some criticism that they exploited their…
Penguin recently posted this video to YouTube, explaining that it was an internal training video that was a big hit with the sales force. On YouTube, I posted a comment saying that if it worked on their sales force — that is, if their sales staff didn’t get the gimmick before the midpoint, that actually…
E-books may be getting all of the attention in publishing these days, but the hype overshadows the cold reality of business: E-books are still just a small fraction of the market. James McQuivey, an analyst with the technology research company Forrester, says that’s why publishing is in such a tough place: A revolution may be…
I didn’t watch that movie awards thing, but I understand this ad premiered last night. Here we see the iPad as a tool for monetizing the consumption of the internet. I saw brief flashes of a keyboard, e-mail, a desktop publication program, and a photo album, so the ad does acknowledge the role of user-created…
Brilliant. Now what do we do about all the workers who get tipsy from the cleaning fluid? In 2002, a group of Babson College entrepreneurship students ran out of room on their whiteboard. They had spent hours brainstorming new business possibilities, and the sudden space crunch threatened to cramp their creativity. Instead, it sparked a…
Professor, please assign us another paper, so we can use Turnitin.com again! If we could, we would stay here in front of this building, submitting papers to Turnitin.com all day long, stopping only to care for our amazing teeth! Look at our eager faces — can you not tell that this software makes us want…
I’ve never played this game, but in the last week or so, my attempts to play multiplayer games with my kids (Uru and Dungeons and Dragons Online) have been thwarted by the fact that my modem blips out for a few minutes every couple hours, which freezes up games that exchange information over the internet. …