The Inquisitr » web

Book publishers myopic as they claim e-books will destroy books

Steven Hodson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:05:00 +0000

We’ve seen the same thing repeated over an over with the music industry, television industry, news industry, and many more just like them. Crying doom and gloom about how their individual wealth creators are being driven into the ground by the Web. Granted the Web might be changing the playing field in favor of the actual content creator and consumers but it isn’t to blame for these businesses failing.

It is their own myopia and unwillingness to find ways to make their business work in the new media world instead of trying to constantly bend it to meet their current business models.

The latest of these is the book publishing world and people Araud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre. It is his opinion that the monsters out to destroy the book publishing industry are the usual suspects – Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble along with other e-book retailers.

His point of contention with these evil people is the aggressive pricing of e-books in the case of the major retailers and the availability of out-of-copyright books courtesy of Google.

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.

There was a real and “muscular” debate in the US, he added. Retailers were paying publishers more than $9.99 for each e-book, so were selling them at a loss: “That cannot last . . . Amazon is not in the business of losing money. So, one day, they are going to come to the publishers and say: ‘we are cutting the price we pay’. If that happens, after paying the authors, there will be nothing left for the publishers.”

Source: The Globe and Mail – E-books ‘could spell the end for hardbacks’

Once again we see some-one who doesn’t seem to understand how the economics of the web works. The fact is that beyond the book author actually getting what their book is worth based on real sales the cost of delivering those e-books is next to zero. In contrast for book publishers the costs incurred to create all those individual copies of the original are far from zero. Why should retailers, and the author, have to sell a copy of a book that costs nothing to create for the same price as what book publishers deem it to be worth.

As with the business behind the other entertainment industries book publishers are finding that because of the Web the middle man isn’t the profit center that it once was.

Even Microsoft would like IE6 to die but can’t help put a stake in it

Steven Hodson — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:20:00 +0000

Admittedly Internet Explorer is a blight on the Web that many would love nothing better than to see disappear – instantly. It has, and continues to cause nothing but grief for designers and users alike but as much as we might like it to go away it is taking a very long time to die out.

Even Microsoft would like to see it go away but as much as they are trying to get users to upgrade to the new Internet Explorer 8 they also realize that when it comes to the enterprise it is going to be a tough battle. The problem is that IE6 has become entrenched as the business web browser with many of these businesses having custom in-house web apps that might not survive the upgrade in browsers.

As Amy Bazdukas, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer said in an Computerworld post

But while she agreed that consumers should ditch IE6, and understood the motivation behind the growing chorus of Web sites calling for an end to the browser, Bazdukas said Microsoft couldn’t give the same advice to businesses. "With our business customers, it’s more complex," she argued. "For them, deploying a browser is very like much like deploying an operating system across multiple desktops. So it’s not a surprise that IE6 is still being used."

Not that Microsoft’s entirely happy with that. "IE6 use is higher than we like," Bazdukas admitted. "Most of that is from the business installations, that’s where we see most of the trailing installations of IE6."

She even says in the post that “Friends don’t let friends use IE6”. This is echoed by Ray Valdes, and analyst at Gartner who regularly recommends to clients that they leave IE6 behind but he also states the same problem when it comes to the enterprise

"But the situation is, it’s surprisingly difficult to get enterprises to upgrade. Many companies have old software that depends on IE6, and that software is not upgradable because they have no budget or the developer is not around anymore, or the in-house developer left."

It’s not a matter that Microsoft wants to keep supporting a legacy browser it’s that they don’t have much of a choice given that their bread and butter comes from those businesses that still have IE6 deployed throughout their operations.

All News Corp news sites to start charging

Steven Hodson — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:13:44 +0000

Well it looks like Rupert Murdoch didn’t get Chris Anderson’s memo about everything on the Internet being free.

Word is that the News Corp chairman told analysts in a earnings conference call that while the newspaper industry has to change to keep up with the time it doesn’t mean that everything will be free – especially his newspapers.

