company:simon

Visual C++ Updates with Marian Luparu, Simon Brand, Tara Raj and Bob Brown
▻http://cppcast.libsyn.com/visual-c-updates-with-marian-luparu-simon-brand-tara-raj-and-bob-bro

Rob talks to several members of the Visual C++ team about both Visual Studio Code and the upcoming Visual Studio 2019 release and more. Marian Luparu is the Lead Program Manager of the C++ team responsible for the C++ experience in Visual Studio, VS Code as well as Vcpkg. Simon Brand is Microsoft’s C++ Developer Advocate. Their background is in compilers and debuggers for embedded accelerators, but they’re also interested in generic library design, metaprogramming, functional-style C++, undefined behaviour, and making our communities more welcoming and inclusive. Tara Raj is the Program Manager for the C++ experience in Visual Studio Code and Vcpkg. She is interested in developer tools and Linux. Bob Brown is the engineering manager for C++ experiences in Visual Studio and Visual (...)

▻http://traffic.libsyn.com/cppcast/cppcast-191.mp3?dest-id=282890

Opinion | Must Writers Be Moral ? Their Contracts May Require It - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/opinion/sunday/metoo-new-yorker-conde-nast.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/01/06/opinion/sunday/06Shulevitz/06Shulevitz-facebookJumbo.jpg

One answer is the increasingly widespread “morality clause.” Over the past few years, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have added such clauses to their standard book contracts. I’ve heard that Hachette Book Group is debating putting one in its trade book contracts, though the publisher wouldn’t confirm it. These clauses release a company from the obligation to publish a book if, in the words of Penguin Random House, “past or future conduct of the author inconsistent with the author’s reputation at the time this agreement is executed comes to light and results in sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work.”

That’s reasonable, I guess. Penguin, to its credit, doesn’t ask authors to return their advances. But other publishers do, and some are even more hard-nosed.

This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.

Agents hate morality clauses because terms like “public condemnation” are vague and open to abuse, especially if a publisher is looking for an excuse to back out of its contractual obligations. When I asked writers about morality clauses, on the other hand, most of them had no idea what I was talking about. You’d be surprised at how many don’t read the small print.

Morality clauses may be relatively new to mainstream publishing, but they have a long history. The entertainment industry started drafting them in 1921, when the silent-movie star Fatty Arbuckle, who had just signed a then-astonishing $1 million contract with Paramount Pictures, was accused of the rape and manslaughter of a girl at a party. Mr. Arbuckle was acquitted after two mistrials, but by then the public had soured on him, and the studios wanted out.

Today the clauses are widespread in sports, television and advertising. Religious publishers have used them for at least 15 years, which seems fair enough. You can’t condemn a Christian publisher that cancels publication of a book called “The Ridiculously Good Marriage” after the author is accused of having sexually assaulted an underage girl when he was a youth pastor. (He apologized for a “sexual incident.”) Children’s publishers have been including the clauses for a decade or more, and they, too, have a case. It would be challenging to sell a children’s book written by a pedophile.

The problem with letting publishers back out of contracts with noncelebrity, nonreligious, non-children’s book authors on the grounds of immorality is that immorality is a slippery concept. Publishers have little incentive to clarify what they mean by it, and the public is fickle in what it takes umbrage at.

In 1947, the concern was Communism, and morality clauses gave studios a way to blacklist the Hollywood 10, a group of directors and screenwriters who denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee as illegitimate and refused to say whether they’d ever been Communists. All 10 went to jail, and all but one, who decided to cooperate with the committee, became unemployable until the 1960s, though some continued to write under pseudonyms.

Tous les arguments ne sont pas convaincants, mais la question soulevée est intéressante.

#Censure #Moralité #Contrat_édition

The Mall of Shame
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-mall-of-shame-5c9de67df34?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*kdrtmOq1_hTlaD-oczxRrg.jpeg

The Mall at Rockingham Park in Salem, NH is home to a million square feet of #retail and contains 144 stores, restaurants, and kiosks. It’s by no means the nicest mall in the country, but as recently as 2015, it was the top-grossing property by square foot in the Simon Properties Group portfolio thanks to its role as a sales tax sanctuary on the border with Massachusetts. Middle-class staples like Williams & Sonoma, Coach, Lush, and an Apple store (along with the obligatory food court Sbarro) help account for $1.8B in annual sales.But there’s an odd trend at work in this otherwise healthy-seeming cathedral of capitalism. Exquisitely fabricated sales fixtures are being replaced by slat board walls. Store logos that were once agonized over by creatives at Landor and Pentagram are being (...)

