Google’s Naked Face Of Evil

If Google was a person standing in front of me right now, I’d clamp my hands around its throat and squeeze squeeze squeeze.

All of you people who say you use Google Books, just STFU and read. You apparently do not use it anywhere near to the degree I do otherwise accounts like this would be all over the Net in book blogs.

The depth and breadth of my use is uncovering more and more of Google’s outright evil by the day.

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Feedbooks eBookstore Opens

They’ve had one for French-language eBooks for a few weeks and today the English-language store opened.

It’s early days, so there are many gaps (no Ken Bruen, not all of Christopher Fowler, as two examples), but the interface is fast and clean with many sort options.

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Plus, Feedbooks has one of the best selections of free and public domain eBooks out there. You don’t ever have to bother with the Google Books ePubs offered by others.

I Side With Wikileaks

Aside from the revelation that there are nukes in The Netherlands and Belgium — big bloody deal! — what I’ve seen of the leaked diplomatic cables is nothing more than a record of vanity, double-dealing, back-biting, gossip, and corruption.

This is news?

Some people on Twitter talk about these revelations somehow jeopardizing our “security.”

That’s utter garbage.

“Security” is the catch-all excuse used by people who want to get away with something.

The non-working check collectors use “security” as excuse to cover-up their crimes in this article: AP Enterprise: Guards shown watching inmate attack

“Public release of the video poses an unnecessary security risk to our staff, the inmates entrusted to our care, and ultimately to the public,” the prison company said in a statement.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

What “security” risk? The security of keeping it under wraps so your asses can’t be sued into bankruptcy?

I cannot wait for the 2011 Wikileaks documents that record what’s been going on at a major bank.

I hope it will be Citi that’s brought down. But I suspect it will be Bank of America/Countrywide.

I’m going to grab and read every single word of it when it’s released.

So should you.

Knowledge is security in a free society.

Do we still live in a free society?

Crash The Damn Banks And Let’s Roll!

From The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes [Kindle, Sony, Kobo]:

The nation’s first impulse was correct. Washington might not have needed to do much. The miracle of the 1920s had followed a rough downturn at the start of the decade, and then a comeback. Such crashes—or panics, as they were known—did not make a lengthy slump an inevitability. Perhaps all that was needed now was for owners to sell their holdings, so that the market could find its own bottom. This was what [Secretary of the Treasury Andrew] Mellon would mean when he recommended that stockholders, banks, and farmers liquidate their holdings. The phrase “to liquidate” sounded harsh, but it also represented an old and important argument. Uncertainty was one of the market’s problems. Only when stocks or wages were “marked to market” and found their bottom could they rise again.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

And:

Mellon’s “liquidate” phrase sounded harsh but was far less constraining than the president’s restrictions on short selling. When a man marked your stocks to the market price and sold, everyone knew what everything was worth. The dread uncertainty of a further decline would diminish, and stocks might begin to move up again.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

The banks refuse to liquidate and mark to market. They refuse to admit their greed has doomed them to insolvency. They’d rather strangle all of us in the years ahead than give up their perks and positions and power.

They want their shell game of hiding objective market values to continue.

If Obama was on the ball — and so far he damn well hasn’t been — he’d force this liquidation. He’d excise the cancer from the economy and get us moving again.

Bernanke prides himself on being a scholar of the Great Depression. So far all I’ve seen him do is repeat the mistakes of back then — you can see it for yourself by reading this book.

Crash the goddam banks and let’s roll.

The Forgotten Lesson

I’ve been reading The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes [Kindle, Sony, Kobo], and there was then-Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon in his book Taxation: The People’s Business, citing a lesson print publishing still refuses to heed in regard to eBook pricing:

Does anyone question that Mr. Ford has made more money by reducing the price of his car and increasing his sales than he would have made by maintaining a high price and a greater profit per car, but selling less cars?

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Interesting how eBook device prices have plummeted to less than half of what they used to be, yet print publishing conspires to fix eBook prices to be high!

Previously here:

The Desperate Mood Swings Of John Sargent
The Desperate Mood Swings Of Carolyn Reidy
eBooks Need A Charles Schwab
Print Publishing: You’re NOT OPEC!
eBook Priced Too High To Buy? Tell Everyone!
Memo To Ian Fleming’s Heirs
eBook Pricing Goes Outright Insane!
Comic Book Sales Plummet: Down 20%!
eBook Publishers: Listen To Jane!
DC Comics Slashes Prices, Will eBooks Learn?
Random House’s Marcus Dohle Has A Moment Of Stupid
Sony’s Reader Store Wakes Up, Lowers Price
Sony’s Reader Store Extortionate Pricing
Pretty Pricing Picture For Print Publishing
Lessons For Print Publishing From Hulu
Publishing Quote Of The Day, If Not Year
Print Publishing’s Suicidal Price-Fixing
Book fan reveals collection of 15,000 Penguin paperbacks | Metro.co.uk
Should ebooks pass the Walmart price test? | The Elementary Studio Blog
Wake Up: eBooks Are Mass-Market Paperbacks
Pricing: The Final Frontier
How a publisher can get me to buy more books | The Digital Reader

Smartphones Will Lead To Smart xBooks

First Look at Aro for iPhone: Can This Semantic Software Replace Your Core Mobile Apps?

As innovative as the technology is, the interface still feels too technical, as if built by engineers not designers. The objects Aro recognizes are circled so as to highlight them, like a teacher correcting a student’s homework. Aro is training wheels for learning semantic technology. Here’s a person, here’s a date, it tells you. Tap this here. See what happens.

The text is circled because we, as Web users, can quite grasp the concept of actionable data that’s not highlighted in some way. We expect hyperlinks, colored and underlined, to direct our clicks. But links are going away, says Andrew Hickl, Aro’s CTO. Semantic technology will eventually lead to their demise. In a decade or so, any object, any piece of data, anything that you can touch will be able to do anything and no one will need training to know that’s the case – it will just be the way it is.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

People will become used to text acting a certain way.

When it doesn’t in digital books, they will be damned disappointed.

Previously at The eBook Test:

Dumb eBooks Must Die, Smart eBooks Must Live

Why We Read

Reminiscing About the Stacks of Books

But by far, the biggest reason I bought lots of books was because I figured a single idea could be worth a lot to me over the run of my life. I’ve gotten $1,000 ideas from a single chapter of a book. I’ve stayed out of bad investments that would’ve lost me lots of money by virtue of reading a couple books. There’s books I’ve read now – like Getting Things Done and The Wealthiest Man in Babylon – that I can see clearly how I’d be much better off if I’d read a few years earlier. 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, too, that one’s amazing. Everyone should read all of those three.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

I haven’t read Getting Things Done but I have read the other two and I recommend them too.

Christmas 2010 eBook Buying Guide

This post has been updated. Read the latest version instead: UPDATED: Christmas 2010 eBook Buying Guide

Recommended, in order of best value:

1) Apple iPad: Via available free apps, it can be any eBook device now: a Kindle, a Barnes & Noble Nook, a Kobo Reader, a Sony Reader; plus there’s Apple’s own iBookstore (which I do not recommend due to lock-in DRM). Plus it can do Google Books PDFs right out of the box. And with Bluefire Reader it can now do public library eBook loans too. Due to size and weight, this is more of an at-home device.

Kobo Reader WiFi Now $129 At Borders

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Filming Near The API Building

I got a bit excited this morning as I was approaching what I will always think of as the API Building.

There was filming happening!

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