I can’t remember in what bin or bag I found this report, written under the auspices of Allan Gotlieb and submitted to then Minister of Communications, The Honourable Eric Kierans.
Tag: Technology
Is Maria Popova a Bot?
At least once a week, I resolve to be a more disciplined blogger. It’s a weaker version of the New Year’s resolution. So, for example, I felt a twinge of it at the end of December and created a reading list: I would read a whack of books and blog about each of them.
Disaster Capitalism as a Publishing Business Model
Since the rise of Amazon, the Kindle, ibooks, the iPad, etc., it’s hardly news that the publishing industry is struggling to cope with radical change. The latest, and perhaps most ludicrous, is an antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department against Apple & the Big 6 U.S. publishers alleging that their agency model is, in fact, price fixing.
Cage Match: Jonathan Franzen vs Ursula Franklin
It’s been a long time since I last held a cage match here at nouspique—where I throw disparate thinkers into collision with one another and see if anything shakes loose. With the furor which has arisen since Jonathan Franzen’s disparaging comments about ebooks, I have decided to resurrect the practice.
My iPhone Addiction
During the Christmas holidays, I had my comeuppance. I had to face my family and confess that I had lost my iPhone.
The Vox – Kobo Launches a Tablet eReader
A year and a half ago, Toronto-based Kobo launched a bare bones eReader to give its biggest competitor, Amazon, a run for its money. It was a decent offering supported by a decent library (2.2 million titles and counting) especially when you consider the behemoth it was battling.
RIP Steve Jobs
At the news of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ death, I pulled out my very first Mac computer and held an interment ceremony. This is one of the original 128k RAM Macs. No hard drive. It boots from a 3.5 inch floppy disc.
Private Label Rights Sludge
Reuters reported last week that Spam is Clogging Amazon’s Kindle Self-Publishing. The problem, it seems, is PLR or Private Label Rights. I don’t understand how PLR works, but I suspect it’s like the water the Morlocks drink in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine – an underground toxic sludge.
Virgin Alerts Infected Customers
To those who insist that there is such a thing as a literal reading of text, I offer a headline posted today by the BBC: Virgin Alerts Infected Customers.
Smashwords, Mark Coker and the Gears of Big Publishing
Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, posted an op-ed today in the Huffington Post, calling on authors to throw themselves on the gears of the machine. This is a reference to Mario Savio’s 1964 speech in which he called on students at UCLA to resist the administration’s attempts to curtail free speech.
Measuring Readability of Blog Posts
I installed a wordpress plugin called FD Word Statistics which applies three metrics on the backend and is supposed to help me gauge the readability of my blog posts.
The ebook piracy experiment
A couple weeks ago, in the Telegraph, Adrian Hon announced: “Your time is up, publishers. Book piracy is about to arrive on a massive scale.” He conducted an experiment: to see how long it would take to locate an unauthorized e-copy of a book he already owned but didn’t want to lug around. It took him about 60 seconds.
The Cloud Economy: Computing as a Social Justice Issue
While the question of cloud computing – is it a good thing? What are its benefits? How will it change the way we interact online? – sounds like it properly belongs in the province of geekdom, I’m of the view that it also deserves to be discussed as a social justice issue.
10 Images that would get your Apple App Banned
With Apple’s refusal to approve apps which display even a smidgen of nudity, I got to thinking about what kinds of images would get your app excluded from the sanitized and Disneyfied world of Apple.
Ulysses Unseen or How Apple got into the Censorship Business
Remember Apple’s “1984” commercial — the one where the woman smashes the giant video screen while thousands of blank-eyed automatons look on, and then a voice tells us that “On January 24th Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ”1984.””