June 2013

What I was thinking when I said that wild stuff

At our Publishers Launch Conference on the Wednesday of BEA, Michael Cader and I introduced a new feature we think will become regular at our events: a candid 1-on-1 conversation between us. It went well.

In fact, it went so well that what reads like a pretty damn accurate verbatim account of much of it constituted a story for Ed Nawotka at Publishing Perspectives. So, now, thanks to Ed, much of the world knows that I made a number of pretty bold forecasts, probably the boldest of which is that we’ll see the US market boil down to one dominant trade publisher over the next 10 years.

There are a lot of unexpressed assumptions in that calculation. And, in the “predicting the future” part of my business, when I say 10 years I don’t count myself “wrong” if it takes 15. So, with thanks to Ed for reporting me accurately, it seems worthwhile to elaborate a bit more on what I said last week.

Full post

June 11, 2013 by Uncategorized

Book Explores How Biotech Creates Weird Wildlife

Ray Suarez talks with writer Emily Anthes about the sometimes wild and weird outcomes when scientists experiment on animals. In her new book, “Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts,” Anthes looks at the ethical limits of — and our emotional reactions to — the use of animals to explore biotechnology.

June 11, 2013 by Books

Why Book Publishers Are Still Dragging Their Heels on Selling You E-Books

Some of the problem stems from tradition. The people drawn to publishing as a professional are, by and large, book lovers, and as such, often as attached to books’ physicality as to their text. More is paranoia: unlike music, whose digital age developed largely in response to an already thriving pirate industry, book publishing has held back, waiting for reliable DRM that seems unlikely to materialize.

On some levels, their reluctance is pragmatic. The technology of digital publishing is awkward and inconsistent. The closest thing to a single file standard, e-pub, is still far from platform-agnostic and notorious for destroying formatting elements, which limits what writers and designers can do structurally if they’re planning for digital.

Full piece here.

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June 6, 2013 by Books EBooks Music Publishing

Today’s digital data could be gone tomorrow

“I’m not blaming Microsoft,” said Cerf, who is Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist. “What I’m saying is that backward compatibility is very hard to preserve over very long periods of time.”

The data objects are only meaningful if the application software is available to interpret them, Cerf said. “We won’t lose the disk, but we may lose the ability to understand the disk.”

June 5, 2013 by Google Internet

If Employment Game Has Changed, Who’s Teaching The Rules?

Story on NPR

It still pays to earn a college degree. That is, if you get the right one. Georgetown University published a report Wednesday that looked into this dilemma.

Conclusion of story: However, if the goal of higher education is to “help people live more fully in their time,” as Carnevale puts it, they need more information.

“We don’t want them feeling their way in the dark,” he says.

Sounds like something librarians could help with.

Full piece

June 2, 2013 by Libraries

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