MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 35): The Cassette Tape, Birmingham Library, Google Glass, Economist Newspaper +More

Missed last week. Apologies.

Who knew the lowly cassette tape is celebrating 50 years of age.  Not much chance of making 60 I shouldn't wonder.  From the Guardian 10 Key Moments in Cassette history (Guardian)

Tape for audio storage was first showcased at the Berlin Radio Show in 1935, on the reel-to-reel Magnetophon machine, but it would take another three decades for the stereo compact cassette to arrive. Dutch manufacturer Philips got there first in 1963, alongside the first battery-powered lightweight cassette player.
Albums on cassette arrived in the US in 1966, with Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt and Johnny Mathis among the first artists on tape; the UK followed suit in 1967. Intriguingly, cassettes also made the album a more significant format. As it was harder to select tracks on cassette than on record, listening to an album serially, without skipping, became ingrained in music culture. Cassettes also allowed more time for the album than vinyl. The standard LP length was 45 minutes in total; compact cassettes allowed up to 45 minutes per side.

A lengthy review of the new library in Birmingham. (Guardian)

The new £189m Library of Birmingham, which calls itself the largest public library in Europe, is as grand a civic statement as that city has attempted for many years. It's also a product of the package and wrapping way of building. Its maker, ahead of its architects, is the project management company Capita Symonds. It was on board first, and made many of the decisions that would determine the experience of the finished building. It managed the process that led to the selection of the Dutch architectural practice Mecanoo. Once architects would win a competition with a design, and ways would be found to achieve it, but Mecanoo was partly chosen for the ability to work with a pre-existing process. The question is: can it be "the best library in the world", as was hoped for, and be built in this way?

From the New York Times magazine this weekend a discourse on Google Glass.

Ultimately it’s difficult to assess how a tool like Glass might change our information habits and everyday behavior, simply because there’s so little software for it now. “Glass is more of a question than an answer,” in the words of Astro Teller, who heads Google X, the company’s “moon shot” skunk works, which supervised Glass’s development; he says he expects to be surprised by what emerges in the way of software. Phil Libin, the C.E.O. of Evernote, told me that my frustrations with Glass were off-base. I was trying to use it to replace a phone or a laptop, but the way head-mounted wearables will be used — assuming the public actually decides to use them — will most likely be very different. “This is not a reshaping of the cellphone,” he added. “This is an entirely new thing.” He predicts that we’ll still use traditional computers and phones for searching the Web, writing and reading documents, doing e-mail. A wearable computer will be more of an awareness device, noting what you’re doing and delivering alerts precisely when you need them, in sync with your other devices: when you’re near a grocery store, you will be told you’re low on vegetables, and an actual shopping list will be sent to your phone, where longer text is more easily read. Depending on your desire for more alerts, this could be regarded as either annoying or lifesaving. But as Libin puts it, “The killer app for this is hyperawareness.”

The principal associations for higher ed (The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU)) announced the formation of a joint steering group to advance a proposed network of digital repositories at universities, libraries, and other research institutions across the US that will provide long-term public access to federally funded research articles and data.  (Press Release)

I know I've asked myself this question; "Why does the Economist call itself a newspaper?" (Economist)

The Economist, moreover, still considers itself more of a newspaper than a magazine in spirit. Its aim is to be a comprehensive weekly newspaper for the world. If you are stranded on a desert island and can have only one periodical air-dropped to you to keep up with world news, our hope is that you would choose The Economist. That goal is arguably more in keeping with the approach of a newspaper than a magazine. The latter term derives from the French word for storehouse and implies a more specific publication devoted to a particular topic, rather than coverage of current affairs.

From Twitter:
CourseSmart Rolls Out Digital Textbook Subscriptions for College Students Goodreader
Scientific American devotes a special report to digital reading. Scientific American
BBC News - Elmore Leonard, crime novelist, dies aged 87 BBC
Will copyright be extended 20 more years? An old debate returns Gigom  

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 36) Education & Innovation, iTunes U, Pearson + More

Kevin Carey of Washington Monthly takes a look at investments in the education technology space. (WM):

Last August, Marc Andreessen, the man whose Netscape Web browser ignited the original dot-com boom and who is now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists, wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. His argument was that “software is eating the world.” At a time of low start-up costs and broadly distributed Internet access that allows for massive economies of scale, software has reached a tipping point that will allow it to disrupt industry after industry, in a dynamic epitomized by the recent collapse of Borders under the giant foot of Amazon. And the next industries up for wholesale transformation by software, Andreessen wrote, are health care and education. That, at least, is where he’s aiming his venture money. And where Andreessen goes, others follow. According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.

This hype has happened before, of course. Back in the 1990s, when Andreessen made his first millions, many people confidently predicted that the Internet would render brick-and-mortar universities obsolete. It hasn’t happened yet, in part because colleges are a lot more complicated than retail bookstores. Higher education is a publicly subsidized, heavily regulated, culturally entrenched sector that has stubbornly resisted digital rationalization. But the defenders of the ivy-covered walls have never been more nervous about the Internet threat. In June, a panicked board of directors at the University of Virginia fired (and, after widespread outcry, rehired) their president, in part because they worried she was too slow to move Thomas Jefferson’s university into the digital world.

The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged by low-price competitors online. The disruptive power of information technology may be our best hope for curing the chronic college cost disease that is driving a growing number of students into ruinous debt or out of higher education altogether. It may also be an existential threat to institutions that have long played a crucial role in American life.

And a look at LORE a new company that The Economist finds interesting (Econ):

Lore is part of a trend that builds on the familiarity with social networking that has come with the success of Facebook. It customises the rules of a network to meet the specific needs of students. Anyone teaching a class would reasonably worry that students using Facebook were gossiping rather than learning useful information from their network of friends. Lore allows teachers to control exactly who is in the network (by issuing a class-membership code) and to see how they are using it. They can also distribute course materials, contact students, manage tests and grades, and decide what to make public and what to keep private. Students can also interact with each other.

In the academic year after launching its first version last November, Lore was used in at least one class in 600 universities and colleges. Its goal for its second year, about to begin, is to spread rapidly within those 600 institutions, not least to see what the effects of scale are from having lots of classes signed up within the same institution.

Inside Higher Education takes a look at Apple's iTunes U Course Manager (IHE):

There remain a number of challenges to this LMS + Apple Courses model.

First, each student needs to have an iOS device - and preferably an iPad. Android or other mobile OS users need not apply. Stay within the Apple world and the curricular content consumption experience is great - stray and you are left without options. Apple is smart to make the Course Manager and iTunes U software free, as the ability to easily create a great tablet / mobile experience will push colleges to consider 1-to-1 iPad programs.

