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eBook Readers Live in a Different Universe of Books
Amazon’s released their list of 2011’s best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn’t even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books!
The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn’t make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. “It couldn’t be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,” notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only “Singles,” including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he’d released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson’s “Reamde” was Amazon’s #99 best-selling…
The LSD Portraits: Marc Franklin Spends 25 Years Photographing ‘Psychedelic Pioneers’
Remember the Reagan administration’s “This is your brain on drugs” ads? In response a photographer started a lifelong project of photographing all the living “psychedelic pioneers,” including Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey.
“I thought, ‘You know, that’s such a load of horseshit … I’m going to dismantle that poisonous propaganda lie visually… I’m going to portray these people how they are.” He started with the man who invented LSD — Albert Hoffman — on its 50th anniversary in 1988, and at one point drove over 11,000 miles in just 7 weeks (including a 26-hour drive to drink beer with William S. Burroughs).
He’s interviewed by the former editor of High Frontiers magazine (”the official psychedelic magazine of the 1984 Summer Olympics.)”, and the article includes three of his best photos. (He’s exhibiting them this month in Los Angeles). But the strangest fact of all?
He started his career taking photographs…
Is Lisbeth Salander a Cyberpunk Hero?
Author Sasha Mitchell compares how cyberpunk is defined by Stieg Larsson, by Hollywood, and by Google. Mitchell compares Lisbeth Salander to William Gibson’s heroines (arguing that she’s a combination of Gibson’s female and male protagonists), but saying the ultimate message of her archetype is “screw labels”. (”Does she really need to be sexualized to the extent … Hollywood illustrators would have her be?”)
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth “spreads resistant messages despite powerful mechanisms of top-down control,” which is ultimately a more empowering message than what you get from searching “cyberpunk” on Google Images. (”Note, if you will, how many topless, pantsless, or pigtailed schoolgirls you see here.”) But even Gibson himself once argued the cutting-edge of cyberpunk is too unfamiliar to be defined.
The Five Worst Thanksgivings in History
If you’re dreading your family Thanksgiving, it could be worse! John Marr identifies the five worst Thanksgivings in history, which included the day the Ku Klux Klan was founded, and Reno’s “Thanksgiving Day Massacre” in 1980. (”Priscilla Ford had a long history of psychiatric problems and bizarre behavior…”)
Also included? The day 22 people were killed in 1900 at the Big Game between football rivals Stanford and Berkeley, and a story which concludes “The gunmen immediately started blasting away with shotguns and assault rifles…”
Usually on Thanksgiving, “Good old all-American chaos is down,” writes Marr sardonically. “But not entirely out.”
Dead Man’s Twitter Feed Keeps Updating
Last week John Pospisil, the editor of Blorge.com, passed away, but his Twitter feed continued updating, since he’d configured it to re-tweet all the headlines from his group technology blog.
“Eventually I figured it out,” reports one technology blogger, “but it was a big shock to see more messages appearing from John himself on the day after he’d died.” They also dedicated their first ebook to Pospisil, a Thanksgiving children’s story, because “I’d always thought we’d watch the world changing together…”
Congress Starts Pushing an Online Sales Tax
Ten U.S. Senators are now proposing a “Marketplace Fairness Act,” which creates a new system letting states collect sales taxes from purchases made online. “It’s about closing a tax loophole,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, part of a bipartisan coalition which has already introduced similar legislation in the House of Representatives.
Strangely, Amazon has just issued a press release saying they support the bill, calling it “a win-win resolution,” according to one Kindle blog, though they may just be hoping to lobby for exemptions from each individual state.
“Instead of a national sales tax, these new taxes will only be imposed at the individual discretion of each separate state legislature, and that’s an area where multi-billion dollar companies like Amazon can still exert a lot of pressure.
How The Family Circus Confronted the Web
Tuesday cartoonist Bil Keane died at the age of 89 — and one webmaster fondly remembers how Keane gracefully confronted unauthorized parodies on the internet.
Keane was a good sport about fake Amazon reviews that gushed about supposedly hidden literary themes in collections of his newspaper comic strips, and he once even drew his own characters into a “guest appearance” in a Zippy the Pinhead strip. But in 1999, Keane’s syndicate threatened legal action against the “Dysfunctional Family Circus” site, which had been re-captioning Keane’s cartoons for over four years.
Heading off a “free speech” showdown, Keane resolved the situation with a friendly phone call to the webmaster, who ultimately decided to voluntarily remove the images just because “He’s actually a nice guy.”
