industryterm:e-books

  • We monitor and challenge internet censorship in China | GreatFire.org
    https://en.greatfire.org

    GreatFire Apps

    FreeBrowser
    https://freebrowser.org
    FreeBrowser is the only browser that allows Chinese internet users to directly access uncensored news. 40% of our users have never used a circumvention tool before.

    FreeBooks
    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.greatfire.freebook
    In an effort to crackdown on freedom of speech, the Chinese authorities have kidnapped and “disappeared” book publishers. FreeBooks fights back by making it easy for readers in China to get their hands on uncensored e-books and audio books, helping to inform and educate those who want to learn more.

    GreatFire Websites

    FreeBrowser StartPage
    http://startpage.freebrowser.org/zh
    We have directed Chinese internet users more than 13 million times to censored news stories about government corruption, politics, scandals and other “sensitive” information.

    FreeWeChat
    https://freewechat.com
    No other website restores and republishes censored information from WeChat, China’s ubiquitous and most popular application. Our dataset grows larger each and every day and provides a real-time and accurate litmus test of the information that the Chinese authorities find most threatening.

    FreeWeibo
    https://freeweibo.com
    We mimic the look and feel of the real Weibo website, but instead of presenting a “harmonized” version of the popular social media network, we restore and integrate censored and deleted posts (currently numbering more than 300,000), so that Chinese can access a real-time view of the real discussions that are taking place online in China.

    FreeBrowser.org
    https://freebrowser.org
    Promotes FreeBrowser.

    Circumvention Central
    https://cc.greatfire.org
    No other website tests the speed and stability of free and paid circumvention tools from China. We provide an unbiased, data-driven view of what is working and what is not so that Chinese can make informed decisions when choosing a circumvention tool.

    GreatFire Analyzer
    https://greatfire.org/analyzer
    No other website has accumulated as much data as we have around the blocking of websites and keywords. We make ourselves available to the media and have been quoted in thousands of news stories.

    GreatFire.org
    https://greatfire.org
    This website.

    GitHub Wiki
    https://github.com/greatfire/wiki
    Our GitHub wiki enables our users in China to download our apps directly without circumventing.

    applecensorship.com
    https://applecensorship.com

    About Us

    We are an anonymous organization based in China. We launched our first project in 2011 in an effort to help bring transparency to online censorship in China. Now we focus on helping Chinese to freely access information. Apart from being widely discussed in most major mass media, GreatFire has also been the subject of a number of academic papers from various research institutions. FreeWeibo.com won the 2013 Deutsche Welle “Best Of Online Activism” award in the “Best Innovation” category. In 2016, GreatFire won a Digital Activism fellowship from Index on Censorship.

    #Chine #censure #vie_privée #surveillance

  • 2019 Big Deals Survey Report- An Updated Mapping of Major Scholarly Publishing Contracts in Europe
    By Rita Morais, Lennart Stoy and Lidia Borrell-Damián
    https://eua.eu/resources/publications/829:2019-big-deals-survey-report.html

    Conducted in 2017-2018, the report gathers data from 31 consortia covering an unprecedented 167 contracts with five major publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and American Chemical Society. Readers will discover that *the total costs reported by the participating consortia exceed one billion euros for periodicals, databases, e-books and other resources – mainly to the benefit of large, commercial scholarly publishers*.

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

    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

  • #Books_with_an_Attitude @ FLAT
    http://constantvzw.org/site/Books-with-an-attitude-FLAT,3044.html

    At the FLAT Art Book Fair of Torino, Femke will present Books With an Attitude. Books deserve their hallmark “with an Attitude” when they are made with Free, Libre and Open Source Software and published under an open content license by Constant. This Brussels’ based association for art and media, collaborated with different designers to experiment the interrelation between tools, design and content. After almost ten years, the catalog now includes e-books, manuals, software-releases, (...)

    Books with an Attitude

  • South Korea to unveil monument for “#comfort_women” next Tues

    The South Korean government will hold a ceremony next Tuesday to unveil a monument for “comfort women” who were forced to work in Japanese wartime military brothels, the country’s gender equality minister said Wednesday.

