Who’s Scamming Who Pt. 2
Published April 9th, 2011 | 
The other day, I blogged about a story in which Amazon and Google were being blamed for the proliferation of e-book piracy on the Internet. Today, I came across a story on PaidContent.org about Congress raking Google over the coals because of search results for piracy sites. Coincidentally, I also read in the newspaper this morning that Congress has voted to repeal the FCC’s net neutrality regulations.
Do you smell rotten fish?
Instead of going after these pirates (last time I checked, piracy was a federal crime) by investigating and building a case against them so that they can prosecute them, the government would rather censor the Internet so that users can’t search for certain websites (a move that will not stop piracy, only block access via the web). They would rather pass some bogus catch-all law that will control access to the Internet than do what needs to be done. At the same time, they want to give Internet Service Provider’s a free hand to control access to the Internet by disallowing any move towards net neutrality. See what’s going on here? Censorship, for one. Giving ISP’s a free pass to violate anti-trust, for another. And, government control of the Internet by proxy under the guise of protecting us from government control of the Internet. Do I sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist? Perhaps, but Congress is not looking out for us. We are being blinded, bled, kicked in the groin, fucked in the ass and dragged behind an RV strapped to a hitch bike rack
.
Posted in Current Events, Happy Horseshit, New Media, Old Media, fiction, newspapers, random thoughtsI’d Be Sad Without Libraries
Published February 4th, 2011 | With so much to do today, I thought I’d by slap on the work gloves a do a little warm-up by blogging about something that got my attention this morning: libraries. Yes, over a O’reilly Radar, Jenn Webb posed a query asking readers to talk about libraries:
- What purpose (if any) has a library served for you?
- If libraries ceased to exist, what would the ramifications be?
- Do libraries help or hurt publishing?
1. For libraries have been nothing short of my salvation. First, my elementary and middle school libraries and then the county library, and library in Milton, WVA, near where my late grandmother used to live. Books opened my tiny world to new universes of possibility. It was sitting in a library reading Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells, Jack London and others, that I thought I might like to be a writers. Had I not discover libraries, I’m fairly certain I’d have ended up in jail or in an insane asylum by now.
2. If libraries ceased to exist . . . oh dear, I don’t even want to think about that. Certainly books wouldn’t disappear, but that community of books would. The poor wouldn’t have access to books either. No libraries means no book mobiles. What no libraries would do to humanity is akin to a neurosurgeon arbitrarily hacking out a chunk of brain and filling the gap with Styrofoam.
3. I think libraries help publishing more than they hurt publishing. Sure, you can go to a libraries and read books for free without buying them. But, if you truly love a book and have the means to do so, you’ll be more likely to buy works by its author than you would’ve been had you never discovered that writer in the first place. With nothing more concrete than a notion to back me up, I’d say that libraries have generated more sales for publishers than they have stolen.
Printed Books Take a Nosedive
Published January 19th, 2011 | As I sit here pondering whether or not to go to the gym today (It’s too cold to exercise in men’s running shorts and I’m out of clean sweats, so I’m leaning towards staying home today and working on other things), I’m looking at a report from the Association of American Publishers that only confirms my own predictions about the downward trend of print book publishing.
According to the report, book sales were down in 2010, in all the major trade categories. Hardcover sales dropped 6.1%; mass market paperbacks have fallen off even more, by 14%. Adult paperback sales finished off the year with a whopping 19% nosedive. A 19% drop in Adult paperback sales during the holidays? That’s akin to Armageddon for publishers!
The flipside of this is that eBook sales jumped by about 165%, accounting for $391 million dollars in revenue. No, it’s not a dominating figure when considering the entire bookselling market, but it’s not insignificant either. It demonstrates what I’ve been talking about for the last several years — that print book and eBooks are moving closer to parity in terms of market share. And that, sooner or later, the mass-market paperback will become extinct.
