b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
Recently
Piracy Only Cause of Music Sales Slump
Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies
Keeping Airports Sane
Virtual Management Consulting
From Germany, With Love
Blog-Novelist Gets Contract
Self-publishing as Minor Leagues
Monday, January 6, 2003
Disk Sales Slump, Pirates Not Storing Data
The reported billions of pirate music downloads being made every month sure aren't helping the disk drive manufacturers. Shouldn't all that music be leading to ever more disk storage being sucked up by the devious pirates? If music sales fell 10 percent, but disk sales fell 21 percent, where is all that music going? Is piracy destroying disk sales, too? Gee, these numbers don't add up.
Disk storage sales carry on slumping. IDC surveyWith "just say no" the dictum for storage buying, IDC has estimated that total worldwide spending on external disk storage systems slumped to $13.3bn last year, down 24% on 2001. That marks the second year in which disk sales have fallen heavily. In 2001, IDC now estimates that they fell by 21% - up on an earlier estimate of an 18% fall that year. [...] [The Register]
Piracy Only Cause of Music Sales Slump
I am continually amazed, though not surprised, that the music industry considers itself immune to the global economic slowdown and attributes it's entire sales slump to piracy. It must be nice to have such a quick, simple, and handy explanation to cover the entire gamut of your real problems.No other industry in the world has such a ready scapegoat for its performance slump, and most are suffering far more than the music industry. It's sad the media is so useless in pointing out the basic reality of sales declines across all industries.
ARTS NOTEBOOK Music industry blames piracy for sales drop. globetechnology.com Jan 6 2003 12:02PM ET[...] Hilary Rosen, chairman and chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America, blamed the decline mainly on illegal downloading of music off the Internet.
"There's no question that the availability of free music on the Internet is not having the stimulative effect that the proponents of this piracy suggest," she said Friday. Citing RIAA surveys, she added: "Our younger buyers are telling us they are buying significantly less albums because they're finding what they want for free on the Internet." [...] [Moreover - IP and patents news]
Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies
Gary Frost points to what looks to be the beginnings of an interesting academic effort in the history of books, reading, and printing.
Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies. The Research Centre in the History of the Book has now merged with the Centre for Paleography to form: the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies. [future of the book news]
Sunday, January 5, 2003
Keeping Airports Sane
This airport thing will eventually smooth out, as long as we keep making loud, public noises every time they get out of control. Let's face it, the kind of people who sign up to be security guards have a statistically greater probability of going gung-ho over the line with their petty power mongering. But we don't have to tolerate it, and we don't have to be quiet about it. Enough black eyes will eventually trickle down into better training, and error correction for the security managers. That, in turn, will mean a better, smoother, safer flying experience for everyone. But I do think we need to be on the lookout for passengers being handled unreasonably, and document it however we can.
Penn Jillette, airport patriot. Penn Jillette, nerd squillionairre and fearless bad-boy magician, had a bad experience with Las Vegas airport security, where a security guard grabbed his crotch during a frisking without asking permission. Penn, who knows his rights, told the guard that unless he asks first, grabbing a person's groin is assault. The guard told him, basically, that he doesn't have any rights once he's in the security checkpoint, and shut up. So Penn asked him to call the cops so that he could press assault charges. What follows is a tragicomedy for the twenty-first century, in which various airport personnel insist that poor Penn will be late for his flight if he doesn't back off of this pressing charges business, and a Las Vegas cop (who's an enormous Penn and Teller fan) tells them, Penn's right, you committed assualt, and Penn stoically insists that he won't mind missing his flight, since he can always catch a later one.The punchline is a call from a PR person at the airport who offers to ensure that he gets VIP treatment from now on whenever he flies out of Vegas.
I explained the problem. "Do you allow your crotch to be grabbed without being asked?" I didn't exaggerate, I said that there was nothing sexual, I wasn't hurt, and it wasn't my genitals. I just said it was wrong. She said "Well, your feedback is really important because most people are afraid of us..."(Thanks, Joe!) [Boing Boing Blog]She said, "Well, you know a LOT about this." I said, "Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it."
She said, "Well, the airport is very important to all of our incomes and we don't want bad press. It'll hurt everyone, but you have to do what you think is right. But, if you give me your itinerary every time you fly, I'll be at the airport with you and we can make sure it's very pleasant for you."
I have no idea what this means, does it mean that they have a special area where all the friskers are topless showgirls, "We have nothing to hide, do you?" I have no idea. She pushes me for the next time I'm flying. I tell her I'm flying to Chicago around 2 on Sunday, if she wants to get that security guy there to sneer at me. She says, she'll be there, and it'll be very easy for me. I have no idea what this means...
Friday, January 3, 2003
Virtual Management Consulting
We'll see more consultancies focused on virtual organization and collaborative computing over the next year, as the growing number of free agents combines with easier, more affordable technology. Recent discussions with several fellow free agents have underscored the difficulty of manning the ship alone. Some few, rare individuals are equipped -- mentally and emotionally -- to go it alone for extended periods. Most of us need some supporting and complementary partners.The first round of weblog conferences will spur some of this. It will be interesting to see how 2003 shapes up.
Virtuelle Projekte.. Take a look at vrtprj: virtual project, a consulting practice for management and technology of virtual organizations. Needed now more than ever. In English, in German, their weblog, Groove spaces. They help with the use of many tools. I suspect this is a growing specialty. Cool that they are starting in Germany, where the need to work across national and cultural boundaries will create new methods and challenge the existing tools. [a klog apart]
From Germany, With Love
Blog-Novelist Gets Contract
Yet another alternative path to getting published, the blog-novel, pays off for a sci-fi writer. The writer, John Scalzi, is a professional writer, but primarily in non-fiction. Still this is one of the first cases of a blog-based effort being picked up by a major house.Over at American Invisible, Inc. Hugh Madison is pushing along with his own blog-based novellas featuring a range of 1950s and 60s comic book-style detectives. Check it out for a sense of how weblog-based serialization works.
Blog-novel to become paper-novel. Patrick Nielsen Hayden -- blogger, senior editor for Tor Books -- announces on his blog this morning that,
...I really did make a publication offer, on behalf of Tor Books, to a writer named John Scalzi for a science fiction novel he had serialized on his web journal. And he very graciously accepted.[Boing Boing Blog]
Self-publishing as Minor Leagues
Once the domain of pathetic wannabes, self-publishing is growing as a viable path to publishing success. My former employer iUniverse recently signed a deal with Kensington to act as a "farm club" for writing talent in the categories Kensington serves.But self-publishing is not for the feint, as this article points out. It's hard work, and it's not just about the writing. Writers -- now like everyone else who wants to succeed -- have to be capable business and sales people, and have the fortitude to keep pushing in the face of adversity.
Self-promoting self-published teen author gets half-mil deal. A 19-year-old author of a self-published epic fantasy novel has successfully promoted his book into a worldwide publishing deal reportedly worth $500k.
This young author became one of the latest graduates of the difficult world of self-publishing to climb into the major publisher big leagues. World rights to Paolini's "Eragon" and its two unwritten sequels were sold recently to the youth division of one of the country's most prestigious houses, Alfred A. Knopf, in a deal reportedly worth more than $500,000...The young author, who recently turned 19, has now learned far more than just to sound like a big-time author. He has learned about the draining grind of book promotion, with more than 70 appearances around the country during 2002, from elementary schools to bookstores. And he has also learned the power of persistence, to keep slogging away through good times and bad.
(Thanks, Vera!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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