- Barnes and Noble Nook Color Gets Android Upgrade (Wired) — was an e-reader, but now Barnes and Noble are offering an upgrade to turn it into a fully-fledged Android tablet. The only thing you won’t be able to do is download apps from the Google marketplace. The Nook retails for $250. (via Glyn Moody)
- Anime Site Treats Piracy as Market Failure (Ars Technica) — “In almost all cases, piracy is not an issue of legality,” says Kun Gao, CEO of the anime streaming site Crunchyroll. It’s often a market issue—and Crunchyroll turns a profit by offering anime lovers what they want: legal access to anime shows right after new episodes have aired in Japan. […] Kun claims that piracy drops “60 to 70 percent” for shows carried by Crunchyroll. (via Glyn Moody)
- Project Cascade — New York Times project analyzing tweets, retweets, bit.ly uses, and other events in the online lifecycle of stories. Built using Processing and MongoDB. (via Flowing Data)
- Survey Indicates e-book Boom in China (Xinhua) — estimates of 613M ebooks read, 23% on mobile phones. Contains the sobering the acceptable price to download an e-book from the Internet is 1.33 yuan (0.2 U.S. dollars), and nearly 54 percent of digital readers say they would pay an average of 3.45 yuan to download e-books. (via Tim O’Reilly)
"piracy" entries
SOPA and PIPA are bad industrial policy
The solution to piracy must be a market solution, not a government intervention.
SOPA and PIPA not only harm the internet, they support existing content companies in their attempt to hold back innovative business models that will actually grow the market and deliver new value to consumers.
Tools of Change for Publishing Newsletter: January 11, 2012
Five things that shaped publishing in 2011, Louis CK's download experiment, DRM-free as a competitive advantage.
We take a look at the five things that shaped publishing in 2011 (many of which will shape the industry in 2012 as well). Plus, how service and ease of use can trump piracy.
Five things we learned about publishing in 2011
Lessons from Amazon, self-publishing, ereading studies, HTML5 and DRM.
It was a busy and sometimes bruising year for publishing as the industry continued its digital transformation. Here, we take a look at five of the biggest lessons from 2011.
Publishing News: Early response to the Kindle Lending Library
Amazon launched its Kindle Lending Library, and a publisher goes after BitTorrent users.
Amazon Prime became even more pervasive with the Kindle Lending Library, the publishing industry joined the piracy lawsuit fray, and presentation videos from the Books in Browsers conference are now available.
Four short links: 26 April 2011
Android Nook, Market Failure, Social Spread Analysis, and Chinese eBooks
Getting your book in front of 160 million users is usually a good thing
"Pirate's Dilemma" author Matt Mason on BitTorrent.
Pirating your own book may seem like an odd promotion strategy, but that's just what Megan Lisa Jones did with her new novel. Matt Mason, author of "The Pirate's Dilemma," says P2P platforms like BitTorrent are a great way to reach audiences and distribute content.
Four short links: 17 March 2011
Data Manual, Data Processing, Piracy Report, and Fragile Free
- The Open Data Manual — a HOWTO for organisations wanting to open up data. This report discusses legal, social and technical aspects of open data. The manual can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data — why to go open, what open is, and the how to ‘open’ data.
- MDP — Modular Toolkit for Data-Processing. Open source Python toolkit embodying a pile of machine learning and signal processing algorithms. (via Joshua Schachter)
- Media Piracy in Emerging Economies — SSRC report. The study finds no systematic links between media piracy and organized crime or terrorism in any of the countries examined. Today, commercial pirates and transnational smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free. (via BoingBoing)
- The Fragility of Free (Ben Brooks) — The fragility of free is a catchy term that describes what happens when the free money runs out. Or—perhaps more accurately—when the investors/founders/venture capitalists run out of cash, or patience, or both. Because at some point Twitter and all other companies have to make the move from ‘charity’ to ‘business’—or, put another way, they have to make the move from spending tons of money to making slightly more money than they spend. It’s at this moment that we begin to see the fragilities of the free system. Things that never had ads, get ads—things that were free, now cost a monthly fee. We have all seen it before with hundreds of services—many of which are no longer around. (via Marco Arment)
Piracy isn't just about price
A piracy research report makes a strong point about pricing, but results may be too narrow.
The "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies" report offers good insight about the realities of pricing, but the "Don't Make Me Steal" manifesto offers a broader perspective on why people pirate digital content.
Four short links: 28 February 2011
Culture, Wifi, Emotion, and Piracy
- Making or Breaking Culture — I’d never thought of HR as something that requires courage, but these stories clearly illustrate that if you want to put your people first then you must do so when it would be easier to buckle. (via Richard Hulse on Twitter)
- Lightpainting Wifi Signal Strength in Urban Neighbourhoods (Vimeo) — I’m a junkie for concept videos of exhibitionist information like this. (via Courtney Johnston’s Instapaper Feed)
- What Makes a Great Speech? (Guardian) — my quest to understand how software can be passionate, opinionated, quirky, persuasive, and generally bypass reason and shoot straight for our emotional pattern-matching apparatus means that I end up reading articles like this. (via Courtney Johnston’s Instapaper Feed as well)
- Piracy is the Future of Television (PDF) — paper that plainly lays out just how much better an experience it is to be pirating your TV than watching it.
Open question: How is your publishing organization addressing DRM?
If DRM's impact on piracy is negligible, what's its real purpose?
If digital rights management doesn't hinder pirates, and one-click stripping solutions are on the horizon, why do publishers turn to DRM?