WikiLeaks: the Novel?
Author Thomas S. Roche has written a new zombie novel which incorporates WikiLeaks, conspiracy forums, and viral YouTube videos, studying the new wasteland where military violence intersects corporate disinformation.
“I think WikiLeaks represents a very important impulse and the start of a strong movement toward anti-corporate sentiment and the demand for government transparency,” he explains in this new interview, “As ineffectual as that movement may end up being – because it started so late in the process of corporate control being consolidated…”
He moves from discussing fictional zombie-fighting to the brutal real-world military violence in neo-colonial nations around the world. And he ultimately wonders if our wireless technology-enhanced future will also include the potential for massive global disinformation.
Homeland Security Office Stages a Mock Zombie Invasion
An Ohio office of the Emergency Management Agency — part of the Department of Homeland Security —
will stage a mock zombie attack on Halloween using more than 225 volunteers dressed as zombies at an Ohio college.
“Organizers hoped the theme would attract more volunteers than previous simulations of industrial accidents or train crashes,” the AP reports, quoting a spokesman for the agency as saying that “People got zombie fever here in Delaware.” The exercise included decontamination procedures for hazardous materials, and was inspired by an “emergency preparedness” post on the CDC web site citing the popular fascination with zombies. (The number of zombie ebooks in Amazon’s Kindle store has increased by 13.9% in just the last two months.)
Now, “Dozens of agencies have embraced the idea,” the AP reports, “spreading the message that if you’re prepared for a zombie attack, you’re prepared for just about anything.”
Will Librarians Revolt Over Amazon’s Kindle Lending Program?
A California librarian is urging librarians to complain to Amazon over issues with privacy and advertising in Amazon’s new Kindle ebook lending program for libraries. “In our greedy attempt to get content into our users’ hands, we have failed to uphold the highest principle of our profession, which is intellectual freedom,” she argues in a 10-minute video. (Read the transcript here):
Kindle has allowed Amazon to harvest all of this borrowing data, so it’s an instant violation of all of our privacy policies … [I]f they’re using a Kindle, Amazon’s keeping friggin’ everything. And we haven’t told people that, and we need to tell people that.
She argues Amazon’s retention of your reading history may violate, for example, California’s Reader Privacy Act, and she also complains that the check-out and renewal process include unacceptable promotional content about Amazon’s for-sale ebooks. Though she owns a Kindle and loves ebooks, she’s urging librarians to speak…
Selling Wikipedia Pages As Kindle eBooks
This article identifies a supposed ebook “author” whose 887 different ebooks were all apparently cut-and-pasted directly from Wikipedia entries!
The “WikiFocus” series targets obscure niches with few competing ebooks, like Hello Kitty, Aquaman, or the comic strip Archie.
“Of the 887 ebooks, all but 10 earned terrible reviews, averaging one star or less,” this article notes, “or received no reviews at all.”
A typical review? “This ‘book’ is just a word for word copy of the Wikipedia page.”
(And a least one other “author” has attempt the same trick, trying to pass off a Wikipedia page about Charlie Sheen as an $18.95 biography!)
Will Bookstores Boycott Amazon-Published Books?
Amazon has begun signing their own authors and then publishing the books themselves, leaving booksellers “wary” as Amazon “tries to have it all,” according to a Boston newspaper. The co-owner of an independent bookstore near Cambridge considered boycotting Amazon’s new line of books, complaining “They are a huge competitor, and they don’t collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage.”
A children’s bookstore noted that “the pie is getting cut into fewer pieces. I’d be nervous if I were an adult book publisher.” Borders bookstore has already declared bankruptcy, leaving The Daily Show to joke that bookstores should simply become “digital downloading” stations — or a “living history” museum where future generations can learn what “a magazine rack” was.”
Are These Evolution’s Future Sluts?
SlutWalk protest in Toronto, 3 April 2011. Photo: Anton Bielousov (CC).
Violet Blue explains why the new SlutWalk protests are “a significant tipping point in cultural evolution” — and she’s serious. “Yes: I think scantily clad girls marching in the streets around the world are agents of change for our species.”
It started in April when a Toronto cop said that to stay safe from rape, women “should avoid dressing like sluts”. Soon “my clothes are not my consent” protests erupted, and the event “had an international identity within a few months,” representing “a huge reclamation and restatement about boundaries and women’s bodies.”
