TV: Touch, Episode One

iBooks Author: Creating A Children’s Book

Shoo Rayner is a professional who does children’s books.

This is his website (warning: autoplay music; click Stop button when there!)

He found out about iBooks Author by accident and has done two videos about it.

Hardly A Thick Bubble

How Thick Is Your Bubble? Guest Score » 8 out of 20 (40% ) Result On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 9 and 12. In other words, even if you’re part of the new upper class, you’ve had a lot of exposure to the rest of America. Quiz School Take this quiz & get your score

How Thick Is Your Bubble? » Quiz Maker

webOS Glimpse Coming To The iPad!

This is really epic:

https://twitter.com/#!/IngloriousApps/status/162315581343809536

See larger photo at Yfrog.

If I’m not mistaken, that’s YouTube in the upper left, Twitter in the lower left, and an RSS reader in the large right pane.

Glimpse is the single webOS program that made me lust for an HP TouchPad (outside of the Cards, general multitasking, and UI).

Now it will be coming to the iPad. I am swooning. Swooning!

This is the power of Glimpse:

Inglorious Apps website

CBS Radio Mystery Theater On The Net!

Welcome to CBS Radio Mystery Theater

Enjoy all 1,399 episodes of CBS Radio Mystery Theater old time radio free! You can stream or download old radio shows in MP3 format or copy radio shows to CD. We’re big fans of Radio Mystery Theater and by offering shows from the golden age of radio for free, we keep the spirit of the old time radio alive!

This is absolutely wonderful!

Run! Run to it — before some idiot thinks the DMCA applies!

Get Away From That Keyboard!!

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Unglue.it Could Save Public Libraries

Unglue.it Crowdfunds Unlimited Licenses for Beloved E-books

This, for example, is what he means by “unglue,” the concept that lies at the heart of Gluejar: “unglue (v.t.) For an author or publisher to accept a fixed amount of money from the public for its unlimited use of an e-book.”

Hellman wants us to consider, in other words, a world in which those who hold the rights to books agree to license them through a Creative Commons arrangement that protects author/publisher copyrights, enables the rights holders to maintain or pursue additional licensing agreements, and at the same time creates an environment in which public funding helps “unglue” the books for digital distribution.

Crowdfunding — something already in play within organizations as diverse as the Nature Conservancy, NPR, and Kickstarter — provides the fiscal fuel, making sure that both the creators of the book and Gluejar get compensated for their efforts.

1) Print publishing now has a cash-out Exit Strategy if this comes to pass.

2) Writers dumped by their publishers could have a new way to reach new readers. Think of their books so freely available, not locked into any one format, free from all public libraries too.

3) What if all public libraries pooled into one fund each year 1-2% of their budgets for this? They could compile a list of books they’d like to get and have their patrons vote for them. Also, patrons could also add to the fund out of their own pockets. Such active participation in public libraries could save them.

4) Those who hold rights to currently not-in-e and out-of-print books could have a way to bring them back to life by having the market decide their value up-front.

There are many, many more implications to this. Those are off the top of my head. But this has to be the most exciting books-related proposal I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s the first thing that has given me hope for both books and especially for public libraries.

I’d like to see this happen.

Fileserve Shuts Its Doors To Sharing Too

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This is no surprise. I learned last night that Fileserve also owns Filesonic, which closed to sharing first.

In the past, TV networks have employed firms to leak pilots to the Net to generate word of mouth. The best and fastest way to snag a copy was via locker.

I think the first to feel the effects of this will be TV viewership. People just aren’t going to bother to watch commercial TV as a substitute (or even Hulu). For some programs that originate overseas and will never appear in the U.S., there is no substitute. You won’t see the kind of post-cancellation cults build as they have for, say, Firefly.

Also, people will move back to torrents. But by the time someone wants something via torrent — having finally gotten the word of mouth — the Seeds are gone or are so few and the transfer rate is so slow that few people will even bother.

All of you praying for Apple TV to save your ass, do you really want to be just another bitch for a tech company?

In the physical retail world, there’s such a thing as breakage. These are inevitable losses incurred by shipping, warehousing, employee theft, and customer accidents. Breakage is how these lockers should be regarded. Anyone who thinks they’re the downfall of any entertainment industry is simply out of touch with reality and should just shut the fuck up.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that Hollywood wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for pirates. Had Edison had his way, it would have never existed and where would we be now? And where will we be with all of the lockers gone? If you think better, just go away, you have nothing to say.

Previously here:

Hollywood: Founded By And On Piracy
Filesonic Shuts Its Doors To Sharing
Copyright: Statute Of Limitations

Copyright: Statute Of Limitations

From what point in time does the copyright statute of limitations begin to run?

Under copyright law, the statute of limitations tolls, or begins running, when the infringement is discovered. So, if someone republished your work as their own six years ago, but you just discovered it, you can still sue for copyright infringement. However, the issue is then raised as to the amount of damages you can collect.

This is bound to be a hot topic with rumors flying around Twitter that the logs of Megaupload are now in the custody of American Feds (and probably their pimps in Hollywood too).

America will probably be the first nation on earth to create a new class of jail: Copyright Prison.

The shit is going to hit the fan this year.

Americans will not continue to be abused like this.

Twitter Down: Filesonic Effect?

Correlation is not causality.

Yet I can’t help wondering if Twitter went down within an hour of the Filesonic news due to the volume of tweets and RTs about it.