#entrepreneurship #startup #venture-capital #business

The New American Songbook: The oldies of the future.
▻https://slate.com/culture/2018/10/the-new-american-songbook-the-oldies-of-the-future.html

Oct 18, 2018 - Here are the hits of the past 25 years that we’ll be listening to for the next 100.

What makes a song last? The history of popular music tells us that many masterpieces of songcraft—and even the most world-conquering smashes—are quickly forgotten.

Meanwhile, many earworms burrow deep into the collective consciousness, where they take root, whether we like it or not.

Which of today’s hits will be tomorrow’s classics?

Who could have predicted that “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—which was, upon its release in 1981, a commercial disappointment from a critically derided band—would become the 20th century’s best-selling digital download?* Or that it would be a “novelty” dance single, of all song varieties, that would become Billboard’s pick for the greatest single of all time?

Separating the most durable tunes from the millions of other would-be classics is no easy task. So we asked critics, musicians, and industry professionals to predict which tracks from the past 25 years we’ll still be dancing and singing along to for the next 100 years. Some of these songs our children will belt in sports arenas. Others our grandchildren will dance to at their weddings.

The New American Songbook is emphatically not a list of the best songs of the past quarter-century, although many of these tracks would make that list, too. As predicted by our panel, tomorrow’s oldies, like tomorrow’s America, will be a lot less male-dominated, and a lot more diverse. Less than a third of the songs on our list are fronted by white men, and no artists are featured more frequently than pop music’s first couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Classic rock will soon be rivaled by classic rap, and the Cole Porter of the next American songbook may be Max Martin.

Below, find the Top 30 songs, in order, all of which were nominated by at least two of our panelists. You can also read the individual ballots of everyone from Chuck Klosterman to NPR’s Ann Powers to Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood. Which of today’s hits will endure as tomorrow’s golden oldies? Here’s our best guess.

30. Idina Menzel – “Let It Go”

Producers: Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Robert Lopez
Songwriters: Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Robert Lopez
Year: 2013

29. Liz Phair – “Fuck and Run”

Producers: Liz Phair, Brad Wood
Songwriter: Liz Phair
Year: 1993

28. Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers – “Get Lucky”

Producers: Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo
Songwriters: Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Nile Rodgers, Pharrell Williams
Year: 2013

27. Alanis Morissette – “You Oughta Know”

Producer: Glen Ballard
Songwriters: Alanis Morissette, Glen Ballard
Year: 1995

26. Old Crow Medicine Show – “Wagon Wheel”

Producer: David Rawlings
Songwriters: Bob Dylan, Ketch Secor
Year: 2004

25. Destiny’s Child – “Say My Name”

Producer: Darkchild
Songwriters: LaShawn Daniels, Rodney Jerkins, Fred Jerkins III, Beyoncé, LeToya Luckett, LaTavia Roberson, Kelly Rowland
Year: 1999

24. Israel Kamakawiwoʻole – “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World”

Producers: Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, Jon de Mello
Songwriters: Edgar Yipsel Harburg, Bob Thiele, George David Weiss
Year: 1993

23. Beyoncé ft. Jay-Z – “Crazy in Love”

Producers: Rich Harrison, Beyoncé
Songwriters: Beyoncé, Rich Harrison, Eugene Record, Shawn Carter
Year: 2003

22. Nine Inch Nails – “Hurt”

Producer: Trent Reznor
Songwriter: Trent Reznor
Year: 1994

Producers: Dr. Dre, Mike Elizondo
Songwriters: Curtis Jackson, Andre Young, Mike Elizondo
Year: 2003

20. Adele – “Rolling in the Deep”

Producer: Paul Epworth
Songwriters: Adele Adkins, Paul Epworth
Year: 2010

19. Oasis – “Wonderwall”

Producers: Owen Morris, Noel Gallagher
Songwriter: Noel Gallagher
Year: 1995

18. Backstreet Boys – “I Want It That Way”

Producers: Kristian Lundin, Max Martin
Songwriters: Andreas Carlsson, Max Martin
Year: 1999

17. Rihanna ft. Calvin Harris – “We Found Love”

Producer: Calvin Harris
Songwriter: Calvin Harris
Year: 2011

16. The Killers – “Mr. Brightside”

Producer: The Killers
Songwriters: Brandon Flowers, Dave Keuning, Mark Stoermer, Ronnie Vannucci Jr.
Year: 2003

15. Céline Dion – “My Heart Will Go On”

Producers: Walter Afanasieff, James Horner, Simon Franglen
Songwriters: Will Jennings, James Horner
Year: 1997

14. Santana ft. Rob Thomas – “Smooth”

Producer: Matt Serletic
Songwriters: Itaal Shur, Rob Thomas
Year: 1999

13. Lauryn Hill – “Doo Wop (That Thing)”

Producer: Lauryn Hill
Songwriter: Lauryn Hill
Year: 1998

12. Drake – “Hotline Bling”

Producer: Nineteen85
Songwriters: Aubrey Graham, Paul Jefferies, Timmy Thomas
Year: 2015