Now sex workers, young exhibitionists, high-heel feminists and random pissed-off women are marching “for the right to dress as they like while having their boundaries respected,” and Violet calls them the true punk rockers — the disruptors. “They’re the ones with the brass ovaries enough to dress like sluts and…
Can AI-Powered Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans?
A technology CEO sees game artificial intelligence as the key to a revolution in education, predicting a synergy where games create smarter humans who then create smarter games.
Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Alex Peake, founder of Primer Labs, sees the possibility of a self-fueling feedback loop which creates “a Moore’s law for artificial intelligence,” with accelerating returns ultimately generating the best possible education outcomes.
“What the computer taught me was that there was real muggle magic …” writes Peake. And he reaches a startling conclusion.
“Once we begin relying on AI mentors for our children and we get those mentors increasing in sophistication at an exponential rate, we’re dipping our toe into symbiosis between humans and the AI that shape them.
Should We Say “Maybe” to Drugs in Afghanistan?
There’s a global morphine shortage in the west (while the Taliban is financing terrorism through black-market opium). So for over a year, a mainstream journalist for both Information Week and Library Journal has been contacting Congressmen about the “Sustainable Opportunities for Rural Afghans Act.” (”Whereas granting rural Afghan farming families an economic ally other than the Taliban is good for the national security of the United States…”)
Basically, the act would allow American pharmaceutical companies to buy opium from the farmers in Afghanistan — and even offer aid and bonuses to the farmers to deter their cooperation with the Taliban (before eventually transitioning them to other crops). “Action has been nil and talk has been quiet,” the reporter writes, even though it could help efforts to “defeat, disrupt, and dismantle” al Qaeda and its allies.
“As we press our advantage after the death of bin Laden, it seems reasonable to use every available tool toward…
Resurrecting Reznor’s Lost Art-Band Discovery, ‘Mondo Vanilli’
Finally the truth can be told — about how the editor of Mondo 2000 magazine was offered a six-album deal with Trent Reznor’s label for a performance art/virtual reality band called “Mondo Vanilli” in 1993. (”Would I be the first mildly overweight, weird-looking lead singer to launch into rock stardom at 41 years old?”)
Mondo editor R. U. Sirius remembers fondly that Reznor “was still excited about us after the psilocybin wore off,” recalls the poop-and-diapers piece of performance art that disgusted the hipsters in San Francisco, and shares the legendary sad-eyed “Keane painting” mocking Reznor that may have ultimately spoiled the deal…
But their one “lost album” from 1993 is finally available online.
The Most Well-Read U.S. Cities (According to Amazon.com)
Amazon.com just crunched their sales data for 2011, and calculated the 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America. (Click here to see all 20 cities on a map.)
The #1 city on Amazon’s list (and the top purchaser of non-fiction titles) is Cambridge, Massachusetts, while four of the top five cities are college towns. This suggests students may be shopping online for cheaper text books – another bad sign for the future of the bookstore.
But the #2 city was Alexandria, Virginia, one of three cities on the list within 10 miles of Washington D.C. — which surprisingly, was also reported by Amazon as the city which purchased the most children’s picture book.
Last Typewriter Factory in the World Closes
The last company manufacturing manual typewriters has finally shut its doors!
It was based in Mumbai, India, and in the 1990s “the company was selling 50,000 models each year,” reports this technology site, but “That had dropped to around 10,000 by the mid-2000s, and last year the company sold less than 1,000 typewriters. According to the company’s general manager Milind Dukle the only people now buying manual typewriters are ‘the defense agencies, courts and government offices.’”
“With manual typewriters no longer being produced, I think it’s fair to say we’re now a world where computers rule supreme.”
YouTube Punishes Copyright Offenders With Animated Pirate Cat
Thursday YouTube announced a new program which requires copyright offenders to watch an animated cartoon starring a pirate cat. “In an adjustment to it’s three-strikes-and-your-banned-for life policy, the site is now requiring alleged offenders to watch a four minute ‘re-education’ movie featuring an animated cat, then complete a four-question multiple choice exam,” YouTube explained on their site. “Only then can the user upload clips again…”
The cartoon — entitled “Happy Tree Friends” — features singing animals who demonstrate the difference between uploading an infringing video and creating original content. (”YouTube has decided the solution is to patronize those users,” jokes one technology blog.) “Because copyright law can be complicated, education is critical to ensure that our users understand the rules and continue to play by them,” YouTube said in Thursday’s announcement. And some users who complete the YouTube “Copyright School” can also have copyright strikes removed from their account.