The second challenge is that the LMS + Apple Course model separates the consumption of curricular content (on the iOS device) and the production of active learning (via blogs and discussion boards in the LMS). Even if the mobile experience for the major LMS platforms improves dramatically (which I hope), students will still need to go outside of the Apple Course environment. Discussions and formative assessments are separated from curricular content.

Parade's End will soon be on TV here (US) and The Telegraph takes a look at other potentially 'lost' masterpieces (Telegraph):

So when we speak of “forgotten novels”, we actually mean those that are not really forgotten at all – there are plenty that no living reader has ever heard of in the stacks of copyright libraries. We mean a novel that is kept alive only by the fervent enthusiasm of a small group of fellow practitioners – the so-called “writers’ writers”. We might also mean the sort of writer who was once read in huge quantities, whose works were predicted to be the great classics of the future, who now go completely unread. The writers’ writer, like Ford, might be returned to circulation in time; the abandoned bestseller might be undergoing a temporary dip in reputation. But for the most part, these novels end as almost all novels do, in obscurity.

The writers’ writer has, on the whole, never commanded a large readership. Henry James and Joseph Conrad mastered the approbation, mostly, of their fellow novelists – oddly enough, the one book with which Conrad commanded a large readership, the sumptuous Chance, is now one of his most overlooked. The writers who are kept alive by small bursts of enthusiastic praise are regularly brought back into print, and drift off again before another publisher is persuaded that it might be worth having a go.

Pearson has been granted a contract to supply California State Universty schools with a platform to deliver on-line courses (Press Release):

The California State University, the nation’s largest four-year university system, has selected Pearson to launch Cal State Online, a fully online program designed to increase access to higher education. Cal State Online will launch in January 2013 with a selection of undergraduate degree completion and professional master’s programs, leveraging the multitude of programs currently available across the CSU.

“As a university system that is devoted to access, affordability and quality, the CSU needed an educational partner with the highest levels of expertise, experience and demonstrated success launching high-growth online learning programs,” said John Welty, President of Fresno State and Chair of the Cal State Online Board. “We partnered with Pearson because they offer a robust suite of services, support and a collection of success stories through their work with other universities, making them a perfect fit for Cal State Online.”

The Economist looks at how printers are doing given the migration to on-line delivery of content (Econ):

If journalists are gloomy about the outlook for their industry, printers are despondent. Media companies can still make some money as readers switch to digital editions; a printer cannot. The outlook for newspaper printers is particularly grim, says Robert Picard, a media economist: advertisers are now keener to run their adverts in magazines on high-quality glossy paper than in newspapers, whose circulation is dwindling. But newspapers and magazines require different printing equipment, so switching over is costly.

Some printers are offering marketers and retailers the option of printing more personalised catalogues to target different groups of consumers more accurately. But this is not as lucrative as “long runs”, printer-speak for running off hundreds of thousands of identical copies. Several printers (including Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which prints its own newspapers) have opened their presses to competitors to earn extra money; last year the newspaper group won a contract to print the Evening Standard, a London daily. A few reckon that they can turn a profit from the digital switch, and help clients to design electronic versions of their printed material.

From Twitter:

Milestones: LibraryThing Turns Seven! InfoDoc

The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald – review Guardian

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 13): Pew Reports: News Isn't Dead Yet, Slow Reading, Odd Titles + More

The Pew Research Center published their annual State of Media report this week and the research suggests some interesting trends are developing in the manner in which readers are accessing news.  Specifically, the research suggests that the rapid spread of mobile devices is also escalating our level of news consumption with traditionally news brands standing to benefit.  Here is their press release summary:

• Americans are far more likely to get digital news by going directly to a news organization’s website or app than by following social media links. Just 9% of digital news consumers say they follow news recommendations from Facebook or Twitter “very often” on any digital device — compared with 36% who say the same about directly going to a news organization’s site or app; 32% who access news through search; and 29% who use news organizing sites like Topix or Flipboard.

• Even so, social media are an increasingly important driver of news, according to traffic data. According to PEJ’s analysis of traffic data from Hitwise, 9% of traffic to news sites now comes from Facebook, Twitter and smaller social media sites. That is up by more than half since 2009. The percentage coming from search engines, meanwhile, has dropped to 21% of news site traffic, from 23% in 2009.

• Facebook users follow news links shared by family and friends; Twitter users follow links from a range of sources. Fully 70% of Facebook news consumers get most of their story links from friends and family.  Just 13% say most links that they follow come from news organizations. On Twitter, however, the mix is more even: 36% say most of the links they follow come from friends and family, 27% say most come from news organizations, and 18% mostly follow links from non-news entities such as think tanks. And most feel that the news they get on either network is news they would have seen elsewhere without that platform.

• Most media sectors saw audience growth in 2011 — with the exception of print publications. News websites saw the greatest audience growth (17%) for the year. In addition, thanks in part to the drama of events overseas, every sector of television news gained in 2011. Network news audiences grew 5%, the first uptick in a decade. Local news audiences grew in both morning and late evening, the first growth in five years. Cable news audiences also grew, by 1%, after falling the year before; in particular, MSNBC and CNN audiences grew in 2011, while Fox declined. Print newspapers, meanwhile, stood out for their continued decline, which nearly matched the previous year’s 5% drop. Magazines were flat.

• Despite audience gains, only the web and cable news enjoyed ad revenue growth in 2011. Online advertising increased 23%, and cable ads grew 9%. Most media sectors, however, saw ad revenues decline — network TV was down 3.7%; magazines ad pages, 5.6%; local news, 6.7%; and newspapers, 7.6%.
• As many as 100 newspapers are expected in coming months to join the roughly 150 dailies that have already moved to some kind of digital subscription model. In part, newspapers are making this move after witnessing the success of The New York Times, which now has roughly 390,000 online subscribers.  The move is also driven by steep drops in ad revenue. Newspaper industry revenue — circulation and advertising combined — has shrunk 43% since 2000. In 2011, newspapers overall lost roughly $10 in print ad revenue for every new $1 gained online. (That suggests no improvement from what a separate PEJ study of 38 papers found regarding 2010, when the print losses to digital gains in the sample were a $7-to-$1 ratio.)