11. Eminem – “Lose Yourself”

Producers: Eminem, Jeff Bass, Luis Resto
Songwriter: Marshall Mathers
Year: 2002

10. Carly Rae Jepsen – “Call Me Maybe”

Producer: Josh Ramsay
Songwriters: Carly Rae Jepsen, Josh Ramsay, Tavish Crowe
Year: 2012

9. TLC – “Waterfalls”

Producer: Organized Noize
Songwriters: Marqueze Etheridge, Lisa Lopes, Organized Noize
Year: 1994

8. The White Stripes – “Seven Nation Army”

Producer: Jack White
Songwriter: Jack White
Year: 2003

7. Mariah Carey – “All I Want for Christmas Is You”

Producers: Mariah Carey, Walter Afanasieff
Songwriters: Mariah Carey, Walter Afanasieff
Year: 1994

6. Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars – “Uptown Funk”

Producers: Mark Ronson, Jeff Bhasker, Bruno Mars
Songwriters: Jeff Bhasker, Philip Lawrence, Peter Hernandez, Mark Ronson, Nicholas Williams, Devon Gallaspy, Lonnie Simmons, Charles Wilson, Ronnie Wilson, Robert Wilson, Rudolph Taylor
Year: 2014

5. The Notorious B.I.G. – “Juicy”

Producers: Poke of Trackmasters, Pete Rock
Songwriters: Christopher Wallace, Hunter McIntosh, Sean Combs, Pete Rock, Jean-Claude Olivier, Samuel Barnes
Year: 1994

4. Kelly Clarkson – “Since U Been Gone”

Producers: Max Martin, Dr. Luke
Songwriters: Max Martin, Lukasz Gottwald
Year: 2004

3. Beyoncé – “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”

Producers: Christopher Stewart, Terius Nash, Beyoncé
Songwriters: Christopher Stewart, Terius Nash, Thaddis Harrell, Beyoncé
Year: 2008

2. Jay-Z ft. Alicia Keys – “Empire State of Mind”

Producer: Al Shux
Songwriters: Angela Hunte, Alicia Keys, Alexander Shuckburgh, Bert Keyes, Janet Sewell-Ulepic, Shawn Carter, Sylvia Robinson
Year: 2009

1. Outkast – “Hey Ya”

Producer: André 3000
Songwriter: André 3000
Year: 2003

This future standard has the “best hook in history,” writes Powers. And it’s perhaps the strongest testament to Outkast’s world-conquering, genre-bending hit that you can’t help but mentally scroll through this perennial list-topper’s many catchy bits and respond, “Wait—which one?” Of course there’s the titular chorus, at once triumphant and melancholy. (While some panelists referred to it as “an expression of pure pop joy,” the lyrics find the singer worrying that all love is transient.) But there are also the hand claps putting three exclamation points on each couplet, the call-and-response section that lets the audience deliver the cooler-than-cool punchline, the “shake it like a Polaroid picture” bridge that people will be singing long after they’ve forgotten the purpose of shaking Polaroids, even the repetition of 14 straight “all rights” that embodies this song’s perfect combination of pop universality and André 3000 weirdness. (See also the time signature, which is either a standard 4/4 or a downright bizarre 11/4, depending on whom you ask.)

And these hooks have already sunk themselves into subsequent generations. As Kois writes, “The first time I played this song for my kids it was as if they’d already heard it 1,000 times.” If what they say is “Nothing is forever,” “Hey Ya” might be the exception.

#musique

Cheap Words | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59094dea1c7a8e33fb3899bb/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/140217_r24640.jpg

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business.

Recently, Amazon even started creating its own “content”—publishing books. The results have been decidedly mixed. A monopoly is dangerous because it concentrates so much economic power, but in the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history. Even in the iPhone age, books remain central to American intellectual life, and perhaps to democracy. And so the big question is not just whether Amazon is bad for the book industry; it’s whether Amazon is bad for books.

According to Marcus, Amazon executives considered publishing people “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and warehouses full of crap.” Publishers kept no data on customers, making their bets on books a matter of instinct rather than metrics. They were full of inefficiences, starting with overpriced Manhattan offices. There was “a general feeling that the New York publishing business was just this cloistered, Gilded Age antique just barely getting by in a sort of Colonial Williamsburg of commerce, but when Amazon waded into this they would show publishing how it was done.”

