Sittin’ Here, Watching The Market Go By (Booksquare)
Since there has been significant interest in using the iPhone as an ereader, I was, well, expecting amazing things from the publishing industry. Hopes. Dashed. On a weekend when headlines were there for the grabbing and customers were searching for both toys and content, the publishing industry, perhaps practicing summer hours, was curiously silent. Not a single major initiative, announcement, horns-blaring call to check out these great offerings on iTunes.
Queue and Apple: Excitement over the newest iPhone (Print is Dead)
But when’s the last time you — if you ever have — saw someone dressed up as a book itself? When’s the last time someone posed as a dust jacket rather than as a figure posing on a dust jacket? Of course, this doesn’t happen. Why? Because people don’t love books themselves; rather, they love the characters and worlds found inside of books. So despite all of the talk of books being amazing technological devices, you never see people waiting outside all night in order to buy a blank one.
You Don’t Build Communities, You Enable Them (Techdirt)
What the rest of the internet has shown is that you build community not by building a community, but by enabling a group of people to do what they want. And that can include commenting on the news, creating the news or sharing the news among many other things.