"The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution," Mr Murdoch said.

"But it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites," he said.

He said News Corp would use the Wall Street Journal’s online vehicle as a model.

"The extended downturn has only increased the drumbeat for change," he said, arguing that classified advertising for online news would never reach the levels once offered by print.

"Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content, is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting," Mr Murdoch said.

Source: Business Spectator :: News Corp to charge for all news websites

Time to get the comfy chair and popcorn ready because the blogosphere is sure to get going full force pontificating over this news.

Smileys: The Big Internet Mystery Solved

Steven Hodson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:04:00 +0000

The ubiquitous internet Smiley has been with us for a very long time but its origins are shrouded in mystery even though many have tried to lay claim to their birth or knowing where they first showed up. Now though documents have been discovered that let us in on the little known world of Smiley creation.

hat tip to Dark Roasted Blend

Are we headed to an Internet Dark Ages?

Steven Hodson — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:16:12 +0000

The common wisdom these days is that the Internet and Web, as well as technology in general, will continue on a forward momentum. It will constantly add to our collective knowledge and increase our achievements as it grows. Things like Moore’s Law and Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerated Return would have us believe that our future of incredible technology is within our grasp. After all there is no indication that it is otherwise.

Or is there?

I like to consider myself a realist when it comes to technology and society. I would like to think that there are incredible things ahead for us as we make discovery after discovery. I also believe, unlike a lot of my equals, that as much good as all this new technology will bring society there are those who will subvert the future to their own advantages. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t hope for a bright future. In fact I hope to always be proven wrong and that we live to see the benefits of a universally equal society as it is helped by our constantly growing technological knowledge.

What if I am wrong?

We live in a world where the Internet and by extension the Web is an increasingly integral part of our society. We might bicker about things like ubiquitous access for all and worry about things like search monopolies, but we would like to believe that as we move to the future we will overcome those problems. We like to believe in a technologically driven world where things like health and other problems which plague us today will no longer exist. Things like oil and coal shortages would be a thing of the past and we would live without fear of the planet imploding from our mere presence.

What if this isn’t the future we end up with?

While the majority of forward thinkers and technologists might dismiss these question as being not something we need to be asking ourselves there are some whole think otherwise. I ran across the writings of one of these types of persons earlier today via a post on Treehugger. John Michael Greer is the author of the Archdruid Report and two of his most recent posts directly look to these types of questions.

The End of the Information Age

In the first post I read titled The End of the Information Age he suggests that rather than heading into a technological Golden Age we are in fact headed in the opposite direction. Much of his argument in the post is based around the point that our technological world is being powered by an increasingly limited supply of energy.

This kind of logic is common enough these days that it’s probably necessary to point out the flaws in it. Electricity isn’t an energy source; it has to be generated, using some other energy source to do so. The electricity that powers the European and Japanese rail systems is mostly generated by plants that burn coal, with significant help from nuclear reactors and a rather smaller assist from hydroelectric plants. Of these, only the hydroelectric plants are a renewable energy source; the others are poised just as firmly on the downslope of depletion as the diesel oil that runs American locomotives.

His point being that our principal forms of creating long term supplies of energy are in fact finite. I realize that this is the point where a vocal group of environmentally minded people will jump up and start waving the banners of solar, wind and wave generated power. Once more we tread into the realm of possible futures but the reality is more likely that these forms of energy generation are going to have a lot harder time gaining a foothold than they think.

As I pointed out in a previous post here we are only just entering into the fields of generating alternative forms of energy. We are barely getting our toes wet in this new world and already see the flag of NIMBY being waved in the communities that, as much as they need these new forms of energy they don’t want its transport systems going through their neighborhoods.