During the 1999 holiday season, Amazon tried publishing books, leasing the rights to a defunct imprint called Weathervane and putting out a few titles. “These were not incipient best-sellers,” Marcus writes. “They were creatures from the black lagoon of the remainder table”—Christmas recipes and the like, selected with no apparent thought. Employees with publishing experience, like Fried, were not consulted. Weathervane fell into an oblivion so complete that there’s no trace of it on the Internet. (Representatives at the company today claim never to have heard of it.) Nobody at Amazon seemed to absorb any lessons from the failure. A decade later, the company would try again.

Around this time, a group called the “personalization team,” or P13N, started to replace editorial suggestions for readers with algorithms that used customers’ history to make recommendations for future purchases. At Amazon, “personalization” meant data analytics and statistical probability. Author interviews became less frequent, and in-house essays were subsumed by customer reviews, which cost the company nothing. Tim Appelo, the entertainment editor at the time, said, “You could be the Platonic ideal of the reviewer, and you would not beat even those rather crude early algorithms.” Amazon’s departments competed with one another almost as fiercely as they did with other companies. According to Brad Stone, a trash-talking sign was hung on a wall in the P13N office: “people forget that john henry died in the end.” Machines defeated human beings.

In December, 1999, at the height of the dot-com mania, Time named Bezos its Person of the Year. “Amazon isn’t about technology or even commerce,” the breathless cover article announced. “Amazon is, like every other site on the Web, a content play.” Yet this was the moment, Marcus said, when “content” people were “on the way out.” Although the writers and the editors made the site more interesting, and easier to navigate, they didn’t bring more customers.

The fact that Amazon once devoted significant space on its site to editorial judgments—to thinking and writing—would be an obscure footnote if not for certain turns in the company’s more recent history. According to one insider, around 2008—when the company was selling far more than books, and was making twenty billion dollars a year in revenue, more than the combined sales of all other American bookstores—Amazon began thinking of content as central to its business. Authors started to be considered among the company’s most important customers. By then, Amazon had lost much of the market in selling music and videos to Apple and Netflix, and its relations with publishers were deteriorating. These difficulties offended Bezos’s ideal of “seamless” commerce. “The company despises friction in the marketplace,” the Amazon insider said. “It’s easier for us to sell books and make books happen if we do it our way and not deal with others. It’s a tech-industry thing: ‘We think we can do it better.’ ” If you could control the content, you controlled everything.

Many publishers had come to regard Amazon as a heavy in khakis and oxford shirts. In its drive for profitability, Amazon did not raise retail prices; it simply squeezed its suppliers harder, much as Walmart had done with manufacturers. Amazon demanded ever-larger co-op fees and better shipping terms; publishers knew that they would stop being favored by the site’s recommendation algorithms if they didn’t comply. Eventually, they all did. (Few customers realize that the results generated by Amazon’s search engine are partly determined by promotional fees.)

In late 2007, at a press conference in New York, Bezos unveiled the Kindle, a simple, lightweight device that—in a crucial improvement over previous e-readers—could store as many as two hundred books, downloaded from Amazon’s 3G network. Bezos announced that the price of best-sellers and new titles would be nine-ninety-nine, regardless of length or quality—a figure that Bezos, inspired by Apple’s sale of songs on iTunes for ninety-nine cents, basically pulled out of thin air. Amazon had carefully concealed the number from publishers. “We didn’t want to let that cat out of the bag,” Steele said.

The price was below wholesale in some cases, and so low that it represented a serious threat to the market in twenty-six-dollar hardcovers. Bookstores that depended on hardcover sales—from Barnes & Noble and Borders (which liquidated its business in 2011) to Rainy Day Books in Kansas City—glimpsed their possible doom. If reading went entirely digital, what purpose would they serve? The next year, 2008, which brought the financial crisis, was disastrous for bookstores and publishers alike, with widespread layoffs.

By 2010, Amazon controlled ninety per cent of the market in digital books—a dominance that almost no company, in any industry, could claim. Its prohibitively low prices warded off competition.

Publishers looked around for a competitor to Amazon, and they found one in Apple, which was getting ready to introduce the iPad, and the iBooks Store. Apple wanted a deal with each of the Big Six houses (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster) that would allow the publishers to set the retail price of titles on iBooks, with Apple taking a thirty-per-cent commission on each sale. This was known as the “agency model,” and, in some ways, it offered the publishers a worse deal than selling wholesale to Amazon. But it gave publishers control over pricing and a way to challenge Amazon’s grip on the market. Apple’s terms included the provision that it could match the price of any rival, which induced the publishers to impose the agency model on all digital retailers, including Amazon.

Five of the Big Six went along with Apple. (Random House was the holdout.) Most of the executives let Amazon know of the change by phone or e-mail, but John Sargent flew out to Seattle to meet with four Amazon executives, including Russ Grandinetti, the vice-president of Kindle content. In an e-mail to a friend, Sargent wrote, “Am on my way out to Seattle to get my ass kicked by Amazon.”