• The emerging landscape of community news sites is reaching a new level of maturity — and facing new challenges. As some seed grants begin to sunset, a shakeout in community news sites is beginning, along with a clearer model for success. NewWest.net and Chicago News Cooperative are among the prominent community news sites that ceased publishing in 2011 or early 2012. The model for success, epitomized by Texas Tribune and MinnPost, is to diversify funding sources and spend more resources on business—not just journalism.
• Privacy is becoming a bigger issue for consumers, creating conflicting pressures on news organizations. Roughly two-thirds of internet users are uneasy with targeted advertising and search engines tracking their behavior, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. At the same time, though, consumers rely more heavily on the services provided by the companies that gather such data. News organizations are caught in between. To survive, they must find ways to make their digital advertising more effective — and more lucrative. Yet they also must worry about violating the trust of audiences to protect their strongest assets — their brands.

A movement towards slow reading advocated by Maura Kelly at The Atlantic:

With empathy comes self-awareness, of course. By discovering affinities between ourselves and characters we never imagined we'd be able to comprehend (like the accused murderer Dimitri Karamazov), we better understand who we are personally and politically; what we want to change; what we care about defending.
Best of all, perhaps, serious reading will make you feel good about yourself. Surveys show that TV viewing makes people unhappy and remorseful—but when has anyone ever felt anything but satisfied after finishing a classic? Or anything but intellectually stimulated after tearing through a work of modern lit like, say, Mary Gaitskill's Veronica?
And though a television show isn't likely to stay with you too long beyond the night that you watch it, once you've finished a slow book—whether it's as long as Tolstoy's epic or as short as Old Man and the Sea, as old as The Odyssey or as new as Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, as funny as Portnoy's Complaint or as gorgeous as James Salter's Light Years—you'll have both a sense of accomplishment and the deeper joys of the book's most moving, thought-provoking, or hilarious passages. Time and again—to write that toast, enrich your understanding of a strange personal experience, or help yourself through a loss—you'll return to those dog-eared pages (or search for them on your Kindle). Eventually, you may get so good at reading that you'll move on to the slowest (and most rewarding) reading material around: great poems.

The Booksellers annual oddest book title competition as noted in The Economist:

The Diagram Prize, organised by the Bookseller magazine, has offered an annual award to the most outlandishly titled books since 1978. Judges recently announced the seven shortlisted titles for the 2011 award. “Cooking with Poo”, a cookbook by Saiyuud Diwong, may not smell that sweet, but its title ensures intrigued shoppers will buy it. Ms Diwong’s competitors are a varied bunch, and include plenty of explanatory ones: “A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two”; “A Taxonomy of Office Chairs”; “Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World”; and “The Mushroom in Christian Art”.
Other shortlisted titles include “The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria”, a self-published effort, and “Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge”. The latter title was chosen to “get everyone’s attention,” says Kate Cloughan of Royd Press, its publisher. The tactic worked: “Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary” has seen greater sales than a typical release by Royd Press.

From the Guardian: Ian McEwan: 'I started Atonement with a careless sentence'

Author Ian McEwan in conversation with the Guardian's deputy editor Ian Katz at the Guardian Open Weekend festival. Here, McEwan discusses hiking; the importance of indolence to writers; moving house, which means the loss of his writing room; and how on 9/11 he broke with his policy of refusing journalistic commissions

From the Twitter this week:

BBC News - How the world's first rock concert ended in chaos http://bbc.in/GFXFRd

My hero: Stephen Haff by Peter Carey via @guardian http://gu.com/p/36cdh

Ex-CEO to publish book on Olympus scandal - The Tokyo Times

St. Martin’s Press Marijuana Mystery - GalleyCat 

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 12): BBC on Education, UK Copyright Revision, Pricing Classes, Book Binding, B&N Speculation Continues + More

The BBC on Education:  Has The Internet Sparked a Revolution in Education (Video):

The internet is helping to reshape the very foundation education by both allowing individuals to learn from the comfort of their own homes as well as training them to be the entrepreneurial moguls.  The BBC's Matt Danzico investigates what place traditional academic institutions have in a world consumed by do-it-yourself education.

The UK government in a proposed review of copyright laws has music publishers up in arms about the proposed benefits from revision to copyright laws (Telegraph):

A plan to update outmoded laws and legalise “format shifting” – transferring a song from a CD to an MP3 player, for example – will deliver up to £2bn of growth alone, according to the Government projection, which was adopted from an independent review of IP laws . It is partly based on the premise that the existing rules prevent companies conducting the kind of innovation that led to the MP3 player.
Mr Mollet added that the £2.2bn that is estimated to come from the creation of a Digital Copyright Exchange – a proposal for an online “one stop shop” for digital rights clearance Mr Mollet supports – is based on the “misappropriation” of an unrelated study.
“There are areas where copyright needs to be reformed. But we see a lot in the consultation on how [the proposals] would be good for anonymous entrepreneurs but there’s little on the cost for current creatives. That’s a damaging gap," he said.
Pete Wishart MP, of the all-party Intellectual Property Group, said: “ How the Government has got away with such bonkers figures is beyond me.”
But a Business Department spokesman said: “We’re not backing away from the £7.9bn figure.”

School costs more depending on popularity - Is this the new model? (Atlantic)

Since 2008, the Golden State has shrunk funding for its sprawling, 112-school community college system by 13 percent. Its cuts to higher-ed have not been the most severe in the nation, but they have been painful. Santa Monica alone has lost $9.9 million support. And like its institutional peers, the school has been forced to cut classes in response. It now offers 15 percent fewer courses than four years ago -- not nearly enough to meet the demand from students, many of whom simply cannot get enough credits to finish their degrees on schedule, or transfer to a four-year school. A Santa Monica spokesman told me that some courses have waiting lists twice the size of the actual class. Out of frustration, students have started transferring to expensive, for-profit schools, taking out high-priced loans in order to get their degree in a reasonable amount of time.
Santa Monica has come up with a smart, yet frustrating, solution. This week, the school announced that it would begin offering more expensive versions of its most popular courses during the summer in order to accommodate students who can't take them during the school year. The classes will be offered at cost, since the college is providing them without any subsidy from the state. The price works out to $180 a credit -- not a huge sum, but still five-times what students pay now.

Making books like art objects (Telegraph).  There is still art to books and book binding.

The books are so remarkable to look at they seem as though they might already be precious antiques – both because of the unearthed gems within the pages and the external format, a replica of the clothbound pocket hardbacks Jonathan Cape used to make in the Twenties. The creamy paper is the same as that used in the quarterly, the Slightly Foxed colophon is blind blocked on the front, and the title and author gold blocked on the spine. Each edition has a specially chosen cloth binding, contrasting endpaper, head and tail band and ribbon marker. The whole thing seems so handmade – indeed, as the film we’ve made shows, much of it is handmade – you can’t imagine how Slightly Foxed doesn’t make a huge loss. There aren’t even any dustjackets with which to sell the books or explain them, nor quotes of recommendation, nor blurbs. The books are, Wood suggests, like “portable sculptures”.

