A perfectly cromulent strategy

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Brian Stelter’s peice, “No Place for Heated Opinions” on nytimes.com got me to watch another episode of Frozen Planet on Discovery this weekend, and I’m glad I did. The piece gathers opinions from several scientists who say that the show takes a pass on the real issue of climate change, that humans are causing it. I think that’s what’s great about it.

“On Thin Ice” presents warming as a fact, and illustrates it with melting glaciers and struggling animals. It does not discuss the reasons why warming is happening. I think this makes it better TV, and I also think it makes it a better bit of education. You see, what they’re opting out of is an argument they can’t win. No conceivable presentation of the opinions of climate change skeptics would make them happy, in the context of a show about the science. And those folks aren’t listening anyway. The rest of us, me included, would actually like to learn something about the effects of climate change without having a pointless (and, frankly, boring) argument appended to it. I wouldn’t have watched an hour of it if they had spent an hour making arguments I already believe; but I did watch Richard Attenborough, and some extremely cute penguins, seals, and polar bears.

Discovery decided not to feed the trolls. I approve.

Price Fixing

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I think price fixing is still illegal no matter what your reasons or motivations for doing it. I’ve been following the response to the Justice Department’s suit against Apple and publishers, and the most common response in the media (Atlantic, New York Times) appears to echo the defendants’ arguments: we had to change how pricing worked in order to compete with Amazon, which has huge ebook market share and decreases our profits. OK, that’s fine, but when an entire industry does it at once, particularly if they agree to do it at private meetings with each other, that is, if we’re enforcing the law, illegal.

I am pretty unsympathetic to the defendants.

Apple’s iBook store shows no sign of Apple being interested in stocking it with anything other than bestsellers. They made a deal to launch their book store but don’t appear to have done much with it.

Scott Turow is the 1% of authors, as he admits. And it is deeply, deeply disingenuous to contrast the Kindle’s proprietary format with the supposedly “open” ePub format used by Sony…which comes with Adobe DRM. An actually open approach to ebooks would be a fine competitive strategy, according to Baldar Bjarnason and, well, current sales of DRM-free music.

Turow’s money quote, “Let’s hope the reports are wrong, or that the Justice Department reconsiders. The irony bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition,” seems bizarre to me. Perhaps it’s my perspective, but six global publishers controlling book publishing doesn’t really seem like competition to me. The question is who’s going to make the money from ebooks, no more than that.

Librarian observations

  • five of the six major publishers are not selling ebooks to Overdrive, the major source of ebooks for public libraries
  • Harper Collins thought it was reasonable to make libraries buy another copy of an ebook which circulated 26 times.

If Amazon abuses its market power that is a separate anti-trust question which I hope will be dealt with the same way.

Barcamp Boston 2012

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Breakfast, Day 1

Just got back from a great time at Barcamp Boston, held in Microsoft’s spectacular New England Research Division in Cambridge. I’ve been reading for years about conferences organized on the fly by their participants and always wanted to go to one. Now I have, and thanks to the Boston WordPress Meetup for posting about it. Day 1 was frenetic and jammed full of people and sessions, with something like 700 attendees. Day 2, Easter Sunday, was much mellower and collaborative. My favorite talks both days were ones where there wasn’t a speaker, and the people who came to learn about a topic (Ruby on Saturday, the psychology of getting out of your own way on Sunday) ended up just having a conversation about it.

Schedule, Day 1

I proposed a session on ebooks (what’s wrong, what’s right), telling myself I’d talk about it if three or four people were interested. Two people said they were while I was putting the post-it on the wall. So I wrote up a rant I think I’ve had germinating for a couple of years, and gave it to a very nice and animated group of twenty or thirty. Executive summary: As a librarian I am concerned about the direction ebooks are taking: they’re great for some things (portability), not great for others (non-fiction), and sort of ominous for libraries (which were mostly founded on how physical items are bought and sold, not on licensing terms). Here are the notes:

Other highlights:

  • Dating for Nerds (@ShelliTrung, @bitsbybike, @tibbon) was a lot of fun; I went to two of the three sessions. Lots of good nerd anthropology and collective thinking on online and offline dating. The second session coincided with the one on Contra dancing, which was nicely harmonious.
  • Social Media: Ask Me Anything (@JayNeely) was awesome. Jay was clear, helpful, and utterly free of social media BS…a thing which should be roundly praised when found.

Executive summary: I had a great time. Thanks to all!

Helpful map

How News Works

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While following the Supreme Court’s debate on the healthcare law I found myself looking at three identical articles in three different major papers.

NYPD officer convicted of sex assault; jurors continue to deliberate on rape (Washington Post)

Jury tensions rise in NYC officer’s rape trial (San Francisco Chronicle)

NYPD officer convicted of sex assault (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Two problems here, pointing in different directions.

1) Google News needs to figure out that the original source for all three of these is the Associated Press and link to that.

2) Why would I not subscribe to the AP directly?

I suspect fear of 2 is why 1 is the way it is. I don’t mind at all linking to a good story elsewhere, but if you’re reprinting it as your reporting that isn’t a compelling argument for me to buy your paper.

Just downloaded and deleted the Boston Globe’s new ePaper app, which recreates the print edition exactly for iPad and iPhone. Which is a really weird idea, especially for an iPhone app.

And in the meantime, to prove I’m not oatmealing on newspapers, I bought a subscription to the New York Times online. It’s a better product, more complete, better thought-through, easier to use. Which is why it baffles me that The Globe (owned by Times Corp.) is so hapless digitally so far.