With Amazon on its recent acquisition spree, one might think they would be the number one candidate to snap up the mobile ereader books.app and its for-pay-cousin BookShelf. That is until you consider books.app is all about the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle don’t play nice together. Amazon won’t touch [...]
In last month’s Wired magazine, Frank Rose touted the first web series to get major funding from Hollywood. $2 million dollars later the site for Gemini Divsion launched today.
My question — why are they blocking Canadian views? Who is going to buy Canadian rights and mirror the friggin thing. Ridiculous.
Back in June Twitter’s fail whale was getting more lift than a Beverly Hills house wife. At the same time the Twitter spammers were coming out of the wood work. I called for a follow cap of 5000 people — a similar number to the Facebook friends one user could have at the time. I [...]
PW pointed to my boy Glen Greenwald last week. His post is poorly constructed, but the above YouTube video makes a strong enough impression on its own.
There was a spell there where everything had a biography — the city of London, water, zero.
Then everything mattered and I mean everything. I thought that title meme was dead until today. I saw the review for a new book subtitled Why Men Matter. Really? The trend has been towards the more obvious. Can we [...]
Chris Anderson posted this paragraph within a longer bit about Kevin Kelly’s recent story in Wired…
To that legal point, I was recently chatting in Seattle with a guy who runs the largest collection of server farms in North America outside of Google–he actually owns many of the facilities that Amazon’s EC2 service and Microsoft’s cloud [...]
A Rogers representative is quoted, re: iphone plans, as saying…”Unlimited plans could end up costing customers more for what they don’t use….”
Meaning if you bought an unlimited plan you would pay for more than you would use — you would be paying for the “un” of the word “unlimited”.
No sir, you can’t have an additional [...]
And Rogers announces their iPhone rates. I like one of the comments over at Engadget…
so basically you’re paying $40/month for 400 MB in Canada, vs. $30/month for unlimited data in the US. that yawning chasm between the two countries is the sound of Ted Rogers laughing at your stupidity for buying this device, and on [...]
Dan Gardner envies Mark Steyn. He said so in a recent piece in the Ottawa Citizen. You see Steyn is a master at the craft of controversy. Controversy sells books. Gardner wishes his book would sell. To quote him…
In my most secret dreams, Heather Reisman wears black leather chaps and inflicts a little of that [...]
Entertainment Weekly published a list of New Classics: the 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008.
I am all for list making but this kind of exercise leaves me dead inside. I stopped reading the magazine last year, so please, if you are a regular reader let me know if they published the list of the [...]
A pack of gum costs 99 cents. I was talking to a guy that works at on online music service last night. He pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and said “my job is to get customers to buy music on impulse the same way they buy gum at the store.”
We then [...]
It wasn’t until I saw these successive listings on the same day for the same article at the Bookseller.com in my Google reader that I realized I was appearing twice every time I corrected a spelling mistake. Apologies for my multiple posts.
Yikes!
A guy started following me today on Twitter who was following 120,000 other people. Are you kidding me? This guy is clearly ruining it for the rest of us. Why isn’t he capped at 5,000 people and I have IM functionality back? I said as much at MESH the other week. An attendee said “No [...]
When I went over to the Globe and Mail today, I was greeted by a pop up announcing the paper had unlocked a bunch of its content. The ad itself was a slow-marquee-type-ad that reveals its message only if you sit there and watch it — the kind of ad they tell you to avoid [...]
In the Fall of 1995, I passed along Micheal Crichton’s Mediasaurus Wired magazine story about the rotten state of the trade to the head of the journalism department at UKC. I thought the piece was thought provoking. I thought he would enjoy it. I thought that was fine.
How naive was I? Yes I am from [...]
Watching TV (a rarity for me) this past weekend, I was bombarded with stories about the price of gas. I had a premonition about all the upcoming quarterly reports from publishers and booksellers citing gas prices as the cause for lower results. It made me wonder — if gas prices keep rising and publishers and [...]