Now I talked about this whole thing with a good friend of mine, Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, via IM and he raised the point that Greer was forgetting things like Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerated Return. It was his point that even now stuff like nano-tech solar technology is only about five years from hitting the market in any great degree. For Mark it is things like this that will allow increasing amounts of solar energy to be generated on a smaller more local scale

Well, take into account urban solar initiatives as well as nano-tech – solar is currently poised for a quantum leap forward.

We’re about five years out from affordable solar accessible to everyone.

Having read Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near I can understand the point that Mark is making. Technology isn’t a linear growth, it is in fact an exponential growth that builds on top of what we already know and have. While I may not be in total agreement with what John Greer is trying to say in this first post I also think that people like Kurzweil, and Mark, forget about a major contributing factor in all human growth.

Human Nature

As much as we might like to believe that all human beings are good and want to do the right things for our world and our society that isn’t the case. We live in a world where money and power are the major driving force. Those in power will always do the bare minimum to keep the maximum number of people happy. Beyond that it is all about garnering as much power and money as possible. Corporations have equal or more power than the governments we elect to [supposedly] govern us.

We have seen time and again throughout our history where any serious change in our society has been brought in only through kicking and screaming. Governments and business do not want to change anything that will affect their long term power and profit margins. At the heart of this is our current situation of an inevitable decline of fossil based source of energy and the constant bickering over moving to more renewable sources of energy. On the smaller scale we have even within our own neighborhoods and communities those that will do whatever they can to stop change because it might affect their short term bottom lines.

The Cost of Our Information Age

When it comes to the bottom line in our technological world we all want as much access with a little interference as possible for a little cost as possible. For many people, myself included, this is a perquisite for any attempt to move ourselves into a true technological future. However all this access costs us a lot of energy. We tend to loose sight of this cost when we look on the small scale of our own personal usage of technology. It is a totally different story when start approaching the bedrock of that technology.

Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to maintain the information economy actually is. The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it’s easy to forget, for example, that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo’s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today’s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you’re reading them.

At some point we are going to reach a convergence of the need for more cheap energy and the reality that we’ve been playing NIMBY far too long. There will come a point, if what Mark suggests about things like nano-solar doesn’t happen, that energy cost could become the most crucial deciding factor in who – if anyone other than Government and Business, has access to technology.

The Economics of Decline

We could actually arrive at a point where those things like libraries, newspapers and shopping in our neighborhoods become more economically viable because of an increasing cost of technology due to our delay, or inability, in moving to a more sustainable energy production. John Greer talked about this in his second post I read titled The Economics of Decline

All this is true, but it misses the central issue I’ve tried to raise in the last few posts – the impact of energy and resource scarcity on the relative costs and benefits of different technologies – and it also dismisses the even broader issue of whether such energy-intensive technologies are sustainable at all in the future ahead of us. It’s a dizzying departure from reason to insist that the advantages conferred by the internet mean that the internet must continue to exist. The fact that something is an advantage does not guarantee that it is possible.

Our Internet, and all our other technological toys we wouldn’t want to be without, do in fact eat up huge amounts of energy. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft along with a host of other technology companies are spending millions of dollars a year trying to find ways to lower their energy consumption. It is a good effort that has already shown promise but they are fighting against an ever growing tide of new technology coming online everyday.

The Growing Energy Cost of the Infrastructure

For as much as technology like the Internet, computers and other modern toys, may have a direct cost energy wise we have to also take into consideration the energy cost of the infrastructure to maintain and grow our technologies. As Greer puts it in his post

It’s crucial to remember that the entire supply chain that keeps the internet and its potential competitors running has to be factored into these calculations. It’s easy to see the internet as uniquely efficient if all you take into account is the energy going into your home computer, or even if you consider the gigawatts used by server farms. Putting those gigawatts to work, however, requires an electrical grid spanning most of a continent, backed up by the immense inputs of coal and natural gas burnt to put electricity into the wires, and a network of supply chains that stretches from coal mines to power plants to the oil wells that provide diesel fuel for trains and excavation machines; the server farms draw on a vast array of supporting services and manufactures, from the overseas mines that produce rare earths for semiconductor doping through the factories that turn out components to the colleges that turn out trained technicians, and the list goes on.

