Peter Brantley
BookTour and IndieBound Make Author Events Hyper-Local
BookTour, which provides author-generated pages and a listing of author tour events, has integrated their database with IndieBound. This is an interesting model, which obviously could expand in its breadth. From the BookTour blog: … the trouble is neighborhood bookstores are all different (that's what makes them great). That made it hard to dump all their data into our…
Audible CEO: Publishing Has History of Tech Ambivalence
In an interview with Fast Company, Audible CEO Donald Katz discusses the publishing industry's history of slow technological acceptance: Publishing is an industry pursuing a noble cultural calling. But publishing has always had an ambivalent relationship to technology-driven change. In fact, the music publishing business spent a whole lot of time trying to kill off the phonograph. The publishing…
Ruling: Consider Fair Use Before Issuing Takedowns
A fairly significant ruling came down Wednesday in Lenz v. Universal, a rather infamous case where Universal Music Publishing Group issued a takedown against a YouTube video of a young child dancing to a song in the background — a song in which Universal maintained some rights. Universal later acknowledged that this was a fair use of the music,…
Short Fiction Renaissance Enabled by Digital
Gary Gibson makes a good observation about the forms of fiction enabled by e-readers. From The Digitalist: There's a potentially very positive aspect to ebooks in relation to short fiction I hadn't previously considered. Publishers rarely produce collections of short fiction in meaningful numbers any more because they long ago ceased to be cost-effective; much of my early reading…
Report: Pre-Roll Video Ads Not all that Bad
Given how "unacceptable" we were told this would be to viewers, it's rather remarkable how many people are now obviously accommodated to pre-roll ads in videos. From Beet.TV: The vast majority of online video viewers are watching pre-roll and overlay ads, a study released today by Break Media and Panache shows. Completion rates for 15-second pre-roll ads were 87…
EFF Looks at the Big Questions Surrounding Digital Books
At the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a post on what the future of digital books portends for pubishers and consumers: Skeptics should remember that it wasn't long ago that many predicted that CDs would never replace vinyl, and later that MP3s would never replace CDs. You can still find great record stores that specialize in vinyl, but the trend…
Infinite Permutations of the Digital Book
James Bridle discusses the near infinite malleability of digital books. From booktwo.org: Imagine a book that told a different story every time it was opened. The story might change depending on the gender of the reader, or the sex. It might depend on the location of the reader, or the position of the book in time; the time of…
Twitter Faces Ramifications of Not Being Global
Twitter, the microblogging service, has had an uneven rollout of an economic model, and was never able to come to good terms on payments for instant messaging (SMS) through its application with mobile carriers abroad. Consequently, it has limited its instant message functionality to North America. On his blog, White African, Erik Hersman talks about the ramifications when you…
A Vote for One-Use Gadgets
Jeff Gomez, in his series on owning a Kindle, voices a preference for multiple gadgets each doing one thing well: One thing that I don't mind about the Kindle is that it's an extra device. I used to think that I wanted an integrated device — one thing that did everything — and that I wouldn't want to carry…
Smithsonian Advertises Via Bluetooth
The Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery are sending out Bluetooth tethers to passers-by. From a Smithsonian press release: … this new medium of advertising prompts Bluetooth phone users to opt-in to receive a free downloadable message … Bluetooth-enabled bus shelters, located in Washington, D.C.'s major pedestrian areas, will deploy a silent prompt to mobile…