Authors’ Guild to Amazon: we’re watching you

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Hmmm… The Author’s Guild isn’t exactly enamoured of Amazon’s new eBook reader.

February 12, 2009. On Monday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-book reading device at the Morgan Library in New York. Most of the changes from the first version of the Kindle are incremental improvements: the new Kindle is lighter and thinner, for example, and Amazon eliminated the scroll wheel. One update, however, is wholly new: Amazon has added a ‘Text to Speech’ function that reads the e-book aloud through the use of special software.

This presents a significant challenge to the publishing industry. Audiobooks surpassed $1 billion in sales in 2007; e-book sales are just a small fraction of that. While the audio quality of the Kindle 2, judging from Amazon’s promotional materials, is best described as serviceable, it’s far better than the text-to-speech audio of just a few years ago. We expect this software to improve rapidly.

We’re studying this matter closely and will report back to you.

Translation: we’re consulting our lawyers.

This is nuts. As Neil Gaiman (who has just won this year’s Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to children’s literature) puts it:

“When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend, etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one’s going to confuse it with an audiobook. … Any authors’ societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what’s good about them with it.”

On this day…

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… in 1929, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.

Footnote: Capone was eventually convicted not for his heinous crimes but for tax evasion. Could there be a precedent here for dealing with corrupt bankers?

Why Microsoft Word is great for journalism

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Remember those $15 billion valuations of faceBook at the time that Microsoft invested in the company?

Well, here’s a lovely story from Good Morning Silicon Valley

For a company built on the public’s willingness to share ordinarily private information, Facebook itself has been notably tight-lipped on some subjects. The company’s market value? Just let people extrapolate from the 2007 Microsoft investment ($240 million for a 1.6 percent stake equals $15 billion). The price of getting founder Mark Zuckerberg’s former college buddies to stop complaining that he stole their idea? Seal the settlement in closed court and swear all parties to a blood oath of silence. But information wants to be free, and when the only thing standing in its way is a thin film of virtual marker ink, somebody’s going to help it make a break.

See, the problem with using virtual marker ink to black out text in a digital document is that it works only for the printed output. On the original, the text is still there behind the shading, and if you copy and paste it into a new document, you can peel away the veil with no problem. That’s why you wouldn’t want to do this with, say, a sensitive legal document full of redactions. Unfortunately for Facebook, however, the transcript of that settlement hearing was edited in just this fashion, and when the Associated Press was given a digital copy and performed the magic cut-and-paste trick, a much more modest valuation of the company was revealed.

A much more modest valuation. See GMSV for the details.

Tip: never send anybody a .doc. Convert it to text or pdf first. But then you knew that, didn’t you?

The rise and rise of Twitter

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From the Pew Internet and American Life Project:

“As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others. Just a few weeks earlier, in November 2008, 9% of internet users used Twitter or updated their status online and in May of 2008, 6% of internet users responded yes to a slightly different question, where users were asked if they used “Twitter or another ‘microblogging’ service to share updates about themselves or to see updates about others.”

Full report here.

Evolution of a meme

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Fascinating piece in Slate by Chris Wilson.

Late last fall, a chain letter titled “16 Random Things About Me” began to chew its way through Facebook. The author of one of these notes would itemize her personality into ’16 random things, facts, habits, or goals,’ then tag 16 friends who would be prompted to write their own lists. And so on and so on. Similar navel-gazing letters had popped up over the years through e-mail and on blogs, MySpace, Friendster, and the venerable blogging site LiveJournal. The Facebook strain had a good run, but by the end of 2008 it appeared to have stagnated.

Then something curious happened: It mutated. Since everyone who participates is supposed to paste the original instructions into her own note, it’s easy to tinker with the rules. Soon enough, 16 things (and 16 tagged friends) morphed into 15—and 17 and 22 and 35 and even 100. As the structure crumbled, more users toyed with the boundaries. Like any disease, ‘Random Things’ was mutating in hopes of finding a strain that uniquely suited its host. In this case, the right number was vital to its survival: The more people who are tagged, the more likely the note is to spread. The longer the list, though, the more daunting it is to compose and the fewer participants will be roped in.

By mid-to-late January, “25 Random Things About Me” had warded off its competitors. Once the letter settled on 25 things (a perfect square, just like 16) the phenomenon exploded. The data we collected reveal a clear tipping point around this time.

The article has a couple of intriguing charts — e.g.