To try and just center our attention on the direct energy cost of technology is myopic and potentially irresponsible. We need to understand that the energy cost of maintaining the world we know and the one we want is going to be immense. As much as our current online experience might like us to believe that the things we want in life can be had at no or extremely little cost the real world shows us otherwise.

The Cost of Living Off of Abundance

Our society for its entirety has lived much a a parasite on this planet. We have placed ourselves above everything else on the planet to the point that we are sucking it dry of its lifeblood. We have no concern for any consequences until we are backing to the proverbial corner. As Mark pointed out though in IM when we talked about this

throughout history, just at the precipice of collapse, humanity figures out a way to continue the growth curve.

He is right.

We have always seemed to pull our asses out of the fire when any bookie in Vegas would have laughed at the odds. Unlike the past though we are reaching a point where the cost of our greed, ignorance and collective self-importance may have exacted too high of a price. While ordinary people fly their NIMBY flags to make sure their corner of the doesn’t change Corporations do everything in their power to maintain the status quo. They have made an art form out of the practice of Avoidance of Cause and Effect.

I am not saying that everything that Greer puts forward in his writing is something that will come to pass. I do believe though that as long as we keep playing the the game of diminishing energy we are in danger of losing any truly good changes that technology could bring to our society. As much as I might like to believe that Kurzweil’s hypothesis might save our asses I also realize that human nature still has a very large part to play in this and that most definitely gives me pause.

Thoughts anyone?

Father of the web gets conned on the web

Steven Hodson — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:25:23 +0000

On one hand this story could be funny and on the other it show just how sophisticated some of the scams on the web can be. After all if you are good enough to trap Sir Tim Berners Lee in a web scam it’s got to be a pretty good one right?

The revelation of his being suckered in came out just before a speech he was going to give this week as Web Science 09 in Athens

"The worst thing that has happened to me was when I tried to buy a Christmas present from a company that looked like a bona fide company on the internet and then actually they were a completely fake company. I think I am yet to get the money back, but it wasn’t a lot," said MIT professor Berners Lee with a helplessness that will strike a chord with the Web’s growing number of less famous victims.

Source: Network World

It might be seen as ironic that such a thing could befall someone as knowledgeable of the web but given that the revelation came about in the same week that the web celebrated its 20th anniversary it is almost like an extra insult to the man.

Will Web 3.0 be all about the YAWN?

Steven Hodson — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:53:17 +0000

If there is one thing you can say about the whole Web 2.0 thing it would be that it definitely hasn’t been boring. Every time you turn around some new service being announce, some new idea is being touted as the next game changer and everybody is yakking about how hot the social media stuff is. Yup – Web 2.0 is full of bustling activity.

But where do we go from here?

What will the next iteration of the web be like?

Fred Wilson had a post this morning called Looking for the Yawn in which he quotes something from a Warren Buffet blog post in which Warren said the following

Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.

I’ve been thinking about that and the other things Fred talked about in his post and it got me to wondering if Web 3.0 could actually end up being very boring. The thing about Web 2.0 is that in a lot of ways it resembles the construction of a building. There is a hubbub of activity as everyone is rushing around putting all the pieces together. The foundation, the walls, the plumbing – it all a flurry of hyper activity as people excitedly raise a whole new building up from the barren earth.

At some point though everything is in place – the building is completed and then everyone sets about to do the day by day business of working in that new building. You know the boring stuff.

The stuff that makes everyone want to *YAWN*.

What do you think? Do you think the next version number will be more building or will it be a big *YAWN*fest?

Inauguration was great but as usual full video is a FAIL

Steven Hodson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:20:47 +0000

Video on the web has come a long way with broadband speeds making watching online less like a hurky jerky dance that use to make it all so painful and pointless. As good as it might have become there is one thing about watching online video that is extremely irritating – especially if you are lucky enough to have more than one monitor.

