New Stuff Tuesday
August 31, 2010
Tuesday (here in the USA at least) is new release day. That includes albums, in MP3 form as well as in disc form. It also includes books.
So I just bought the new album by my favorite musician, Richard Thompson. Dream Attic is like a live album in the most obvious way: it was recorded before a live audience. It’s the new RT album in that the songs are new, not having appeared on any previous album. It’s more like a live album in that RT stretches out on guitar more than on any of his studio albums.
Because of the guitar-stretching, the 13-track album comes in at 70+ minutes. For us old folk, that sounds like double (vinyl) album length. Slightly younger folks might note that it’ll almost fill the CD to which you burn it. Respectable folks will note that you should buy it before you burn it. You can do so from all sorts of places: Amazon, eMusic, RT’s own website, etc.
Those who understandably want to listen first can do so at AOL’s listening party – but, strangely, not at Spinner, which is owned by AOL, includes a new releases “listening party” and has a coolish name, as well as some interesting additional content.
Yet others might wonder what an album is, and how anyone could muster the attention span for over an hour or music by some greybeard. So the embed for this post is the 6-minute minimix.
Back in the real/analog world, I just got a package from Amazon including a couple of last Tuesday’s dead tree book releases: Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games); and The Second Siege(paperback).
Happy new media day!
“Book” and its Wrappers
August 25, 2010
Books are sadly limited things once they are wrapped in DRM (see previous). Now even the word book may be limited.
Facebook has filed suit against Teachbook.com, an online community for teachers. The lawsuit accuses Teachbook of “misappropriating the distinctive BOOK portion of Facebook’s trademark.”
I don’t think that’s satire. I think that Jennifer Van Grove wrote it for Mashable with a straight keyboard.
The hounds of “intellectual property” have made enough toothmarks on enough books. Now their foul fangs slaver for the word book itself.
Freemium, Ad-Supported Books?
August 20, 2010
The time for ads in books has come, according to an editorial in yesterday’s WSJ. Why now?
In short, physical books can’t compete with other print media for advertisers. Digital books can. With an integrated system, an advertiser or publisher can place ads across multiple titles to generate a sufficient volume. Timeliness is also possible, since digital readers require users to log in to a central system periodically.
For consumers, the free samples of digital books now available would surely include ads… Seeing ads in the sample may also convince a reader to pay for a premium, non-ad version of the full-length book. The old market segmentation of paperbacks and hardcovers will be replaced by ad-supported or ad-free books.
So books will be ad-supported and freemium. By the way, those two things go together. Why Ben Parr at Mashable thinks that ad-supported and freemium should be pitted against each other is beyond me, unless he was on a really tight deadline for a “web faceoff” post.
I don’t like the idea of ads in my books. But I am used to paying in order to make them my books, so I’d probably pay to get books without ads. And, come to think of it, if I can put up with DRM in books, I can put up with a lot.
The argument that advertisers like ebooks more than pbooks (or whatever we call physical/paper books) is a strong one. But as usual, if you want to see the future, you can go back in time: see Galleycat’s brief history shows that ads in books aren’t new.
What the Nook? Second Thoughts on eReading
August 18, 2010
My e-reader quest started a few posts ago, leaning toward the Nook.Then there was the “reality in the form of DRM” post: so what if Nook uses an open format, if it also uses a DRM wrapper?
Slow learner I sometimes am, I installed Nook for Android. It struck out.
- The Nook app wouldn’t let me just read an EPUB already on the Android. It wanted me to sign on to Nook/Barnes & Noble first. Why? I just wanted to read an EPUB I already have.
- When I tried to sign on using the Barnes & Noble name/password I’d set up, and checked multiple times in Chrome, it rejected the login.
- When I reported this to support, I was sent a standard “Thank you for inquiring about Barnes & Noble’s policy regarding disclosure of customer information” email. Of course, that was irrelevant to my question.
I’m inclined to nix the Nook notion. I’m even relighting my Kindle consideration.
eBooks, Open and Closed
August 16, 2010
Here’s a book I bought decades ago, and thousands of miles away from Washington DC. I’ve read it more than once, my mother read it, and I’m currently reading it to my daughter.
If I buy an ebook today, will I be able to read it at a similar remove of time and distance: in 2040 in Sydney, for example? I doubt it. You may have gathered that I an among those who prefer paper books to eBooks. ReadWriteRichard provides 5 reasons to prefer paper, and comments on his post provide more.