This weekend saw speculation that an offer had been placed for the (Barnes & Noble) college retail business that Barnes & Noble, Inc. absorbed a few years ago.

G Asset Management, a shareholder has lodged a bid for 51% of the business which in the carve out would also take on $410mm in debt.  Reported in the NY Post the story comes from the Bloomberg wire and notes that the business would be valued at $460mm.

In a letter to the board dated Febuary 17th, Michael Glickstein President of G Asset Management revisited his (and the funds desire) to 'unlock shareholder value' by proposing a break-up of the business.  Here is the text of his letter:

February 17, 2012

Members of the Board of Directors

Barnes & Noble, Inc.

P.O. Box 111

Lyndhurst, NJ 07071

Dear Members of the Board of Directors:

We are writing to reiterate our belief that taking strategic action to spin-off the Nook business would create substantial value for shareholders. We have communicated previously with you and with Chairman Riggio on this subject (our letters of April 5, 2011 and November 16, 2011 are attached).

We believe BKS should take strategic action as soon as practicable to unlock the value of the NOOK business and BKS as a whole. As shown in the attached summary of our analysis, we believe that very substantial shareholder value could be created by moving forward and executing a spinoff of the NOOK business. Furthermore, we believe that a spinoff by way of a rights offering in which each BKS shareholder would receive rights to exchange a proportion of their BKS shares for NOOK shares could create meaningful upside for both the NOOK and the parent firm.

While we were pleased to see the Company announce on January 5 of this year that it had decided “to pursue strategic exploratory work to separate the NOOK business,” we are concerned that there is no timetable for review and that the Company has said that it may decide not to take any action. We believe that BKS both can and should act without delay to reduce the risk that changes in technology and/or a reduction in current favorable high growth tech company valuations may occur. There is no assurance the same opportunity will be present down the line.

We are encouraged by management’s ability to improve results in a challenging industry environment and its ability to adapt and find new opportunities for growth. We have great confidence in the Board’s ability to take the steps needed to unlock the value of the NOOK business. Our attached November 16 letter notes the track record in successful spin-offs of Mr. Riggio and Dr. Malone’s Liberty Media.

We look forward to the Board’s consideration of this analysis and the taking of appropriate action as soon as practicable.

The above was submitted to the SEC and the submission also includes a Powerpoint deck describing in some detail their view.  (SEC).

Among numerous points made in the deck is a suggestion that in a 'sum of the parts' analysis the company could be worth $71 per share which is in excess of 400% more than the current market cap.  Nice!

Here is the deck via slideshare (since this is a scan it is a little difficult to read);

Barnes & Noble; G Asset Management SEC Filling

View more presentations from Michael Cairns.

From the twitter:

Literary legends brought to life in publisher's archive Guardian

Some deeply retro moaning about the internet from the Publisher of Harper's magazine Providence Journal

TechRadar - Encyclopedia Britannica now online only http://bit.ly/yVb1Y3

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 10): The Monkees, PayPal, Self-Publishing, Jeff Bezos + More

I was never that aware of The Monkees but the passing of Davy Jones generated a lot of reminiscing.  Mrs. PND recalls the time her Dad brought home the record - unprompted - becoming 'cool' in the process and in the last few days she has DVR'd what must be 24hrs worth of the show.  Here some thoughts from Neil McCormick at The Telegraph:

One of the most remarkable things about the Monkees is that the show, like the band itself, was sophisticated enough to be open to interpretation. Watching those endless repeats in my teens, I formed further ideas of the pop process. The myth of the Monkees is one of the great myths of pop culture: the manufactured band rebelling against svengali manipulators, briefly shining before burning up in the fires of ego. We see the same story played out again and again in the “real” pop world, from the Bay City Rollers to the Spice Girls, but with The Monkees, we can watch it happen in repeat, from the zany innocence of the TV series to the mad rush of their self-immolating movie, Head, in which the band attempted to break free of their constraints by exposing their own essential fiction, but only ended up destroying the illusion that sustained them.

All of this is really sustained, however, by genuinely fantastic music that has, remarkably, stood the test of time. The miracle of The Monkees is that this exploitative, manipulative, derivative children TV series was underpinned by brilliant pop songs, written to order by some of the great writers of the era (from Neil Diamond to Goffin and King), framed in colourful arrangements that captured the happy essence of the band’s spirit, performed with conviction and emotion. Last Train To Clarksville, I’m A Believer, Randy Scouse Git, Pleasant Valley Sunday … these are songs of such dynamic originality they put the imaginary band shoulder to shoulder with the heroes they were imitating.

PayPal the censorship enforcer?  Stranger than fiction as PayPal says it will strike off certain self-publishers (Independent):

From now on, the firm said, it will begin aggressively prohibiting erotic literature which contains scenes of bestiality, rape, incest and under-age sex. Ebook websites that sell such works will have their PayPal accounts deactivated. "It's underhanded, unfair and ludicrous, and it bodes badly for the future of free speech and expression," said Juillerat-Olvera, adding that Demon's Grace is now banned by self-publishing sites.

Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, one of the world's largest such sites, said the announcement has so far caused roughly 1,000 of the 100,000 novels that he stocks to be withdrawn from sale. "Regardless of whether you or I want to read these books, this is perfectly legal fiction and people have a right to publish it," he told The Independent on Sunday. "It surely isn't for some financial services company to control what is written by an author."

Mr Coker said that attempting to enforce PayPal's effective ban is likely to be impossible. "They say they won't have rape, bestiality or incest presented in a way that might titillate. But deciding what constitutes titillation is completely subjective," he said. "The Bible has incest in it, and rape. Nabokov's literature does. Should we ban the sale of those books?"