    Gender Equality and Family Minister Chung Hyun Back also said at an event in Seoul that the government will open a research institute later this week tasked with collecting scattered data and materials about the women.

    The comfort women issue has been a source of diplomatic tension between South Korea and Japan, with Tokyo particularly sensitive to the erection of statues commemorating the women near Japanese diplomatic missions in South Korea.

    https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2018/08/72c08ae1c524-s-korea-to-unveil-monument-for-comfort-women-next-tu
    #monument #mémoire #femmes #prostitution #guerre #bordels #histoire #Corée_du_sud #Japon

  • The Union of Concerned Mad Scientists — Plots Against Russia
    http://plotsagainstrussia.org/eb7nyuedu/2016/7/6/the-union-of-concerned-mad-scientists

    Il est difficile de ne pas devenir fou ou pour le moins désorienté quand on se penche trop sur les projets anticommunistes et anti-russes. Leurs auteurs défendent avec obstination des thèses aberrantes comme si c’étaient des résultats de la recherche scientifique partagés par a totalité du monde éduqué et sérieux. C’est le destin du défecteur soviétique Gregory Klimov qui a publié ses livres sur internet et autorisé leur re-publication gratuite. Cet article nous informe sur quelques détails de sa vie.

    July 06, 2016

    Klimov’s vision of an anti-Russian conspiracy itself resembles the monstrous progeny of Cold War mad science that was such efficient fodder for the pop cultural mill throughout the world. Like Godzilla and the plethora of giant, radioactive vermin that attacked the major metropolitan centers of the United States and Japan on the movie screens of the 1950s, or the dangerous biological, nuclear, and psychotropic weapons let loose from ex-KGB laboratories in post-Soviet Russian thrillers, Klimov’s “Harvard Project” is a freakish offshoot of Cold War propaganda battles that has far exceeded the intentions (not to mention the life-spans) of the actual researchers who inspired it.

    FROM A VKONTAKTE GROUP FOR HARWARD PROJECT ENTHUSIASTS.

    According to his now defunct official website, (http://klimov.bravehost.com), which had previously been maintained by the “Gregory Klimov Online Fan Club Moscow,” Grigory Petrovich Klimov was born Igor Borisovich Kalmykov, not far from Rostov-on-Don in 1918. In 1945, he was employed as an engineer in Soviet-occupied Berlin, defecting to the Allies’ zone in 1947. From 1949-1950 he claims to have worked for the CIA on a secret plan to destroy the Soviet Union, codenamed the “Harvard Project,” which was followed by the “Cornell Project” for psychological warfare in 1958-1959. As his website puts it, his participation in the Harvard Project “affected his entire life and work,” but, “[s]ince psychological warfare was literally a war of psychos, Grigory Petrovich, being a normal person, could not continue to participate in a performance whose script was written by sick people.” 

    Instead, he produced a cycle of novels and essays that purport to expose the evil machinations of the "Harvard Project’"s masterminds: The Prince of This World (Князь мира сего, 1970), My Name is Legion (Имя мое—легион, 1975), The Protocols of the Soviet Elders (Протоколы советский мудрецов, 1981), and Red Kabbalah (Красная каббала, 1987). Initially distributed among Soviet émigrés, copies of these books made their way into the Soviet Union before perestroika, after which they were eventually reprinted by right-wing Russian publishing houses (particularly, but not exclusively, "Sovetskaia Kuban’" in Krasnodar). In interviews (Mogutin) and elsewhere on his site, Klimov claims that the total print run of all his books is “more than 1,100,000 copies,” an assertion that is impossible to verify. [1] Moreover, Klimov repeatedly declared his willingness to have his books printed by anyone anywhere, foregoing copyright and royalties, and has made his texts freely available on the Internet. [2] For Klimov, the most important thing was to get his message out; thus, in 1997, he not only granted an interview to gay journalist Yaroslav Mogutin for Mitin zhurnal, but even agreed to have the text of the interview reprinted on his website, despite Mogutin’s thinly-veiled contempt for his subject and his insistence on faithfully transcribing all of Klimov’s grammatical mistakes and misplaced accents (http://klimov.bravehost.com/html/interview2.html). [3] 

