Monday, July 21, 2014

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 29): Amazon, The LMS, Director's Cut, Open Access + More

Read these articles on flipboard:

From the NYTimes: Amazon, a Friendly Giant as long as it's fed.
“Everything Amazon has promised me, it has fulfilled — and more,” he said. “They ask: ‘Are you happy, Vince? We just want to see you writing books.’
Changes ahead for the humble learning management system (Inside Higher Ed)
“I think we’re in a weird place right now in the marketplace -- partly because there’s a lot of parity between the systems,” Severance said. “You can almost throw a dart at a dartboard and pick an LMS, and it won’t be that bad.”
Andrew Ladd at The Newstatesman thinks publishers should think about the director's cut.
Besides, what’s wrong with a little naked commercial ambition in the publishing industry, given everything we’re always hearing about the death of the book? There’s clearly a demand for this sort of thing.
Lots of print about the Kindle all you can eat. Almost as much fun as the race between GigaOm and PL in getting the story out.
No big-5 publisher appears to be participating yet, based on my preliminary glance through the test pages. Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins have both made their ebooks available to Scribd and Oyster, but I haven’t yet seen books from those publishers on the Kindle Unlimited page
Open access is not enough according to The Guardian.
Earlier this month, Nature Publishing Group launched Scientific Data – a broader, interdisciplinary publication dedicated to a more specific type of data paper: the data descriptor. This new category of peer-reviewed publication provides detailed descriptions of individual or combined experimental, observational and computational datasets.
At the Hong Kong bookfair people camp out to get in first and also plan to spend thousands (SCMP)
Vacilando Yip Chun-kit, 18, left his home in Sheung Shui last night and joined the queue at 4am to be among the first batch into the fair.


Thursday, July 03, 2014

Photo: High school throw back.


Biggish reunion this weekend.  At one point there were five Michaels in this class.