TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
July 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

This is Not a Comment (Derek Powazek, Powazek.com)

Chastising all internet commenters for the actions of the loudest, craziest ones is no different that swearing off all newspapers because of Jason Blair.

Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship (Rebecca MacKinnon, RConversation)

The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent? What happens when they roll out services in not-so-benevolent authoritarian regimes?

Once More With Feeling: The LATBR Publishes Its Last (Kassia Krozser, Booksquare)

... I still maintain that a book review section in a major newspaper should be reflective of the subscriber base, even if it's trying to maintain a certain level of discourse; you have to bring the larger audience in, even a little bit, if you want to expose your conversation beyond the choir.

Why I Joined the POD People (Richard Grayson, Quarterly Conversation)

Eventually, as print-on-demand technology improves in quality and costs shrink, trade publishers will probably rely on POD for all their books, just as some academic publishers have begun to do. Trade publishers waste a lot of money (and trees) by publishing copies of books, even bestsellers in fourth or fifth editions, that never get sold; no matter how many print runs, publishers always seem to have books left over. After my first book was remaindered I bought 400 copies of my first book for a nickel a copy, then discovered the cost of storing them was so expensive that I ended up throwing dozens of copies into a Miami dumpster.

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