This post is about ebooks. So isn’t just a rehash of the advantages of paper. That said, those decades with paper anchor my expectations about books,and those expectations carry over into the upstart format.
Make that upstart ebook formats, since there are many of them. In my previous post on ebooks, I decided that EPUB was the way to go, since almost everyone except Amazon uses it. The trouble is, almost everyone also uses DRM. So EPUB is an open standard that can be, and usually is, wrapped up in DRM, as Gizmodo explained earlier this year.
This means that I can’t buy an book in EPUB format and read it on my hardware or software EPUB reader of choice. Or rather, I can do so only under limited circumstances. For example, I can read a Sony B&N ebook on a Nook, but I can’t read a B&N ebook on a Sony reader. Or, when I Google anything to do with EPUB and DRM, I get a lot of links that seem to lead to instructions for stripping DRM.
This “Tower of eBabel” problem makes me think that my eBook era doesn’t need to start any time soon, unless I suddenly have to go on a long and bookstoreless trip. The prices of the books themselves aren’t particularly attractive, unless you have a free eReader. The selection has some surprising gaps, as well. For example, there seems to be no e-dition of A Wizard of Earthsea.
PressRow on Death Row
August 13, 2010
The selection of themes at WordPress.com no longer includes Cutline. Why not? Here’s how staffer Themeshaper explained in the support forum.
When we first added the Cutline theme to WordPress.com it was free software. That means the users of that theme had the freedom to use, share, and modify that theme as they wished—as long as they passed those freedoms on when they shared it. That freedom let us bring the Cutline theme here to WordPress.com and it’s the same freedom that’s made WordPress so popular…
Cutline was sold a few years ago and had a more restrictive license placed on it. The original author of the Cutline theme has gone on to produce other themes with more restrictive licenses. Using Cutline has been seen as a promotion of that work and that’s not something we want to do
Posting on the replacement of Cutline with Coraline, I closed with a thought on another theme.
If I were using PressRow at WordPress.com, I’d be wondering how much longer I’d have it for, and what might replace it.
One comment on the post provides confirmation that PressRow is on death row. Another identifies PressRow as the theme of choice if you want Cutline and can no longer use it. That’s not surprising, since the two themes share a designer (Chris Pearson) and hence a certain look and feel.
I hope that WordPress.com will handle the endgame for PressRow more gracefully than it handled the Cutline cutoff. In other words, I hope that PressRow users won’t suddenly find that they are using a different theme.
I fear a worse than that case scenario, in which:
- Most, or many, PressRow users get no advance warning.
- They are switched to a theme they didn’t choose, had never heard of, and, in many cases, dislike.
- They find their widgets, as well as their theme, gone.
- They just switched to PressRow, and did so when Cutline went away.
All except the last of these happened during the Cutline cut. The last could happen, especially given the similarity of PressRow to Cutline, and the fact that PressRow is a prominent theme at WordPress.com: if you sort themes on popularity, PressRow is on the front page.
The number of PressRow blogs at WordPress.com may well be in six figures. I arrive at that noting that it is the 14th most popular theme, and that WordPress.com hosts millions of blogs.
I’d like to see a retirement plan for PressRow, stating things like how to forwarn every PressRow user, how much notice to give, etc. I’d like to see the plan itself posted, so that the community can comment on it.
If PressRow/death row isn’t handled better than Cutline/cut, we may see one of WordPress.com’s competitors advancing the proposition: come to us, we won’t cut your theme or put it on death row. That said, the most recent and aggressive attempt to get migrants from WordPress came from Posterous, which has more recently had downtime woes. The most likely migration destination from WordPress.com is still self-hosted WordPress.
Even I Am an eReader Now
August 11, 2010
I love books, always have, and always will. So what about ebooks? I haven’t used them. I don’t like reading large amounts of text on a computer screen, and eReaders are too expensive for my taste: I like gadgets, but not enough to pay early adopter prices.
Now that eReader prices are moving down towards $99, I’m starting to consider which one to get, or at least to request for a present come December. Here are my main criteria.
- EPUB format support.
- Price.
- Easy enough on the eyes to actually read a book. I’m going to rely on reviews for this, since a quick in-store test-read won’t prove much about prolonged use.