Articles about Self-publishing and the death of traditional publishing are as freckles on a haole.  Here's an interesting take from Atlantic author Alan Jacobs

But one of the illusions most common to writers -- an illusion that may make the long slow slog of writing possible, for many people -- is that an enormous audience is out there waiting for the wisdom and delight that I alone can provide, and that the Publishing System is a giant obstacle to my reaching those people. Thus the dream that digital publishing technologies will indeed "disintermediate" -- will eliminate that obstacle and connect me directly to what Bugs Bunny calls "me Public." (See "Bully for Bugs".) And we have heard just enough unexpected success stories to keep that dream alive.
Well, here's hoping. But a couple of months ago I decided to dip my toes into these waters: I wrote a longish essay called "Reverting to Type" about my own history as a reader -- a kind of personal epilogue to The Pleasures of Reading -- and decided to submit it as a Kindle Single. Amazon wasn't interested, so I decided to publish it myself using Kindle Direct Publishing. I announced its existence to the world: that is, I posted a link on my tumblelog and tweeted about it. A few people downloaded it; some pointed out typos that I had missed, but that a copy editor surely would have caught. I thought about ways to promote it better but haven't been able to come up with anything other than becoming a self-promoting jerk on Twitter. Last time I checked it had sold 98 copies.

And from the BBC, no more boring waffle (BBC):

Buy an e-book through, say, a Kindle, and one of the first things you will notice is that the length of the text itself is nowhere to be seen. Unlike a hardback, an e-book doesn’t have to have 250 pages any more than it has to cost a set amount, or sit handsomely on your shelf. There are some great losses wrapped up in these facts. As far as actually writing a book goes, though, the digital format has one significant advantage over the physical: it is much harder to get away with producing boring waffle.
...
Buy an e-book through, say, a Kindle, and one of the first things you will notice is that the length of the text itself is nowhere to be seen. Unlike a hardback, an e-book doesn’t have to have 250 pages any more than it has to cost a set amount, or sit handsomely on your shelf. There are some great losses wrapped up in these facts. As far as actually writing a book goes, though, the digital format has one significant advantage over the physical: it is much harder to get away with producing boring waffle.

From the Economist:

Taking the long view - Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.

Mr Bezos’s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon’s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time,” he observes.

Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. “A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent,” Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon’s annual meeting last year. “And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

Could they have made Jeff's eyes more freaky in that image?

From the Twitter this week:

Librarians Feel Sticker Shock as Prices for Random House Ebooks Rise 300 Percent - http://goo.gl/2vYex

College Publishing Comes of Age: Highlights of the BISG Higher Education Conference (BookBus)

Jackie Collins experiments with self-publishing The Bitch Guardian Hilarious headline. So is "Queen of bonkbuster"

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 8): Movies from Books, Digital Music, Coriolanus, Larsson & Journalists + More

From the Independent "Hollywood ate my Novel"

Novelists reveal what it’s like to have their book turned into a movie

Literary adaptations rule this year's Oscar nominations. But, for an author, having a book transformed by movie magic isn't always pleasant. Five writers tell Charlotte Philby what it's like to see your creation 'brought to life'.

Improving digital music but will we notice? (Economist):

Rock-and-roll, as usual, is leading the way. Bands such as Pearl Jam and Metallica have used FLAC to sell recordings of their concerts online. The rocker John Mellencamp issued a CD in 2008, which came with a lossless high-definition version on a DVD to demonstrate what the music should really sound like. In 2009, the Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young ("the Godfather of Grunge") released the first of what is to be a ten-volume set of archives on Blu-ray Disc as well as CD and DVD. With its lossless codecs, Blu-ray can play high-resolution music way beyond a CD’s dynamic range.

Whether the listening public can actually hear the subtleties being conveyed is another matter. The perceived quality of a recording depends on what the listener’s ears have been trained on (as well as the quality of the audio equipment and the ambient noise). Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford University in California, gets his incoming students every year to listen to a variety of recordings compressed with different algorithms. Each year, their preference for music in MP3 format increases.

 Is Coriolanus relevant today? (Intelligent Life):

And yet a doubt persists: how “relevant” can this Shakespeare play be made to the present? Coriolanus’s tragedy begins after his return as a victorious general, when his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and his mentor (Brian Cox) want to capitalise on his military success by turning him into a politician as consul to the Senate. Coriolanus succumbs to their idea, but won’t play the part that political success requires. He won’t flatter the rabble he despises, won’t woo them, refuses to dissemble. His political opponents—two consummate performances by James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson—will of course do all these things and more. They know how to play the crowd, when to make it angry and when to please it, and naturally they win. We’re familiar with this depiction of politics as a tactical game played out by self-seeking hypocrites; physically at least, Jesson’s Brutus reminded me of Tony Blair’s smooth legal chum, Lord (Charlie) Falconer. It’s Coriolanus who is the unfamiliar figure in the film, the protagonist who tests our understanding and forfeits our sympathy because there is so very little in him to like. 

From the Guardian: Radical alternatives to conventional publishing (Guardian):

A new breed of radical publisher has emerged in recent years, with writers responding very quickly to current events. Here, some of their authors explain what marks them out.

One of the most exciting radical presses at the moment is Zer0 books. A shoestring operation begun in 2009 by the novelist Tariq Goddard, its impressive backlist covers philosophy, political theory, music criticism, contemporary cinema and much more. Its highlights include: Ivor Southwood's mordant Non-Stop Inertia, about the culture of precariousness that defines the modern workplace; and Marcello Carlin's The Blue In The Air, gorgeously constructed essays about pop, written by a widower while waiting for his new wife to fly over from Toronto so that they can start their new life together.
Zer0 has been particularly good at identifying a nexus of young, savvy writers – such as Owen Hatherley, Laurie Penny, Nina Power and Mark Fisher (better known as K-Punk) – whose work had previously surfaced mainly on blogs and whose bylines now regularly appear but in mainstream newspapers and journals.

It's been forever since we read a Steig Larsson article but the Columbia Journalism Review has stated our appetite (CJR):

But what make the trilogy so valuable to the cause of journalism are the things it gets right. Over the course of more than 1,750 pages, its author captures a remarkable number of the challenges that doing honest journalism involves, as well as the reasons it matters whether people keep doing it. This is significant, given the profession’s apparent inability to make a compelling case for itself, at least in the eyes of the readers, viewers, and listeners who do not appear to be concerning themselves terribly much with its rapid disappearance. The journalists’ credo can be found in the instructions offered by Erika Berger, Blomkvist’s lover, best friend, and editor, to one of the young writers in her employ: “Your job description as a journalist is to question and scrutinize critically—never to repeat claims uncritically, no matter how highly placed the sources in the bureaucracy. Don’t ever forget that.” This could sound like the kind of pabulum that has entered into the speeches of all the gruff, quietly heroic newspaper editors once concocted by Hollywood, from Humphrey Bogart in Deadline, USA through Jason Robards in All the President’s Men. But in Larsson’s gothic and twisted murder mysteries, the attention to journalistic detail with which readers must identify to make it to the end can only endear them to the men and women sufficiently dedicated to Berger’s lofty mission statement to stick with it.