Sargent’s gesture didn’t seem to matter much to the Amazon executives, who were used to imposing their own terms. Seated at a table in a small conference room, Sargent said that Macmillan wanted to switch to the agency model for e-books, and that if Amazon refused Macmillan would withhold digital editions until seven months after print publication. The discussion was angry and brief. After twenty minutes, Grandinetti escorted Sargent out of the building. The next day, Amazon removed the buy buttons from Macmillan’s print and digital titles on its site, only to restore them a week later, under heavy criticism. Amazon unwillingly accepted the agency model, and within a couple of months e-books were selling for as much as fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents.

Amazon filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. In April, 2012, the Justice Department sued Apple and the five publishers for conspiring to raise prices and restrain competition. Eventually, all the publishers settled with the government. (Macmillan was the last, after Sargent learned that potential damages could far exceed the equity value of the company.) Macmillan was obliged to pay twenty million dollars, and Penguin seventy-five million—enormous sums in a business that has always struggled to maintain respectable profit margins.

Apple fought the charges, and the case went to trial last June. Grandinetti, Sargent, and others testified in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. As proof of collusion, the government presented evidence of e-mails, phone calls, and dinners among the Big Six publishers during their negotiations with Apple. Sargent and other executives acknowledged that they wanted higher prices for e-books, but they argued that the evidence showed them only to be competitors in an incestuous business, not conspirators. On July 10th, Judge Denise Cote ruled in the government’s favor.

Apple, facing up to eight hundred and forty million dollars in damages, has appealed. As Apple and the publishers see it, the ruling ignored the context of the case: when the key events occurred, Amazon effectively had a monopoly in digital books and was selling them so cheaply that it resembled predatory pricing—a barrier to entry for potential competitors. Since then, Amazon’s share of the e-book market has dropped, levelling off at about sixty-five per cent, with the rest going largely to Apple and to Barnes & Noble, which sells the Nook e-reader. In other words, before the feds stepped in, the agency model introduced competition to the market. But the court’s decision reflected a trend in legal thinking among liberals and conservatives alike, going back to the seventies, that looks at antitrust cases from the perspective of consumers, not producers: what matters is lowering prices, even if that goal comes at the expense of competition.

With Amazon’s patented 1-Click shopping, which already knows your address and credit-card information, there’s just you and the buy button; transactions are as quick and thoughtless as scratching an itch. “It’s sort of a masturbatory culture,” the marketing executive said. If you pay seventy-nine dollars annually to become an Amazon Prime member, a box with the Amazon smile appears at your door two days after you click, with free shipping. Amazon’s next frontier is same-day delivery: first in certain American cities, then throughout the U.S., then the world. In December, the company patented “anticipatory shipping,” which will use your shopping data to put items that you don’t yet know you want to buy, but will soon enough, on a truck or in a warehouse near you.

Amazon employs or subcontracts tens of thousands of warehouse workers, with seasonal variation, often building its fulfillment centers in areas with high unemployment and low wages. Accounts from inside the centers describe the work of picking, boxing, and shipping books and dog food and beard trimmers as a high-tech version of the dehumanized factory floor satirized in Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” Pickers holding computerized handsets are perpetually timed and measured as they fast-walk up to eleven miles per shift around a million-square-foot warehouse, expected to collect orders in as little as thirty-three seconds. After watching footage taken by an undercover BBC reporter, a stress expert said, “The evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.” The company says that its warehouse jobs are “similar to jobs in many other industries.”

When I spoke with Grandinetti, he expressed sympathy for publishers faced with upheaval. “The move to people reading digitally and buying books digitally is the single biggest change that any of us in the book business will experience in our time,” he said. “Because the change is particularly big in size, and because we happen to be a leader in making it, a lot of that fear gets projected onto us.” Bezos also argues that Amazon’s role is simply to usher in inevitable change. After giving “60 Minutes” a first glimpse of Amazon drone delivery, Bezos told Charlie Rose, “Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.”

In Grandinetti’s view, the Kindle “has helped the book business make a more orderly transition to a mixed print and digital world than perhaps any other medium.” Compared with people who work in music, movies, and newspapers, he said, authors are well positioned to thrive. The old print world of scarcity—with a limited number of publishers and editors selecting which manuscripts to publish, and a limited number of bookstores selecting which titles to carry—is yielding to a world of digital abundance. Grandinetti told me that, in these new circumstances, a publisher’s job “is to build a megaphone.”

