October 2011

The Great Tech War Of 2012

The Great Tech War Of 2012
Everyone reading this article is a customer of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google, and most probably count on all four. This passion for the Fab Four of business is reflected in the blogosphere’s panting coverage of their every move. ExxonMobil may sometimes be the world’s most valuable company, but can you name its CEO? Do you scour the Internet for rumors about its next product? As the four companies encroach further and further into one another’s space, consumers look forward to cooler and cooler products. The coming years will be fascinating to watch because this is a competition that might reinvent our daily lives even more than the four have changed our habits in the past decade. And that, dear reader, is why you need a program guide to the battle ahead.

[Thanks Elaine!]

Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access

Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access
The Royal Society has today announced that its world-famous historical journal archive – which includes the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal – has been made permanently free to access online.
Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available.

Occupy Wall Street: The Book

From New York Magazine, news of a forthcoming look at the “Occupy” phenomenon.

Progressive publishing house OR Books will release a 200-page first draft of a history entitled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America as soon as December 17, using volunteers from the movement’s Education and Empowerment Committee, and including work by both “sympathetic writers and people who are active in the occupation,” OR co-founder Colin Robinson told New York. The book’s release date will mark the protest’s three-month anniversary. “Although you can’t deliver definitive opinions at the moment or set out a course of action, you can record the details of what has happened so far in Zuccotti Park,” he said.

The publisher — whose anti-Sarah Palin essay collection Going Rouge wound up a New York Times bestseller — will release Occupying Wall Street as a print-on-demand product and independent e-book, with all profits going back to the occupation.

Here’s another story on the process of writing the book from Huffington Post.

Warner Bros. Locking Down Harry Potter and Screwing Themselves

Warner Bros. Locking Down Harry Potter and Screwing Themselves
My prediction? Well, it’s not a prediction if it’s a sure thing so let me just tell you what the hell is going to happen. You can watch the incidents of piracy surrounding every Harry Potter movie skyrocket as soon as they start disappearing from the shelves. People will come to the front desk, ask for the movie, we don’t have it, they can’t buy it, so they’ll go get it from someplace that will give it to them.

Will Amazon Kill Off Publishers?

Laura sent over a link to Will Amazon Kill Off Publishers?
Amazon is getting a lot of heat these days over its attempts to push its way into the hearts and minds of readers, writers and the larger book culture — even comic books. Indeed, the news last week that Amazon would aggressively expand its publishing efforts by signing up authors has ruffled the feathers of many agents and publishers.

Will Amazon’s plan shake up the book publishing industry as more writers have the option of a one-stop shop: agent, publisher and bookseller? Are publishers still needed?

Your favorite author, brought to you by a wealthy patron

Your favorite author, brought to you by a wealthy patron
With primarily visual works — comics and art or photo books — Kickstarter seems a great way to solicit the extra cash needed to produce top-drawer work. Comics creators have flocked to it, hoping to finish discontinued series or add color to black-and-white books. But can it bring us the next Ann Patchett or Robert A. Caro? Or is that another part of our future that will be determined by billionaires?

Where should our information literacy standards come from?

Where should our information literacy standards come from?
“The ACRL Information Literacy standards have often frustrated me. I struggle to find their usefulness to my day-to-day work, since the content of most of my information literacy sessions comes from conversations with the professor of the class, and are geared directly to student assignments. As such, use of the standards usually involves fitting what I’m already doing back into the structure of the standards. And because the standards are meant to apply to all disciplines, they suffer from being both too vague and too specific at the same time.”

The secret stalker within your phone

If you’ve ever wondered just what’s going on inside some of those apps on your phone, you’ll want to take a look at this!
Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps
Developers can get away with more sloppy or sneaky practices in mobile apps as the execution is usually further out of view. You can smack the user with a massive asynchronous download as their attention is on other content; but it kills their data plan. You can track their moves across entirely autonomous apps; but it erodes their privacy. And most importantly to me, you can jeopardise their security without their noticing; but the potential ramifications are severe.