From Twitter:

How Companies Learn Your Secrets: http://nyti.ms/zcyXOc

The publishing industry has gone mad for film-style trailers - Features - Books - Independent

I made Sunday dinner this week - which Mrs PND couldn't quite believe:  Bo Ssam

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 6): Serendipity and the Internet, Facebook Users, Canadian Copyright Issues + More

Serendipity killed the Internet: Ian Leslie writing in More Intelligent Life

The word that best describes this subtle blend of chance and agency is “serendipity”. It was coined by Horace Walpole, man of letters and aristocratic dilettante. Writing to a friend in 1754, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had just made by reference to a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip”. The princes, he told his correspondent, were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of…now do you understand Serendipity?” These days, we tend to associate serendipity with luck, and we neglect the sagacity. But some conditions are more conducive to accidental discovery than others.

Today’s world wide web has developed to organise, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.

When the internet was new, its early enthusiasts hoped it would emulate the greatest serendipity machine ever invented: the city. The modern metropolis, as it arose in the 19th century, was also an attempt to organise an exponential increase, this one in population. Artists and writers saw it as a giant playground of discovery, teeming with surprise encounters. The flâneur was born: one who wanders the streets with purpose, but without a map.

Most city-dwellers aren’t flâneurs, however. In 1952 a French sociologist called Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe asked a student to keep a journal of her daily movements. When he mapped her paths onto a map of Paris he saw the emergence of a triangle, with vertices at her apartment, her university and the home of her piano teacher. Her movements, he said, illustrated “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives”

Interesting report from the Pew Internet that took a look at Facebook users.  From their summary:

The average Facebook user gets more from their friends on Facebook than they give to their friends. Why? Because of a segment of “power users,” who specialize in different Facebook activities and contribute much more than the typical user does.

The typical Facebook user in our sample was moderately active over our month of observation, in their tendency to send friend requests, add content, and “like” the content of their friends. However, a proportion of Facebook participants – ranging between 20% and 30% of users depending on the type of activity – were power users who performed these same activities at a much higher rate; daily or more than weekly. As a result of these power users, the average Facebook user receives friend requests, receives personal messages, is tagged in photos, and receives feedback in terms of “likes” at a higher frequency than they contribute. What’s more, power users tend to specialize. Some 43% of those in our sample were power users in at least one Facebook activity:  sending friend requests, pressing the like button, sending private messages, or tagging friends in photos. Only 5% of Facebook users were power users on all of these activities, 9% on three, and 11% on two. Because of these power users, and their tendency to specialize on specific Facebook activities, there is a consistent pattern in our sample where Facebook users across activities tend to receive more from friends than they give to others.  

• On average, Facebook users in our sample get more friend requests than they make: 63% received at least one friend request during the period we studied, but only 40% made a friend request.
• It is more common to be “liked” than to like others. The postings, uploads, and updates of Facebook users are liked – through the use of the “like” button – more often than these users like the contributions of others. Users in the sample pressed the like button next to friends’ content an average of 14 times per month and received feedback from friends in the form of a “like” 20 times per month.
• On average, users receive more messages than they send. In the month of our analysis, users received an average of nearly 12 private messages, and sent nine.
• People comment more often than they update their status. Users in our sample made an average of nine status updates or wall posts per month and contributed 21 comments.
• People are tagged more in photos than they tag others. Some 35% of those in our sample were tagged in a photo, compared with just 12% who tagged a friend in a photo.

There's been a lot of controversy in Canada regarding proposed changes that the Canadian copyright clearance agency (Access Copyright) has imposed on copyright use.  After facing significant opposition to their new "all in" pricing model for universities, Access Copyright just announced the agreement of the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario to the new scheme.  While the agreement, based on a per student charge, is almost 50% less than the originally proposed rate it remains to be seen if this decrease will be enough to placate the other schools.  Opposition to the deal has already been voiced by the Canadian Association of Universtity Teachers (CAUT):

The Canadian Association of University Teachers is condemning an agreement two universities have made that allows for the surveillance of faculty correspondence, unjustified restriction to copyrighted works and more than a million-dollar increase in fees.

This week, the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto signed a deal with the licensing group Access Copyright that includes: provisions defining e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document; a flat fee of $27.50 for each full-time equivalent student; and, surveillance of academic staff email.

“Toronto’s and Western Ontario’s actions are inexplicable,” said James L. Turk, CAUT executive director. “They have buckled under to Access Copyright’s outrageous and unjustified demands at a time when courts have extended rights to use copyrighted material, better alternatives are becoming available to the services Access offers and just before the passage of new federal copyright legislation that provides additional protections for the educational sector”.

Turk also pointed out that the Supreme Court is set to clarify the educational use of copyrighted works in the coming months, clarifications that could undercut Access’s bargaining position. In contrast to Western Ontario and Toronto, many institutions have opted out of agreements with Access Copyright or are fighting its demands at the Copyright Board of Canada.

“These two universities threw in the towel on the copyright battle prematurely,” said Turk. “We call on other post-secondary institutions not to follow Toronto’s and Western Ontario’s example of capitulating to Access Copyright. It‘s time to stand up for the right to fair and reasonable access to copyrighted works for educational purposes”.

In the telegraph a look at 'vanity' magazine publishing impresses Thomas Marks (Telegraph):

Small magazines are proliferating in London. Steven Watson, the founder of the innovative subscription service Stack – which transfers the lucky-dip principle of the vegetable box to the delivery of independent magazines – speaks enthusiastically about the quality of their production values and content. There is The Ride Journal, freewheeling its way through cycle culture, Boat Magazine, a nomadic publication that relocates to a different city every six months, the offbeat fashion journal Address, the creative film criticism of Little White Lies. While many industry leaders are struggling for subscriptions and advertising revenue, their former readers have started generating editorial content for themselves.

No doubt some of these publications trade on their hipness and many flash and fade after a handful of issues. But they have an energy that raises them well beyond vanity projects: they begin like apprenticeships but the best evolve into impressive small enterprises. Nevertheless, there remains a certain amount of gratifying amateurishness involved: Scott and Smith describe lugging sale-or-return copies of Lost in London around London in a rucksack. Many writers and photographers relish the chance to take the imaginative risks they often avoid when they’re being remunerated – so long as they can find paid work elsewhere. 

