It was nice while it lasted…

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It was a nice, but short-lived run for the e-ink based e-reader. iSuppli says sales of e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Nook have peaked. It’s all downhill from its 2011 high of 23.2 million units. The iPad, Kindle Fire HD, and other tablets are killing the e-reader, says iSuppli.
For some perspective on the death of the e-reader, iSuppli puts it well: “The rapid growth—followed by the immediate collapse—of the ebook market is virtually unheard of, even in the notoriously short life cycle of products inhabiting the volatile consumer electronics space.”

[Source.]

Pilgrimage

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Warning: This film is over 30 minutes long and probably of interest only to photography buffs. It’s the story of how a photographer who still does wet-plate photography made a pilgrimage to Laycock Abbey, the home of Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the calotype process and therefore one of the great pioneers of photography.

If you are going to watch it, brew some coffee and reconcile yourself to not doing any work for half an hour.

Osborne’s controlled experiment

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Lovely New Yorker piece by John Cassidy. Sample:

One of the frustrations of economics is that it is hard to carry out scientific experiments and prove things beyond reasonable doubt. But not in this case. Thanks to Osborne’s stubborn refusal to change course—“Turning back would be a disaster,” he told Parliament—what has been happening in Britain amounts to a “natural experiment” to test the efficacy of austerity economics. For the sixty-odd million inhabitants of the U.K., living through it hasn’t been a pleasant experience—no university institutional-review board would have allowed this kind of brutal human experimentation. But from a historical and scientific perspective, it is an invaluable case study.

At every stage of the experiment, critics (myself included) have warned that Osborne’s austerity policies would prove self-defeating. Any decent economics textbook will tell you that, other things being equal, cutting government spending causes the economy’s overall output to fall, tax revenues to decrease, and spending on benefits to increase. Almost invariably, the end result is slower growth (or a recession) and high budget deficits. Osborne, relying on arguments about restoring the confidence of investors and businessmen that his forebears at the U.K. Treasury used during the early nineteen-thirties against Keynes, insisted (and continues to insist) otherwise, but he has been proven wrong.

With Republicans in Congress still intent on pursuing a strategy similar to the failed one adopted by the Brits, this is a story that needs trumpeting. Austerity policies are self-defeating: they cripple growth and reduce tax revenues. The only way to bring down the U.S. government’s deficit in a sustainable manner, and put the nation’s finances on a firmer footing, is to keep the economy growing. Spending cuts and tax increases can also play a role, but they need to be introduced gradually.

The future’s mobile. It might also be bleak

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This morning’s Observer column.

But it’s when one sees how all these people access the net that the data leap into life. Meeker claims that the world now has 1.1 billion smartphone users, ie people who can access the internet and use the web via a handheld device. This trend is reinforced by other developments. A third of US adults now own a tablet or e-reader (up from 2% less than three years ago). And Apple’s iPad is the fastest-selling mobile device of all time (which, in the internet world, means “until the next Big Thing”). There’s a serious trend here.

The really staggering figures, however, are those relating to how people use their mobile devices. They already account for 13% of all internet traffic. This year, 24% of all online shopping on “black Friday” in the US was done via mobiles (up from 6% two years ago). And Meeker claims that in May this year mobile internet traffic in India overtook PC-based traffic.

What do these statistics mean? Well, basically they imply that the future’s mobile. We’re heading for a world in which most people will access the internet via handheld devices – phones and tablets. And this is a really big deal. On the one hand, it will make it easy for billions of people to integrate the net into their daily lives, with all the benefits that that can bring. On the other hand, it will greatly enhance the powers of corporations that few of us have any reason to trust.

Uncomfortable thoughts about Leveson

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I’ve been thinking. Always a bad idea (as my mother used to say). And four uncomfortable thoughts come to mind.

  • The first is the sad fact that I mentioned in an earlier post, namely that as long as the great British public continues to buy newspapers that behave disgracefully, then newspapers will behave disgracefully, no matter how much self-regulation they undergo.
  • The second is that Leveson’s prescription is going to be applied to something that may be a sunset industry (printed newspapers) while being able to do little or nothing about the Internet and what’s published on it — at least by organisations and websites based in other jurisdictions.
  • To date the only really original thinking I’ve seen on this last point is Lord MacAlpine’s idea of — and method for — going after defamatory Tweeters. This seems to be a smart way of using existing statutes to ensure that people think carefully before tweeting or retweeting something that may be defamatory in the UK.
  • The Guardian reports that Cameron is thinking of using a Royal Charter to regulate the press. The model for this is, of course, the BBC, which is governed by just such a charter. What could be simpler: we’re all proud of the BBC and its journalism is (generally) a model of probity? There’s just one problem with this — as Professor Brian Winston pointed out in a letter to the Guardian:

    A far better indication of the consequential dangers of content regulation by the state is the Hutton inquiry. The content-regulated BBC was called to account for its actions in reporting on David Kelly while Paul Dacre and Lord Rothermere (who ran the same story) were not. The question of independence needs to be tested against broadcasting’s record of investigations of UK political power, and history suggests that this has been less than stellar. Over time, it has certainly been consistently more constrained than parallel probes by the printed press: witness, for example, Hackgate itself, and the Guardian’s crucial role in that.

    That’s true. There are some examples where TV journalism has indeed taken on the power of the state and won. Think, for example, of the investigative reporting which led to the freeing of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. But mostly the journalists who did that were working not for the BBC but for the old ITV companies.

    Like I said, uncomfortable thoughts.