After the Kindle came out, the company established Amazon Publishing, which is now a profitable empire of digital works: in addition to Kindle Singles, it has mystery, thriller, romance, and Christian lines; it publishes translations and reprints; it has a self-service fan-fiction platform; and it offers an extremely popular self-publishing platform. Authors become Amazon partners, earning up to seventy per cent in royalties, as opposed to the fifteen per cent that authors typically make on hardcovers. Bezos touts the biggest successes, such as Theresa Ragan, whose self-published thrillers and romances have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But one survey found that half of all self-published authors make less than five hundred dollars a year.

Every year, Fine distributes grants of twenty-five thousand dollars, on average, to dozens of hard-up literary organizations. Beneficiaries include the pen American Center, the Loft Literary Center, in Minneapolis, and the magazine Poets & Writers. “For Amazon, it’s the cost of doing business, like criminal penalties for banks,” the arts manager said, suggesting that the money keeps potential critics quiet. Like liberal Democrats taking Wall Street campaign contributions, the nonprofits don’t advertise the grants. When the Best Translated Book Award received money from Amazon, Dennis Johnson, of Melville House, which had received the prize that year, announced that his firm would no longer compete for it. “Every translator in America wrote me saying I was a son of a bitch,” Johnson said. A few nonprofit heads privately told him, “I wanted to speak out, but I might have taken four thousand dollars from them, too.” A year later, at the Associated Writing Programs conference, Fine shook Johnson’s hand, saying, “I just wanted to thank you—that was the best publicity we could have had.” (Fine denies this.)

By producing its own original work, Amazon can sell more devices and sign up more Prime members—a major source of revenue. While the company was building the Kindle, it started a digital store for streaming music and videos, and, around the same time it launched Amazon Publishing, it created Amazon Studios.

The division pursued an unusual way of producing television series, using its strength in data collection. Amazon invited writers to submit scripts on its Web site—“an open platform for content creators,” as Bill Carr, the vice-president for digital music and video, put it. Five thousand scripts poured in, and Amazon chose to develop fourteen into pilots. Last spring, Amazon put the pilots on its site, where customers could review them and answer a detailed questionnaire. (“Please rate the following aspects of this show: The humor, the characters . . . ”) More than a million customers watched. Engineers also developed software, called Amazon Storyteller, which scriptwriters can use to create a “storyboard animatic”—a cartoon rendition of a script’s plot—allowing pilots to be visualized without the expense of filming. The difficulty, according to Carr, is to “get the right feedback and the right data, and, of the many, many data points that I can collect from customers, which ones can tell you, ‘This is the one’?”

Bezos applying his “take no prisoners” pragmatism to the Post: “There are conflicts of interest with Amazon’s many contracts with the government, and he’s got so many policy issues going, like sales tax.” One ex-employee who worked closely with Bezos warned, “At Amazon, drawing a distinction between content people and business people is a foreign concept.”

Perhaps buying the Post was meant to be a good civic deed. Bezos has a family foundation, but he has hardly involved himself in philanthropy. In 2010, Charlie Rose asked him what he thought of Bill Gates’s challenge to other billionaires to give away most of their wealth. Bezos didn’t answer. Instead, he launched into a monologue on the virtue of markets in solving social problems, and somehow ended up touting the Kindle.

Bezos bought a newspaper for much the same reason that he has invested money in a project for commercial space travel: the intellectual challenge. With the Post, the challenge is to turn around a money-losing enterprise in a damaged industry, and perhaps to show a way for newspapers to thrive again.

Lately, digital titles have levelled off at about thirty per cent of book sales. Whatever the temporary fluctuations in publishers’ profits, the long-term outlook is discouraging. This is partly because Americans don’t read as many books as they used to—they are too busy doing other things with their devices—but also because of the relentless downward pressure on prices that Amazon enforces. The digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while readers are being conditioned to think that books are worth as little as a sandwich. “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value,” Johnson said. “It’s a widget.”

There are two ways to think about this. Amazon believes that its approach encourages ever more people to tell their stories to ever more people, and turns writers into entrepreneurs; the price per unit might be cheap, but the higher number of units sold, and the accompanying royalties, will make authors wealthier. Jane Friedman, of Open Road, is unfazed by the prospect that Amazon might destroy the old model of publishing. “They are practicing the American Dream—competition is good!” she told me. Publishers, meanwhile, “have been banks for authors. Advances have been very high.” In Friedman’s view, selling digital books at low prices will democratize reading: “What do you want as an author—to sell books to as few people as possible for as much as possible, or for as little as possible to as many readers as possible?”

The answer seems self-evident, but there is a more skeptical view. Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter.

#Amazon

CppCast Episode 161: Expectations and Exceptions with Simon Brand
▻http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2

Episode 161 of CppCast the only podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. In this episode Rob and Jason are joined by Simon Brand to discuss his upcoming CppCon talks covering exceptions, value wrappers, debuggers and more.