The first criterion rules out a Kindle, tempting though the new Kindle Wi-Fi is at $139 on the price criterion. I don’t want my eShelf to rest on a proprietary format.
Almost everything else on the market does support EPUB, according to Wikipedia’s comparison of e-book formats. So it’s time to do some research on Nook and the like, or at least keep my eyes and feed reader open over the next few months.
I’m hoping for “a sub-$100 device with no connectivity other than a USB port”. The quote is from Joe Wickert, even though he has a Kindle in mind.
Since I’m going EPUB, I’ve installed a software eReader on my Android. I went with Aldiko, after reading Matthew Miller’s comparison of apps. That’ll get its own post soon.
In the meantime, any comments on EPUB readers and content stores are most welcome.
Coraline: The WordPress Theme
August 9, 2010
Coraline is the story of a girl who finds herself in a different reality. I like the original Neil Gaiman novel, and the movie (and this photo, by origami_potato, of a Coraline doll).
Another Coraline story concerns WordPress.com users who find themselves with a different theme. Coraline is a new theme at WordPress.com, where it has replaced Cutline. I think that this is the first time that WordPress.com has removed a theme and switched all sites from that theme to another, without prior warning.
Is it surprising that this particular theme – Cutline – has been retired from WordPress.com? Yes and no. Yes, since Cutline was one of the most popular themes at WordPress.com. No, given the recent controversy involving Cutline designer Chris Pearson.
I’m not the only person who thought that Cutline might have been retired because of its designer. This thought is expressed in one of the many forum threads protesting the abrupt replacement of Cutline with Coraline. Other such posts include: YOU changed my theme without my knowledge; Cutline is Gone!?@(!(!(; WordPress deleted my theme w/out notification.
I note that there is another popular WordPress.com theme designed by Chris Pearson: PressRow. If I were using PressRow at WordPress.com, I’d be wondering how much longer I’d have it for, and what might replace it.
Software, the Hold Up Problem, and the Cloud
August 9, 2010
Why is “the web development world… dominated by open source”? Michael Schwarz & Yuri Takhteyev, writing at GigaOm, answer the question as follows.
The reason is based on what economists call “the hold up problem.” When a business relies on assets owned by another party, it may become dependent on that party’s cooperation in the future. In this situation, the party with ownership of a key resource may gain the ability to “hold up” its partner, demanding an unreasonably high price…
The hold up problem is particularly severe in the IT sector. Building an Internet company on a foundation consisting of proprietary software owned by others is akin to building a house without owning the land under it. When software is sold in binary form, the buyer is subject to hold up by the vendor; if the software needs to be changed in the future, such changes can only be done with the cooperation of the original vendor at the price that the original vendor demands. By relying on open source, a company can invest in developing its product without fear of being held up down the road. Therefore, open source is an economically powerful solution to the hold up problem.
There are of course limits to this analysis. One is the proprietary anomaly, Flash. Indeed, explaining this anomaly is a primary purpose of the quoted post. Another limit, found in the comments, is that source code is not the only asset that may allow holdup.
I’m posting to advance another limit to the argument that open source software solves the hold up problem. It is “the web as platform.” That may be familiar to older readers as one of the definitions of Web 2.0. Cloud computing is an increase in the extent to which the web is used as a platform.
Cloud computing is a trap, warned Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman a couple of years ago. Cloud computing allows software derived from free/open source software to run without the source code being made available.
So, while free/open source software is a solution to software hold up, it also gives life to a new monster: hold up in the cloud.
Instructional Design Books
August 5, 2010
Instructional Design? Some of my initial thoughts on ID (or ISD, with the S standing for System) are in an earlier post. A thought not captured in that post is that I’ll be doing some reading on ISD.
So I was interested to see a list of books for instructional designers, culled by Amit Garg from a LinkedIn discussion. I saw the list via Cammy Bean, who also linked to the reading list she posted a couple of years ago.
I note that both lists start with e-Learning and the Science of Instruction. So I’ll probably get it (after asking why each list links to the first edition, rather than to the second, which came out in 2007). It’s interesting that this book is about e-Learning, rather than about ISD more generally.
Cammy’s list also includes Non-Designer’s Design Book. I was surprised to see it on an ISD list, but I do recommend it highly. It discusses basic design principles, and applies them to flyers, business cards, web sites… almost everything except courses. But then, e-Learning tends to mean learning from a web site.
