Monthly Archives: February 2010
Google Search Stories. Only possible in our time. (thx, @Tanushri) # - On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing.
My mother-in-law walked in the door the day of the keynote and the first thing out of her mouth was “Did you see that new Apple iPad? That looks like it would work for me. Would that work for me?”
Amazing. #
- The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination, a commencement speech by J.K.Rowling at Harvard.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
Watch the video, don’t read the transcript. #
- John Baker on ‘entirely fictional characters’. #
- An outsider’s guide to Amazon vs Macmillan. Charlie Stross writes:
… to customers, Amazon would like to be a monopoly (i.e. the only store in town). To suppliers, Amazon would like to be a monopsony (i.e. the only customer in town). Their goal is to profit via arbitrage, and if they can achieve those twin goals they will own everyubody’s nuts — the authors, the customers, everyone. They are, in fact, exactly the kind of middle-man operation that the internet tends to squish, gooily.
It’s also worth noting that Amazon is the only company on the market that doesn’t do ePub. Everyone else – Sony, Apple, Baen, is going with the format, and ePub doesn’t force DRM down anybody’s throats. #
- Snarkmarket on storytelling on the iPad:
And now this new device takes the iPhone’s virtues and scales them up—plus, no text messages while you’re reading. So more than anything else, the iPad looks to me like a focus machine. And it looks, therefore, like such an opportunity for storytelling, and for innovation around storytelling. It looks like an opportunity to make the Myst of 2010.
If Robin is right, the multimedia ebook may have just found its messiah. #
