I got the Puppini Sisters album, Betcha Bottom Dollar, for Christmas, and they do a wonderful swing cover of I Will Survive. And Wuthering Heights, which I have woken up humming in the middle of the night.
Anyway, the move is complete, the unpacking is being duly ignored, and the internet has been installed. So it’s time for a belated (and bumper!) Motivation Monday.
Publishing: The Book Pirates of Peru. This picture article really interested me, over all the other Publishing links I’ve collated this week, because it shows an aspect of Piracy often overlooked in the digital age. In a country where libraries are almost non-existent and even those in solid work can rarely afford more than two books a year, piracy of popular novels is rife in the same way copies of designer bags are here. Being pirated is almost akin to getting on a bestseller list, in terms of “arriving”, but obviously in terms of sales it’s a killer.
On a similar note, Cliff Harris ask why people pirate his games, and what he can do to encourage legitimate purchases and dissuade pirates (as the raging debates about DRM tend to show, it’s hard to do both at once). Gizmodo are sick of eReaders, thanks to CES, and are of the opinion that:
There will soon be two kinds of happy ebook-reader owners. The people who paid a fair amount for a reputable ebook reader from one of the companies they already buy books from, and the people who spend like $50 on a no-name ebook reader that supports a lot of formats, who gets every book they can think of as a pirated copy over BitTorrent.
They’re argument is that those who’ll buy the cheap eReaders will quickly become annoyed at the limitations of DRM and file formatting that they might not have faced had they paid (or been able to pay) for one of the high end eReaders, and will turn to pirated books in order to get some use out of their device.
I’m not sure about this. I buy cheap MP3 players, but I haven’t filled them with pirated music; however, the music industry managed to get standardised a lot quicker than the eBook industry is, and had the added advantage that people could add music they already owned without being pirates for doing so. The industry really needs to get sorted, and soon – as CES has shown, the eReaders are out there and available across a massive price range.
Like many people, I want an eReader for around £100 (or less), and be able to read any eBook I buy on it. If I conclude I want wireless, or an LCD screen, or a touchscreen, I might be willing to pay more, but I don’t want to pay more just to read books I’ve legally purchased. I am the person with a mobile phone I’ve had for 6 years that I paid £60 for, an MP3 player I’ve dropped so many times half the screen is shot that I paid £40 for, and a netbook I bought secondhand off eBay (that, let’s be honest, I almost paid full price for anyway – curse my affection for Samsung) – in many ways I’m the e-gadget indstury’s worst nightmare, buying previous gen tech as soon as it’s cheap and nursing electronics so they outstrip their intended lifespan, but I suspect I’m also the standard electric-pleb. All my electronic toys what I want them to as well as I want them to, with no bells or whistles. That’s what I look for in an electronic device, and that’s what I’m looking for in an eReader – something that does the job its designed for and isn’t charging me extra for features I don’t use. If I find my choice is one that doesn’t do the job it was designed for to the extent I require (which, I feel, is a reasonable extent) or one that does do it but only if I pay the extra for the bells and whistles… Well, I bought another seven dead tree books last weekend. I think I can make do for now.
Interest-Piquing: In the Picture. An active attempt to stop excluding disabled children from picture books. The exclusion isn’t active, of course, but consider that parents asked young-children’s channel CBeebies to remove their one-armed presenter because she “was scaring children“* the fact that it’s very rare to see diabled adults and children depicted in children’s fiction is both disheartening for those who are disabled and a source of potential embarrassment for those who aren’t (both parents and children). Plus, In the Picture has some awesome Quentin Blake illustrations, and I was raised on that man’s art.
InsPiration: A History of the World. Museum artefacts from around the world that best illustrate the history of humanity (in the eyes of the BBC). You can add your own artefacts, there’s a podcast to download, and local museums are enouraged to submit artefacts and get involved with their local BBC radio station (if they’re in the UK). Though radio seems a strange medium for this kind of thing, it does have the advantage that it can be done on a much smaller budget and with considerably fewer air miles than on television. My love of this project… well, I may have handled some of these, in the day job.
More InsPiration: Being a Space Pilot Could be a Real Job in 20 Years, and why Science Fiction shouldn’t be marginalised and scorned. It would have been nice if the SciFi article hadn’t felt fit to take a swipe at other genre fiction, bang smack in the middle, but the rest of the article is well worth the read.
Procrastination: What, you haven’t lost enough time to all the above links? 🙂 The Book of Ratings died some years ago now (I used to read it back in school, my dears) but I still lose time to rereading it every now and then. Mostly now, since I opened it to link it. Since I’m in a geeky mood, consider Visions of the Future circa 1953, Star Wars Lego Figures, and Conspiracy Theories . And hey, Richard Branson is getting into space travel now.
*I have the firefox extension that converts all headlines on the Daily Mail website to automatically generated ones from the Daily Mail-o-matic (my favourite is “Are Gays making Britain Gay?”) which makes up potential Daily Mail headlines based on their usual buzzwords and hyperbole. Sometimes I forget I have it installed, though – for example, to me the headline there reads “Will Jacquie Smith Kill Hard Working Families?” and I thought I’d clicked the wrong link…
