Publishing

Pictured above is our top pick of those whose works will, on 1st January 2016, be entering the public domain in many countries around the world. Of the eleven featured, five will be entering the public domain in countries with a ‘life plus 70 years’ copyright term (e.g. most European Union members, Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, etc.) and six in countries with a ‘life plus 50 years’ copyright term (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and many countries in Asia and Africa) — those that died in the year 1945 and 1965 respectively. As always it’s a sundry and diverse rabble who’ve assembled for our graduation photo – including two of the 20th century’s most important political leaders, one of Modernism’s greatest poets, two very influential but very different musicians, and one of the most revered architects of recent times.

Below is a little bit more about each of their lives (with each name linking through to their respective Wikipedia pages, from which each text has been based).

From Class of 2016 | The Public Domain Review

Full disclosure, I downloaded approximately 30GB of data from Sciencedirect in approximately 10 days. This boils down to a server load of 35KB/s, 0.0021GB/min, 0.125GB/h, 3GB/day.

Approximately two weeks after I started downloading psychology research papers, Elsevier notified my university that this was a violation of the access contract, that this could be considered stealing of content, and that they wanted it to stop. My librarian explicitly instructed me to stop downloading (which I did immediately), otherwise Elsevier would cut all access to Sciencedirect for my university.

From Chris H.J. Hartgerink's Notebook

I started my quest to write an article about creating the best digital reading experience by seeking out designers at publishing-tech companies and getting their thoughts on the subject. One of the first designers I spoke to was Zane Riley, one of the first product designers at Brit + co. After I introduced my passionate spiel about reading and technology, he dropped a truth bomb on me: The publishing-tech world is a tricky world to design for, he said, because these products don’t inherently profit from what makes them useful, such as a seamless reading experience or beautiful, clean UI.

From Advertising and All That Icky Stuff: Designing Digital Reading Experiences for the Real World — Thoughts on Media — Medium

“I feel like exposing this scam might even hurt my own sales,” he said.

Experts are more optimistic: Jane Friedman, a professor of digital publishing at the University of Virginia, describes catfish as an ongoing but “not that significant” threat. (“It increases the noise for everyone, sure,” she wrote by e-mail, “but for any author building a long-term career, it’s not hard to distinguish yourself from low-quality opportunists.”) Amazon, meanwhile, promises that it is weeding out deceptive accounts and their products.

From How an industry of ‘Amazon entrepreneurs’ pulled off the Internet’s craftiest catfishing scheme - The Washington Post