CppCast Episode 161: Expectations and Exceptions with Simon Brand by Rob Irving and Jason Turner

About the interviewee:

Simon is a GPGPU toolchain developer at Codeplay Software in Edinburgh. He turns into a metaprogramming fiend every full moon, when he can be found bringing compilers to their knees with template errors and debating undefined behaviour on the C++ Slack channel. He co-organises the Edinburgh C++ user group and contributes to various programming standards bodies. Outside of programming, he enjoys experimental films, homebrewing, (...)

#News,Video&_On-Demand,

Expectations and Exceptions with Simon Brand
▻http://cppcast.libsyn.com/expectations-and-exceptions-with-simon-brand

Rob and Jason are joined by Simon Brand to discuss his upcoming CppCon talks covering exceptions, value wrappers, debuggers and more. Simon is a GPGPU toolchain developer at Codeplay Software in Edinburgh. He turns into a metaprogramming fiend every full moon, when he can be found bringing compilers to their knees with template errors and debating undefined behaviour on the C++ Slack channel. He co-organises the Edinburgh C++ user group and contributes to various programming standards bodies. Outside of programming, he enjoys experimental films, homebrewing, and board games. News The value of undefined behavior Qt Creator 4.7 released Coroutines and Qt Simon Brand @TartanLlama Simon Brand’s GitHub Links CppCon 2018: How to Write Well-Behaved Value Wrappers CppCon 2018: How (...)

▻http://traffic.libsyn.com/cppcast/cppcast-161.mp3?dest-id=282890

GRENZEN / Europa

▻http://www.en-bloc.de/de/grenzen-europa

Un beau travail sur les frontières de l’artiste berlinoise Simona Koch
▻https://vimeo.com/145134769

Im Zentrum der künstlerischen Arbeit von Simona Koch stehen das Lebendige und seine Zusammenhänge, Entwicklungsprozesse und Strukturen. In Zeichnungen, Fotografien, Installationen und Animationsfilmen reflektiert sie ihre Recherchen zu den grundlegenden wissenschaftlichen und philosophischen Fragestellungen des Lebens. Vom kleinsten Organismus bis zum Menschen untersucht sie Auswirkungen und Wechselwirkungen, Entwicklungen und Spuren, die durch Lebewesen verursacht werden.

The lie of the land: when map makers get it wrong – in pictures | Books | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2016/nov/16/the-lie-of-the-land-when-map-makers-get-it-wrong-edward-brooke-hitching

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5c2433a7f32e9a9cc68a9d2d0c9dcdf17332e373/0_0_3543_2829/master/3543.jpg?w=720&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=3eaddfab8c6353a819d76f2096b581be

The history of cartography is littered with mistakes, myths and mendacity. From the magnetic mountain at the north pole to Australia’s inland sea, Edward Brooke-Hitching charts five centuries of misrepresentative maps

#cartographie #manipulation #cartographie_ancienne

Analyser les comportements des lecteurs grâce aux livres numériques
▻https://www.actualitte.com/article/lecture-numerique/analyser-les-comportements-des-lecteurs-grace-aux-livres-numeriques/83678

https://www.actualitte.com/images/facebook/jellybooks-595b20ae1d34d.png

Jellybooks, petite entreprise fondée en 2012 dans le but d’aider le lecteur à découvrir de nouveaux livres par un service adapté. Elle a annoncé dans un communiqué qu’elle changeait la nature de son activité principale pour se concentrer sur son autre service : Readers Analytics. Ce dernier analyse les habitudes de lecture pour en informer les éditeurs.

Ces données sont ensuite fournies aux maisons d’édition partenaires de l’entreprise. Pratique pour jauger ce qui marche vraiment et ce qui n’attire pas, surtout avant le lancement de nouvelles publications...

Nombre de pages lues, chapitre passé, temps nécessaire pour lire le bouquin, influence de la couverture sur les choix de lecture... Rien n’échappe à Jellybooks et son Readers Analytics, qui rencontre un grand succès auprès des éditeurs anglophones : Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Cambridge University Press ou encore MIT Press passent régulièrement commande auprès de ce service, lui assurant une certaine prospérité à l’avenir.

#édition #traçage #données_personnelles #marketing

Pour sauver la #forêt boréale, Greenpeace réclame le soutien d’éditeurs
▻https://www.actualitte.com/article/monde-edition/pour-sauver-la-foret-boreale-greenpeace-reclame-le-soutien-d-editeurs/82754
/images/facebook/2928931741-2505398e54-b-591b066155c4c.jpg

Mais le sel du rapport « Couper le droit de parole » n’est pas là : Greenpeace est en effet allée chercher qui étaient les clients de Produits Forestiers Résolu, et le donne en mille : on y trouve nombre d’éditeurs, dont Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster et Hachette. Or, remarque l’ONG, « [l]e paradoxe tient dans le fait que ces éditeurs appuient ainsi une entreprise qui menace activement le droit à la liberté d’expression qui sert de fondement à leur propre existence et qui est essentiel à nous tous ».