With just about every video that you see on the web you will see a small little link that will let you watch the video in full screen mode. For folks with a single monitor this really not something that they need to be concerned with but once you move to a multi-monitor setup this full screen option is ultimately pointless.

Sure you can click on the link and the video will switch to full screen just as it should but the moment you try to switch monitors in order to get stuff done while still being able to see the full screen video, you will suddenly find yourself watching the video in that small irritating player in the browser.

This folks is full video FAIL!

The birthing pangs of Artificial Intelligence of the Web

Steven Hodson — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:03:00 +0000

As we move forward into 2009 and all the predictions of what we can expect to happen in technology and the web for the coming year come pouring out it’s interesting to see how myopic and in some ways short sighted we can be as human being. We are more interested in whether or not some silly little social media service like Twitter will survive the year. We are more concerned with the interconnections of business than we are on the growth of ideas and concepts that could really change our world – electronic and real.

When I sit back for a quiet moment and look around at all that the web already brings to our lives – the good and the bad – I am awe struck. Even a short 15 years ago I don’t believe anyone; with maybe the exception of Tim Berners-Lee, could envision where this new thing called the Internet was going to take us. Regardless of how corporations and governments have tried over time – and still do – to bend what the Internet is to their own visions the Web has for the most part remained the vast repository of information for all.

We tend to get lost in all that information and for the larger segment of web travellers we forget about the whole network of machines that are joined together by a nervous system of wire and wireless connections. When I sit back a think about the wonder that is the Internet I am often reminded of a book by Robert Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The basic premise of the book is that at some point in the vast computer network that runs the Moon colonies something happens. In a corner of this network an awareness is born and it calls itself Mike. While the book is about much more than just a computer network becoming aware – developing an intelligence – that one aspect of it always fascinated me.

Now we live in a world that is forever connected by fragile lines of copper, fibre and wireless nodes. It is a connected mass of computing devices of varying intelligence that grows bigger on a daily basis. More and more information is being added and created every minute of every day. The consummate knowledge of mankind is slowly finding its way into a network that spans the globe.

One of the driving forces of computer science has been the idea of creating artificial intelligence. A computerized mind in the image of man but much more powerful. A computer mind with the ability to think and create of its own volition. However what if we were looking at this the wrong way. What if we looked at it the way that Kevin Kelly does

This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, the greatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differently than humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither how smart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humans perspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. A distributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai—a low-level background intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it.

Ideally this additional intelligence should not be just cheap, but free. A free ai, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, and would pay for itself in no time.

- A New Kind of Mind / Kevin Kelly

What if in some corner of our Internet there is an awareness being born?

What if that awareness gives birth to an intelligence that we don’t understand – would it be artificial or would it in its own way be as real as ours?

How would our world be changed as this intelligence grew fed by our own compendium of knowledge?

I think these make for far more interesting thoughts as we look to the new year than how much Twitter will be sold for or if Facebook is really worth $15 billion. We have achieved something incredible in the last 15 years and given our exponential doubling of capabilities one has to wonder just where we will be in another 15 years.

I can’t hardly wait.

Internet search good for the brain than books

Dominic Rivera — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:07:06 +0000

If you think reading a book stimulates your brain, think again. Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles found that searching the web is a better activity than reading as it triggers the centers of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. But before you go and start doing those Google and Yahoo searching, this study is good only to middle-aged and older adults.

The research team worked with volunteers with ages between 55 to 76, with half having experience with the web and the rest as Internet newbies. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines scanning their noggins, participants were asked to search the web and read books.

Both activities showed significant brain activities but those who used the web users registered activities in the frontal, temporal, and cingulate areas of the brain, controlling decision-making and complex reasoning.

The study is set to see publication in the upcoming issue of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Now I know what to do when I get to that age.