    Klimov’s depiction of the Harvard Project does have a basis in the culture of military/industrial think tanks funded by the US government in the 1950s, but from a vantage point that simultaneously distorts the results of this research while highlighting the improbable oddities that actually characterized US anti-communist psychological warfare. When discussing the Harvard Project, Klimov often invokes the name of Nathan Leitis, a University of Chicago graduate who joined the Rand Corporation in 1949 after working as an adviser to the US government during World War II. Leitis first made his mark at Rand with the 1951 publication of The Operational Code of the Politburo, which Ron Robin describes as “the most conspicuous attempt to fuse psychoculture and elite studies during the early Cold War years”. Leitis treated Communism as a “secular religion” (Leitis, The Operational Code xiv), and assumed that its leaders and adherents followed Marxist-Leninist Holy Writ without fail. His “operational code” (a quasi-semiotic elaboration of the rules and motivations that guided Bolshevik leaders) was a marvel of exegesis, teasing out decision-making patterns from numerous volumes of Communist theory and official pronouncements.

    Notes

    [1] My copy of the 1997 Sovetskaia Kuban’ edition of My Name is Legion is part of a “supplementary printing” of 1000 copies.

    [2] Klimov’s works could be found not only on his own site, but also on the largest Russian etext server, Maxim Moshkov’s library (www.lib.ru), as well as numerous sites offering e-books in formats more convenient for higher-end e-book reading software.

    [3] Mogutin himself has been identified with xenophobic Russian nationalism in his writings about Zhirinovsky and the war in Chechnya (Essig 143-146; Gessen, Dead Again 185-198), but even for him, Klimov’s theories were too extreme to be taken seriously.

    #anticommunisme #conspirationnisme #Russie #USA #guerre_froide

  • Canadian Libraries Band Together Over High e-Book Prices Good E-Reader News
    http://goodereader.com/blog/digital-library-news/canadian-libraries-band-together-over-high-e-book-prices

    Canadian Library organizations have banded together to launch a website that wants to bring public attention to high e-book prices.

    The Toronto Public Library, Canadian Library Council, Ontario Library Association and the Canadian Library Association want to bring awareness to the super high prices publishers are charging them for e-books. They cite number examples, such as the new Michael Connelly novel Burning Room costs $14.99 on Amazon, but their libraries are paying $106.00 per copy. John Grisham’s Grey Mountain costs $15.99 for a retail edition but costs libraries $85.00.

  • #jeu #crypto #pirate : textz.com reported to have released the complete works of Theodor W. Adorno

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

    London, November 28, 2014

    Today, textz.com has released its long-rumored “Complete Historical-Critical Edition” as a torrent on The Pirate Bay (1). The encrypted archive is supposed to contain the source code of all published and unpublished versions of the website, from around 1999 to 2006, and thousands of pirated e-books, allegedly including the complete works of Theodor W. Adorno in digital form.

    Between 2000 and 2004, textz.com was one of the most popular online sources for pirated digital literature. In October 2014, the website has resurfaced as an “Alternate Reality Game” whose participants are confronted with a series of cryptograhic puzzles (2). It is expected that solving the game will let players decrypt the complete textz.com archives that were released today.

    (1) https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/11582339

    (2) http://textz.com/arg

  • Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Libraries and E-books
    http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2013/09/cory-doctorow-libraries-and-e-books

    Unlike every other channel for e-books, libraries are not the publishers’ competitors. They don’t want to sell devices. They don’t want to win over customers to a particular cloud. They just want readers to read, writers to write, and publishers to sell. They deserve a better deal than they’re getting.

    Publishers should be courting libraries as neutral parties and potential allies in the e-book wars. Publishers are in direct competition with e-book companies like Amazon, who publish e-books as well as selling them. But when Amazon sells an e-book, it gets mountains of business intelligence from the transaction: who is buying, where, from which keywords, and with what other books (for starters). What does the publisher get? An aggregate sales figure, 90 days after the fact. Of course Amazon is running circles around the Big Five publishers: the publishers know nothing about their customers, and Amazon knows everything about them.