Wilson showed his data to an epidemiologist who told him that they displayed the “classic exponential growth of an epidemic curve.” Her view was that

’25 Things’ authors can be seen as ‘contagious’ under what’s known as a ‘susceptible-infected-recovered’ model for the spread of disease. Think of ’25 Things’ authors as being contagious for one day—the day they tag a bunch of their friends.

She found that, for that one day, the growth parameter of the ’25 Things’ disease during its ascent phase (roughly until the beginning of February) was 0.27. This means that, on average, each ’25 Things’ writer inspired 1.27 new notes.

It’s ironic that I came on this on Darwin’s birthday. What it suggests is that there was something about 25 things that made that particular variation ‘fitter’ than its competitors. I’m surprised — I would have predicted that a smaller number — seven perhaps — would have been more likely to triumph. But maybe FaceBookers have more interesting lives than mere bloggers.

Even more ironic is the fact that the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life today reported that 63% of Americans reject Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

What a strange country is the US.

Here we go… again.

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I’m a big Obama fan and am delighted that such a handsome couple have made it to the White House. But there’s something depressing about seeing Mrs Obama draped on the cover of the latest edition of the premier fashion rag. She’s a clever and interesting woman, but the glossy media are going to do their utmost to turn her into a clothes-horse. And it looks as though she’s playing ball. Sigh.

Photo by Leibovitz, naturally. Explains why she’s the only snapper in the world who can afford a private jet.

After the snows

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One of the most noticeable side-effects of the icy weather is the rapid deterioration of road surfaces everywhere. Wonder how long it will take to repair the damage.

The Most Dangerous Man in the World

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From Mark Anderson.

Now that we no longer have a chimpanzee in the cockpit of the F-16, some folks may be wondering, just who is the most dangerous man in the world?

The answer, I think, is simple: A. Q. Khan, “founder” (or perhaps chief thief) in charge of Pakistan’s first nuclear program, and, more importantly, of his own secret nuclear proliferation ring.

Dr. Khan, just released from house arrest this week, is now wandering around, free, no doubt wondering how to resurrect the absolute worst idea in the entire world today. Specifically: Goodness, how can I make sure that as many fundamentalist Islamic states (and, hey, crackballs like North Korea, too) as possible acquire nuclear weapons, as quickly as possible?

I suppose if one had to define insanity, Khan would be the walking definition.

One can hope that the real reason he was let out of the box was so that the FBI and CIA could track his every movement and unearth the rest of his still-extant client list. Or, even better, that he has been taken off the house arrest regime in hopes that he goes camping, and the tiger enters his tent and eats him, before Khan can destroy the Earth.

I never liked the idea that he only received house arrest. It was a bit like taking a Hitler wannabe and putting him on free-roaming probation in a Nordic country with blue-eyed teens.

Is there a worse crime against humanity than shipping nuclear weapons technology and knowhow to unstable regimes of indiscriminate pedigree and no obvious systems or sense of restraint? You might think there are today, but you would certainly not say it tomorrow, if Khan’s bombs had been used meanwhile.

This jerk belongs in jail, not in house arrest. Think of him like Napoleon, without the good parts…

Steve Ballmer’s Speech to the Democrats

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As some readers know (and others have probably guessed) there are lots of things about Microsoft that I dislike. But one thing I’ve always admired about the company is the fact that it’s never had any corporate debt. Bill Gates famously said once that he wanted Microsoft always to be able to run for an entire year without earning a cent in revenues. Until today, however, I didn’t know why he felt so strongly about that. Now, thanks to Mark Anderson, I do. He’s relayed the entire text of a speech Steve Ballmer gave the other day to the Democratic Caucus. Here’s the passage that made me sit up.

When I got to Microsoft and we were this tiny little company, we didn’t have the budget to put people up in hotels, so I lived with Bill. And every time I sat down, in every corner, nook and cranny of couches, tables, I’d find these little yellow pieces of paper with Bill’s writing that had a bunch of people’s names and companies’ names and numbers.

I think of myself as pretty good pattern matching… and I just couldn’t figure out what these numbers were.

So, finally I said to Bill, what is this? He says, Steve, I’m really always worried about whether we’re going to have enough cash to pay people. So, every night I write down everybody who works for us and how much we pay them, and every contract we have and how much it’s worth. I’ve got to count the pennies tightly and that’s why you’re here now.

It’s a great talk, which is essentially about how the US needs to reboot itself. And another interesting thing: he flew to the meeting on the red-eye scheduled flight, not in a corporate jet. A neat contrast to the automobile moguls, eh? And to the Citicorp execs.