#industrie_papetière #déforestation

“Muslim Girl” Author Explains How Millennials Are Shaking The Country Up—In a Good Way | Bitch Media
▻https://bitchmedia.org/article/woke-generation/muslim-girl-book-author-explains-how-millennials-are-shaking-country-goo

https://bitchmedia.org/sites/default/files/muslimgirl.jpg

I felt lost growing up. That’s an experience that’s really understated, because it’s hard to identify, but that absence of having figures who look like you, who you’re able to identify [with] in pop culture—I think it really does something to you when you’re missing from that picture. I recently did an interview with Zareen Jaffery, who’s an editor at Simon & Schuster. She’s the editor of this new imprint they have called Salaam Reads, which is for books with Muslim characters as their central theme. She said that one of the ways you rob people of their humanity and make them feel like they’re monsters is by not allowing them a reflection of themselves. I think that really speaks to the experience of Muslim kids, especially after 9/11 happened. Not only did we [not] have much representation, but the representation that we did have was entirely negative and antagonistic. I think that has a tremendous impact on how we view ourselves in relation to our society as we grow up.

(Encore une fois, reconnaissance éternelle pour Bitch Media, @aude_v )

#islam #islamophobie #racisme #USA

Clintons earned $10.75 million in 2015, paid 34.2% federal tax rate - The Economic Times
▻http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/clintons-earned-10-75-million-in-2015-paid-34-2-federal-tax-rate/articleshow/53678883.cms

Hillary Clinton on Friday released her 2015 tax returns, which showed the Democratic presidential nominee and her husband had $10.75 million in income that year and paid an effective federal tax rate of 34.2 per cent.

In 2015, the Clintons made $1 million in charitable contributions, mostly to the Clinton Foundation; former President Bill Clinton brought in nearly $5.3 million in speaking fees; and the former secretary of state reported income of $3 million from publisher Simon & Schuster for her book on her tenure at the State Department.

Vale Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys)
By The Monthly (journal australien)
Monday, 11th August 2014

We were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Pierre Ryckmans.

Pierre Ryckmans, whose pen-name was Simon Leys, was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993.

His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, Quadrant and The Monthly, and his books include The Hall of Uselessness, The Death of Napoleon, Other People’s Thoughts and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper.

In 1996 he delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction.

He was a giant of Australian letters and will be greatly missed.

The Monthly is proud to have worked with him, and we offer our deepest condolences to his loved ones.

By Simon Leys:

THE SINS OF THE SON
Vladimir Nabokov’s ’The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments’

THE CAMBODIAN GENOCIDE
Francis Deron’s ’The Trial of the Khmer Rouge’

IN THE WAKE OF MAGELLAN
The Voyage of Globalisation’s Forefather

LIES THAT TELL THE TRUTH
The paradox of art and creative writing

MEMENTO MORI

TELL THEM I SAID SOMETHING

(Books by Simon Leys - Black Inc)
Comments

Dans les coulisses de « The Wire »
►http://www.slate.fr/story/80363/coulisses-the-wire

Comment Bunk, Kima, Freamon et McNulty relâchaient la pression hors tournage. Source : Slate

#Là-bas - chapitre 1
▻http://www.larevuedesressources.org/la-bas-chapitre-1,2246.html

À l’occasion de la rediffusion de l’adaptation radiophonique de #2008 du #Roman de #Joris-Karl_Huysmans, Là-bas, en trois épisodes du 21 au janvier au 4 février #2012, dans le cadre de l’émission Drôles de drames, sur #France_Culture, voici le lien là pour se procurer l’ebook du livre original téléchargeable en plusieurs formats, et ici le premier chapitre dans le corps de l’article, pour présenter l’ensemble. [ Mise à jour en 2013 ] L’émission radiophonique (réalisation de #Jean_Couturier d’après une (...) (...)

#Simon_Guibert #Satanisme #1891 #Radio
▻http://www.larevuedesressources.org/IMG/pdf/La_-bas.pdf

Publishers Tell of Disputes With Apple on E-Book Prices - NYTimes.com

▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/business/media/publishers-tell-of-disputes-with-apple-on-e-book-prices.html?nl=todaysheadl

In an e-mail to her boss, Leslie Moonves, Carolyn K. Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, dismissed an Apple executive as a “minion.”

David Shanks, the chief executive of Penguin Group USA, fought with Apple over the e-book pricing it initially proposed.

##édition #ebooks #édition-electronique