From the Twitter:

Flow of venture capital into K-12 market exploded over the past year EdWeek

Utah is working on free online textbooks for high school http://shar.es/fjoan

Opening the book conference to people who buy books. Finally, (well, 2013) - BookExpo for the readers. BookExpo

Scientific publishing: The price of information Economist

In sports, ManUtd fought back from three goals down to draw at Chelsea. (MEN)

Albrecht Dürer Bust the Publisher Model

A fascinating article from the Christmas Economist last week on Albrecht Durer who may have been one of the first self-publishers to build a real business.

For Dürer, this was an unusual incident. Then 50, he had been for some years the most famous artist in northern Europe; but he was not in essence a court painter. He thought of such people as “parasites”, hanging round great men, waiting for a commission to fall from the lordly lips. He, by contrast, was an independent businessman. He made his money not by grovelling, but by selling copies of the woodcuts and engravings printed, since 1495, at his workshop in the centre of Nuremberg. He was not even a member of a guild, for there were no artists’ guilds in the city: he was a free individual, unaffiliated, making money and a reputation purely for himself.
...
It was easy to meet demand, however high he fanned it. Though the fundamental work, carefully incised in mirror-image with knife or burin on the wood or copper plate, was every bit as laborious as drawing, it could then fly out in hundreds of copies. Dürer or his assistants just inked a wood or copper plate and cranked a lever. Thanks to the printing press he had bought, he was never in thrall to a publisher; his book of extra-large printed woodcuts of the Apocalypse, which had made his fame in Nuremberg, was the first to be both illustrated and published by a great artist.

He could now replicate and communicate his art. In 1520, for example, he sent a whole set of prints to Raphael’s studio in Rome (he had hoped to impress Raphael himself, but the master had just died), and expected prints of Raphael’s work in return. Artists no longer needed to meet, or ship precious works along dangerous roads, to show each other what they could do. Dürer was not the first artist to exploit the joy of the new medium, but he was the most assiduous and influential—and the best.

My Year in Reading 2011

As I have on prior years, I've followed the lead of The Millions and thought about the books I read this year. In terms of quantity 2011 was a slower year for me mainly because I slogged through a book that had remained on my shelf unread for 10 years or so.  This was Q by "Luther Blissett" a novel about the insurgencies and guerrilla warfare that followed Martin Luther's declarations in the 1500's.  It was a dense novel and one of those that would have been better drunk in several long sessions rather than piece meal prior to falling asleep in bed.  Nevertheless, while I found it a difficult read I still think about it and coincidentally an article in the year end Economist last week wouldn't have interested me at all if I hadn't read Q.  The Economist article suggested that social networking as we know it today was similarly prevalent in the Reformation driven by easy access to printing technology.

"Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation.

Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks—what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message."

Another slower read was also a book that sat on my shelf for a while was the Claire Tomalin bio of Samuel Pepys.  She's a vibrant and interesting writer and I'm looking forward to reading her bio of Dickens.

As I mentioned above, 2011 was a down year in terms of volume:  My total this year was only 19 books against 27 in 2010, 22 in 2009, 17 in 2008 and 25 in 2007.  It has been my desire over the past five years or so (and it has taken me that long) to clear out as many of my unread books as possible.  I am happy to say that I've done very well at that task.

The book I most enjoyed this year was The Northern Clemency which wasn't technically on my shelf but Mrs. PND had been telling me for a while that I would really enjoy it.

Here is my full list and these are in my 'bookstore' (PND Bookstore)

The Dealer and the Dead - Gerald Seymour

Found Wanting - Robert Goddard

Piece of My Heart - Peter Robinson

Life - Kieth Richards

Field Grey - Philip Kerr

Innocent - Scott Turow

Close to Home - Peter Robinson

Q - Luther Blissett

The Northern Clemency - Philip Hensher

The Tenth Man - Graham Greene

Strange Affair - Peter Robinson

Friend of the Devil - Peter Robinson

Snowdrops - A. D. Miller

The Fear Index - Robert Harris

Prague Fatale - Philip Kerr

The Cut - George Pelecanos

Deniable Death - Gerald Seymour

Blood of Victory - Alan Furst

Samuel Pepys - Clair Tomalin

In the UK there was a lot of hype about Snowdrops by A.D. Miller which was a Booker nominee.  It was a good read and entertaining but it wasn't on the same level as Hensher's Northern Clemency which was short listed for the Booker in 2008.

Looking to 2012, I've already added another of Hensher's titles (The Mulberry Empire) from PND senior's shelf, Wolf Hall from Mrs. PND and my own selection Amanda Foreman's A World of Fire about the American Civil War from the English perspective.  In addition to those I've already got 10 others and Mrs. PND got me six very nicely bound Dickens classics from Penguin for Christmas, so it will be another busy reading year.  Just how we like it.

The Economist on Euphemism

The economist has an amusing article on those things people say but what they really mean.
http://www.economist.com/node/21541767

"American euphemisms are in a class of their own, principally because they seem to involve words that few would find offensive to start with, replaced by phrases that are meaninglessly ambiguous: bathroom tissue for lavatory paper, dental appliances for false teeth, previously owned rather than used, wellness centres for hospitals, which conduct procedures not operations. As the late George Carlin, an American comedian, noted, people used to get old and die. Now they become first preelderly, then senior citizens and pass away in a terminal episode or (if doctors botch their treatment) after a therapeutic misadventure. These bespeak a national yearning for perfection, bodily and otherwise."

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 50): Khan Academy, Academic Libraries, Harvard Business School, Consumer Reports + More

An interesting profile of The Khan Academy and its founder Salman Khan from Inside Higher Ed and what is most interesting is less the videos than the opportunity to provide assessment tools that monitor and measure comprehension. (IHEd):

One root of the problem is the fact that the college degree is issued by the same institution that is in charge of setting, and enforcing, the standards of that credential, says Khan, who holds four degrees himself. This is tantamount to investment banks rating their own securities, he says. Meanwhile, the accrediting agencies that are in charge of making sure those “ratings” are legitimate do not currently focus on what students coming out of those institutions measurably know.

That is why, when an audience member at Khan’s Future of State Universities talk asked whether Khan Academy was interested in credentialing, its tutor-in-chief answered with an enthusiastic yes-but. Khan told Inside Higher Ed that he does not want to turn his free, online trove -- whose 2,700 videos could theoretically be organized into course-length sequences -- into a credential-granting institution. What he does want to do is advocate for the creation and mainstreaming of credential-granting institutions that exist wholly separate (“decoupled,” in Khan-speak) from the institutions (including his) that do the teaching.

In Khan’s ideal world, this would mean an independent third party that tests specific competencies and awards credentials corresponding to knowledge areas in which a student can demonstrate mastery -- like the MCAT or standardized tests like a bar exam for calculus, physics, or computer science. “It would be much more useful, speaking as employer, if they show they’re just at the top of the charts on a certain skill set that we really want,” he said.

