The Lowest Bastards Are Book Burners

Because they promote ignorance. And ignorance leads to all other evils and ills.

Iraqi libraries ransacked by Islamic State group in Mosul

When Islamic State group militants invaded the Central Library of Mosul earlier this month, they were on a mission to destroy a familiar enemy: other people’s ideas.

Residents say the extremists smashed the locks that had protected the biggest repository of learning in the northern Iraq town, and loaded around 2,000 books — including children’s stories, poetry, philosophy and tomes on sports, health, culture and science — into six pickup trucks. They left only Islamic texts.

The rest?

“These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah. So they will be burned,” a bearded militant in traditional Afghani two-piece clothing told residents, according to one man living nearby who spoke to The Associated Press.

We need a worldwide program to digitize every damn library.

The Problem With Apple And eBooks

Apple Secretly Acquired “Pandora For Books” Startup BookLamp To Battle Amazon

The details are not clear yet, but the source says, “in broad strokes, the goal that [founder Aaron] Stanton and three of the folks he was working with from the original BookLamp crew is to beat Amazon at their own game.”

“I can tell you that in the next year to 18 months you will see some fairly major initiatives focused on books and reading coming out of Apple.”

Huh. And just earlier today I discussed the problem of Apple and eBooks with Baldur Bjarnason.

If Apple wants to boost sales, they have to treat books like books.

A Kindle book can be read on any damned platform — Kindle device, iOS, Android, Mac, PC.

Books bought from the Apple iBookstore are locked to Apple’s iOS and OS X hardware, period. Who wants book lock-in? No one.

Apple can think better recommendations will help, but if they want to be serious in selling books against Amazon — and with over one billion devices out there, they should — they need to liberate books from their Apple-only grasp.

And on the writer’s side of things, don’t require OS X hardware to submit to the iBookstore.

The Hot Book In China Right Now

Xiaomi’s MiPad Weibo published a communique today that contains some staggering information about a book that went viral through social media:

Google Books Advanced Search

They removed this ability quite some time ago. I don’t know why because it’s often useful.

Anyway, it actually still exists despite the link no longer appearing.

Click here for Advanced Book Search.

Bookish Dumped By Its Founding Partners

Zola Books Acquires Bookish.com

The site that was supposed to save the asses of the Big 6 (now 5) of publishing against that meanie Jeff Bezos and his ferocious beast Amazon, was dumped in what looks like a fire sale price to a non-publisher.

I never got around to checking out this site in depth. That is, beyond its WTF TOS.

Now I am pleased that I will never have to look at it ever again.

Amazon wins again.

Next!

The Internet Versus Books, Yet Again

The internet is wiping out gardening books so I’m giving up, says author, 85

To write a bestseller now you need to choose something that you can’t look up on Google.

https://twitter.com/ljndawson/status/406777166236753921

Google Won. Next!

Google defeats authors in U.S. book-scanning lawsuit

I was against Google. But I’m not going to bother to link to all my posts.

This is bullshit:

He [Judge Chin] also said Google’s digitization was “transformative,” meaning it gave the books a new purpose or character, and could be expected to boost rather than reduce book sales.

If scanning a book is “transformative,” then my posting a short clip from a TV program or movie on YouTube for fair use in a post should be as well. Yet I’ve had two such clips DMCAed away and Google has threatened me with account deletion if I do it again (or am caught doing it again, harumph).

I have been a user of Google Books for longer than I can remember. Proportionally, they place more of a book online than any of my short clips do of any TV program or movie.

Yet they get a fucking free pass — for grabbing all the books.

While I’m under threat by Google for just two alleged violations.

I look forward to Google doing Video Search and grabbing all the TV and all the movies. Because that’s what they do. They need to build shit to slap ads on. It’s how they make their money.

Those CopyNazis of the MPAA don’t realize what just hit them.

Scribd Offers eBooks By Monthly Fee

Scribd launches first global, multi-platform digital book subscription service

Go here to get a look at all of the available books.

There are over thirty publishers involved.

For many people, this will probably be a good deal, even if they read just two books a month. But that’s not the average American, who reads far fewer than that.

I’m not sure if this is for me yet. I’d really feel the pressure to read, to squeeze every penny out of that monthly fee. Not that that’s a bad thing, but there are some times when I get burned out on reading — yet I’d still have to keep up that fee every month. And then feel even more pressure to squeeze out those lost pennies.

Publishing Inside Social Media

KakaoTalk Challenges Apple and Google with New Digital Publishing Platform

The Korean-made messaging app KakaoTalk has over 70 million users and a social gaming platform running in a couple of countries. But the app doesn’t stop there. KakaoTalk has launched Kakao Page as a media and content publishing platform for companies to distribute content.

This is interesting, putting publishing inside of “social media.”

Those seventy million users — if you get a direct mail response rate of one percent, that’s seven hundred thousand!

It will be interesting to see what sell-through numbers turn out to be.

And you can expect this to show up next as The Next Big Thing at the endless book conferences…

That is, unless Amazon does a phone and gets the bright idea to include its own messaging app that incorporates this.

Comment On The gTLD dotBOOK Domain Grab

Who’s After the dotBOOK Top Level Domain

Maybe we can stop this idiocy after all.

ICANN is asking for public comments: “Closed Generic” gTLD Applications

dotBOOK should not belong to any commercial entity.