Links for 2012-03-15

  • Ask Moxie: Welcome to Moxie Madness!

    Welcome to Moxie Madness 2012: Misery Poker Tournament! 64 mothering calamities go mano-a-mano in a single elimination tournament like you've never seen before. Only one mothering problem can be the champion... Vote for which problem is worse in a series of shoot-from-the-hip head-to-head matchups that will leave you breathless. First matchups start Thursday. Final Championship Match April 2. Are you ready to rumble?

  • DOJ vs. book publishers: Who cares if Apple and publishers are colluding to raise e-book prices? - Slate Magazine

    A bit buried in last week's iPad 3 excitement was the news that Apple, along with five major American book publishers, was given notice by the Justice Department that it's about to be sued for colluding to raise prices. A tech giant can afford to shrug off something as petty as an anti-trust lawsuit over books, but for HarperCollins, Penguin, MacMillan, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster (full disclosure: my publisher) the implications are potentially quite dire. Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, went further and argued that "everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture" should be alarmed by the DOJ's actions. He's wrong. If there's a case against the government's actions it's that the forces of disruption buffeting traditional publishing are much too large to be blocked by any cartel. The good news is that literary culture should survive either way.

  • The Daily Mash - Why I am leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader

    TODAY is my last day at the Empire. 'I no longer have the pride, or the belief' After almost 12 years, first as a summer intern, then in the Death Star and now in London, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its massive, genocidal space machines. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it. To put the problem in the simplest terms, throttling people with your mind continues to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making people dead.

Tags

More like this

What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions | Brain Pickings So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? It seems like a simple question, but it's an infinitely complex one, the answer to which is ever elusive and…
The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the "agency model" of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links…
For my own purposes I've been collecting various ebook-related posts for a while now and in particular the whole HarperCollins/library/ebook/Overdrive thing is a valuable source of lots of speculation and information. What I have below no doubt only represents a fairly small percentage of the…
A recent change by Harper Collins Publishing regarding library-owned eBook has met with a lot of criticism: The value of this magically convenient library book -- otherwise known as an e-book -- is the subject of a fresh and furious debate in the publishing world. For years, public libraries…