I have a lot of built up resentment towards RIM, the makers of the Blackberry. With a Mac, the sync tool is a disaster. You can’t even use the multi-media functionality. Putting music on the Curve requires RealPlayer crapware. And I can’t use txt files without downloading a $50 app suite. Here is to hoping [...]
The idea that closed circuit TV cameras deter crime took a blow this week. Detective chief inspector Mick Neville of Scotland Yard called the assumed crime-deterrents an “utter fiasco”. (via)
Having worked in a major urban shopping mall and dealt with their security force with their security cameras I must say I think security cameras are [...]
In the Bookseller article “Travel content ‘must be better than free’” the following section caught my eye…
“A writer needs to be a partner in the business,” he said. “Incentivise me to write the best guidebook I can so that I can get royalties, not a fixed fee.”
My question is when should you use “incent” and [...]
Richard Florida quoted Jane Jacobs in his weekend column in the Globe and Mail. In 2001 she said…
Expansion and development are two different things. Development is differentiation of what already existed….Expansion is an actual growth in size or volume of activity.
Jacobs’ take on city development — reusing, remolding, reinterpreting what is already present — demands [...]
I have missed two TOC conferences so far, but I am gradually catching up with the New York presentations.
If you don’t have the patience for powerpoint I recommend the TOC blog. It has the insight of Radar, specifically tailored to our industry. Check it out. It won’t be a secret for long.
I am worried Spielberg used too much CG in this one. There I said it.
(trailer)
Spring is here and the Titan is still no closer to being on the road. I did discover this vid on youtube however. It is an immaculate ‘69 Titan — just like mine (minus the immaculate part). That sweet sound. Damn.
This would have been so much better as a single-serving site.
Challenge everything. Ethan Kaplan talked music with Veronica Belmont at Maholo. It made me wonder if the “experience” was really the core appeal for readers as it is for music fans. Sure the “value” for music labels (i.e., the money) is in the experiential stuff. Sure the book-as-artifact is losing value as I type this. [...]
This just came over the wire. Greenpeace is looking for publicity. I am giving it to them. It seems a rather random selection of targets. The press release doesn’t elaborate as to why these retailers were chosen. Four of the retailers have stores at Yonge and Dundas, so I am speculating that mere convenience [...]
Brando stars in the West Side Wild Ones: A Dystopia…
Top 10 Most Depressing Quotes from Orwell’s 1984
I want to help the search rank of BookNetCanada.ca by linking to it directly. Not much to say other than they have gracefully dealt with the .com disappearance. The site was back online before I wrote the douchy post about the waylay.
The Huffington Post has adopted the “Mullet Strategy” for curating content — “Business up front, party in the back”.
(link)
Do I ever feel sorry for the Book Net Canada folks. It looks like they let their domain name renewal slip through the cracks. The domain BookNetCanada.com expired on Dec 10th, 2007. After the 75 day grace period expired, the site was purchased by someone in Russia who is now serving ads on the [...]
My favourite Sherlock Holmes cover over at the Penguin blog (link) — if the story starred Vincent Price…
and the worst international cover for Freakonomics. The cover is from France. The link is via kottke.org
BTW the title of Freak in Catalonia is Economia Freaky. That is awesome.
Having just seen two heist films in two days, I have been thinking about this list…
The Asphalt Jungle — it was first so I put it first
Rififi — the original don’t-touch-the-floor heist takes up 28 minutes in middle of the film
Le Cercle Rouge* — like Rififi, this also has an extended heist set-piece that [...]
John Lanchester stated the obvious in the Telegraph newspaper — print and bits are different. Thanks John, I had missed that.
I liked the bit about a zippo versus a match. I must agree with the commenter — LarryOldtimer — Bradbury was wrong. A zippo is better.
Lancaster seems like an OK chap. I wonder if there [...]
My friend Jo has a New Yorker subscription. It is a cliche that it is hard to get through before the next issue arrives. Jo’s house is a testament to that cliche — issues are abandoned half-read where they fall.
When I started talking up how much I was enjoying The Economist on my daily commute, [...]