Barbara Fister writing in Inside Higher Ed questions whether more public space in academic libraries is what students really want ( IHEd)

Though the conventional wisdom these days about library spaces is that students want to be social, that group work and collaboration are how kids learn today, and that digital texts and digital tools will get used but printed collections won’t, students often disagree.I’ve heard more librarians talk about student demands for quiet and solitary spaces for study in the past year, perhaps because the information commons idea has become so standard it’s no longer an innovation. Recently a small group of students at the University of New Brunswick protested because their spiffy new library was too noisy, too public, and the books were squirreled away at the periphery. It wasn’t clear from the article that students wanted to read the books, but they wanted a quiet, serious place to study, and books were part of their idea of such a place.

A recent Project Information Literacy study found that students minimize technology use and try to unplug from their overly distracting social networks when working on projects or studying for exams. Last month, a couple of student speakers at a symposium on the future of the academic library went even further. They yearned to be disconnected at times, and speculated that if a section of the library was purposefully taken off the grid, with no wifi and no computers, it would be the most popular site on campus for stressed students who needed to focus and get things done. I just noticed that the most recent issue of American Libraries has an essay proposing that libraries consider having gadget-free zones. Ironically, the print copy comes with a QR code you can use to retrieve the essay online.

From The Economist, Harvard Business School is experimenting with a different model for teaching students (Economist):

Long before he became dean, Mr Nohria lamented the failure of business schools to fulfil their mission of turning management into a profession similar to law or medicine. Asked what should be expected from someone with an MBA, he replies that “obviously, they should master a body of knowledge. But we should also expect them to apply that knowledge with some measure of judgment.” MBA students have long been sent on summer internships with prospective employers, but HBS, like most business schools, did little else to help them with the practical application of management studies.

What happens in the second year of the new course is still being worked out. But the first year has three elements. First, team-building exercises. Students take turns to lead a group engaged in a project such as designing an “eco-friendly sculpture”. They learn to collaborate and to give and take feedback. These exercises are loosely based on ones used in the US army.

Second, students will be sent to work for a week with one of more than 140 firms in 11 countries. Already the new intake have had conference calls with these companies, ranging from the Brazilian soapmaker to a Chinese property firm, and gone off-campus to conduct product-development “dashes” like the one in Copley Mall. This sort of structured learning-by-doing is a world away from HBS’s traditional encouragement of students to “go on an adventure” outside of classes.

The NYT takes a look at how Consumer Reports is doing on the web. Not particularly insightful the numbers are interesting however ( NYT):

Consumer Reports started its Web site in 1997; by 2001, it had 557,000 subscribers. That number has grown to 3.3 million this year, an increase of nearly 500 percent in 10 years. It has more than six times as many digital subscribers as The Wall Street Journal, the leader among newspapers.

And in August, Consumer Reports started generating more revenue from digital subscriptions than from print — a feat that must make it the envy of the print world struggling to make that transition. Even more amazingly, Consumer Reports has enjoyed success on the Web without losing print subscribers — those have held steady since 2001 at around four million.

“Five years ago, the Web site was just the magazine put online, word for word,” says Kevin McKean, Consumer Reports’ editorial director. Formerly, products were tested in batches, but today testing occurs whenever a new model is released. Results are quickly available online, instead of being held up for the once-a-year roundup of reviews of a particular product category in the magazine. 

From the Twitter:

OCLC WorldShare Platform: OCLC Brands and Strengthens Its Webscale Strategy (Link)

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 48): Orwell on Police Actions, Dickens and Economist Book Festival + More

Conor Friedersdorf writing in The Atlantic asks What Orwell Can Teach us About OWS and Police Brutality

In Burma, Orwell remembers, every British police officer was a target of constant ridicule. "When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter," he writes. "This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves." The next passage captures what it is like to be a man trapped in a system you wouldn't have chosen and don't particularly like:

I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically - and secretly, of course - I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos - all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East...

All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

Perhaps you know the rest of the story. Orwell gets a call about a mad elephant stampeding through the village. It killed one man. Being the officer in charge, he is expected to do something.

I am sure Niall Ferguson could find a silver lining in there somewhere (Guardian)


An exhibition at the British library makes the claim the Dickens stole a ghost story from a rival (Guardian):

Exhibition tells how Charles Dickens was spooked by ghost tale doppelganger: Bicentennial show at British Library says rival accused Dickens of plagiarism but author said he was amazed by story similarities.

The Economist running a books festival in combination with their annual book of the year round-up. (Economist):

The process starts in mid-November when we e-mail all our reviewers, soliciting their advice. This year, for the first time, we also ran a competition among our readers on Facebook.
The rules are simple: to be included a book needs to have been published in English between January 1st and December 31st 2011.

A handful have already been selected to feature in The Economist’s first “Books of the Year” festival at London’s SouthBank Centre. Among these is “A History of the World in 100 Objects” by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, which began as a radio programme early in 2010; a new edition of the book is out this month. Also appearing will be Edmund de Waal, who opens the festival with a new illustrated edition of his bestselling family memoir, “The Hare with Amber Eyes”.

Join me on Twitter: PND

Economist Profiles Springer's Digitization Efforts

The Economist takes a look at how Springer has approached the digitization of their entire backlist/archive of books. They already provide electronic access to 50,000 titles published since 2005 but now they are looking at the remaining archive of 65,000 titles. Springer has been at the forefront of book digitization efforts and some may remember in the early days of the Google Scholar effort they were frequently the most active participants in panel discussions on the subject. (Economist):

Scanning Springer's backlist proved no mean feat. First, the company had to figure out for which works Springer holds copyright, surveying records at all the firms swept up in recent years, says Thijs Willems, who heads the book-archiving project. To create a definitive list his group scoured old catalogs and national libraries. They eventually assembled an archive of 100,000 print books in English, Dutch and German, many of which were different editions of the same work. The firm arranged access from libraries to those that Springer had lost due to the vagaries of time, war, etc. It decided to scan only the last available edition of a given work; earlier editions might be added to the trove in the future.

and they end with this,

Springer has painstakingly produced the highest possible quality of scans, principally to avoid having to start from scratch when today's viewing technology is superseded by something dramatically better. Mr Willems and his team also embedded rich metadata—details like author, date of publication, number of pages, and so on—in standard formats which are likely to persist for a while. They took especial care in reproducing illustrations. These digital books are, after all, meant to last for ever.