    Library e-book circulation data is a source of potentially priceless, actionable business intelligence for the publishers, if they can stop focusing on gouging libraries on price and focus on cooperating with them instead. Libraries could provide publishers with daily circulation figures, broken down by city, for every book, along with correlations between books (‘‘this book was checked out with that book’’). Provided the data is sufficiently aggregated, it would not pose a risk to individual patron privacy. This has to be managed carefully, of course, but if there’s one group that can be relied upon to treat this issue with the care it is due, it’s librarians.

  • EU about to close eBook probe - Apple and publishers back down | TechEye

    cc @fil

    http://news.techeye.net/software/eu-about-to-close-ebook-probe
    07 Nov 2012 09:37 | by Nick Farrell in Rome | Filed in Software

    An EU anti-trust watchdog has stopped growling at Apple and four publishers after they agreed to ease price restrictions on Amazon.

    The move is a victory for Amazon which wanted to sell e-books cheaper than its rivals.

    A spokesman at the EU insisted that its investigation was not yet finished, but Reuters insisted that it was done and dusted. An official announcement is expected next month.

    It looks like the EU accepted a deal from Apple and the publishers to let retailers set prices or discounts for a period of two years, and also to suspend “most-favoured nation” contracts for five years.

    #publications-electronique #ebook #internet #e-publication #europe

  • Evgeny Morozov : The Naked And The TED | The New Republic
    http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/105703/the-naked-and-the-ted-khanna

    I take no pleasure in declaring what has been obvious for some time: that TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas “worth spreading.” Instead it has become something ludicrous, and a little sinister.

    Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.”

    (...)

    When they launched their publishing venture, the TED organizers dismissed any concern that their books’ slim size would be dumbing us down. “Actually, we suspect people reading TED Books will be trading up rather than down. They’ll be reading a short, compelling book instead of browsing a magazine or doing crossword puzzles. Our goal is to make ideas accessible in a way that matches modern attention spans.” But surely “modern attention spans” must be resisted, not celebrated. Brevity may be the soul of wit, or of lingerie, but it is not the soul of analysis. The TED ideal of thought is the ideal of the “takeaway”—the shrinkage of thought for people too busy to think.

    (...)

    The Khannas are typical of the TED crowd in that they do not express much doubt about anything. Their pronouncements about political structures are as firm and arrogant as some scientists’ pronouncements about the cognitive structures of the brain. Whatever problems lurk on the horizon are imagined primarily as problems of technology, which, given enough money, brain power, and nutritional supplements, someone in Silicon Valley should be in a position to solve. This is consistent with TED’s adoption of a decidedly non-political attitude, as became apparent in a recent kerfuffle over a short talk on inequality given by a venture capitalist—who else?—which TED refused to release for fear that it might offend too many rich people.

    (...)

    Another fine example of the TED mentality in the context of global affairs is Abundance, a new book co-written by Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of the Singularity University. (...)
    Given TED’s disproportionate influence on a certain level of the global debate, it follows that the public at large also becomes more approving of technological solutions to problems that are not technological but political. Problems of climate change become problems of making production more efficient or finding ways to colonize other planets—not of reaching political agreement on how to limit production or consume in a more sustainable fashion.

    #technologie #geek_power

  • “Why I break DRM on e-books”: A publishing exec speaks out — paidContent
    http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/24/breaking-drm-publishing-exec

    By that point, I had purchased several dozen e-books from Amazon, and thanks to the fact that Amazon has Kindle apps for all major platforms I didn’t feel all that locked in. But what happens when Amazon decides not to support a platform? Or what if it rolls out new features on Kindle e-readers but doesn’t make those features available on the Kindle apps?

    I had also bought an e-book from Apple and quickly realized the options there were even more limited. You’ll probably never see an iBooks app for Android, for example. I decided it was time for me to take control and not let the retailer lock me in.

    #ebook #drm