From the creative genius that brought us the Gallery of Regrettable Food comes a walk down geek memory lane: Compu-Promo features promotional photographs of the kit of yesteryear, aptly narrated by James Lileks.
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Archive for March, 2006
Nigel Newton, Chief Executive of Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK, is a pratt. Apart from being responsible for unleashing the derivative claptrap that is Harry Potter on the world (recommended by his 8-year-old daughter), Newton also exemplifies the pompous literary opposition to Google Print. Because Charles Dickens wouldn’t like advertising associated with his books, he would find it “crass”.
Actually, Mr Newton, Google Print is not about Dickens (or any other author), nor about you (or any other representative of the publishing industry) but about me, and all other people who like reading or frequent libraries or simply need to do research. Using Google Print I can find all references to the phrase “black velvet” in Great Expectations, should I feel like doing so. And that, Mr Newton, is a right, not a privilege, a right won by readers of hundreds of years of evolution of the printed word.
There are two aspects to this land-grab. The first involves scanning out-of-copyright work, provided by the great libraries, and surrounding it with such advertising. That’s not illegal, though it is of cultural concern.
And why on earth would this be of cultural concern? Offering users applicable text ads (often to books by the same author, or related products) only adds a significant dimension to finding information. Or does Mr Newton find advertising oh-so-nasty, the filthy lucre polluting the fine art of literature? And how would the commercial orgy that has become Harry Potter fit into this model of artistic purity?
The second part of Google’s literary predations, in the case of American libraries, involves scanning in-copyright works – for the purpose of publication – without direct prior permission of the copyright holder.
Whether Google scans books or rips them apart to stock their HQ toilet facilities, this is of no concern to anyone but Google and their shareholders. There is nothing illegal in scanning copyrighted works, not even if you scan them a million times. What is illegal is to distribute copies of the scanned works, either in digital or in printed form. And Google doesn’t do that.
Searching Google Print only gives users access to a very limited number of pages. Clearly the publishing industry have never taken a good look at the system, or they would have noticed being locked out long before being able to read a single chapter. Perhaps this says a lot about the quality of books being published by Mr Newton and Bloomsbury, but most readers won’t be satisfied with simply reading individual pages.
It is authors who will suffer most.
And pray tell, Mr Newton, how will authors suffer from Google Print? Give a single example of a single lost sale. The only way I can see Google Print having a negative effect on sales is by readers discovering how truly bad books are before buying them, or by readers not being swayed by glitzy marketing and binding but rather led by actual content. And when this is measured against the massive good done by leading readers to the books they really want, the loss of sales for bad books promoted by the publishing industry pales into insignificance.
Let the truth be revealed: a small number of books published by the large publishing houses represent a significant percentage of turnover. It serves the publishing houses to push PR and marketing efforts on these books specifically, controlling what reviewers read and write about. The most profitable market is a controlled market. However, Google Print turns this upside down. The free flow of information on the Internet means that readers are informed by their peers, and linking Google Print to online booksellers means that readers will be buying the books they really prefer, rather than the slop the publishers would like to push down their throats.
Google Print represents the triumph of consumer rights in yet another area. And probably spells the downfall of very profitable market manipulation for the publishing industry.
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So the South Dakota Legislature has reinstituted a ban on abortion, putting the entire United States on a slippery slope back to the Dark Ages. True, this is also the state where it is supposedly illegal to lie down and fall asleep in a cheese factory (and would the Internet lie about such a significant fact?), and only recently was a law repealed which made it legal to shoot native Americans if five or more of them gathered on your property. Yes, South Dakota can be a scary place.
But today’s rant doesn’t concern itself with inbreeding, rather with a fundamental question in the debate over abortion. “Reasonable” anti-abortionists oppose abortion on the basis of the sanctity of life, which would exclude arguments based on the wrath of the Thunder God or the fact that they just don’t like new-fangled medicine. Life is sacred, they argue. A fetus, even a gamete, is alive, and as such should enjoy every protection society can afford it. Difficult to argue.
But what about hunting? I would imagine that a very large number of anti-abortionists are also pro-hunting. They support the death penalty. They’re meat-eating, perp-killing, bug-squashing people. And I’m sure they have very good—if perhaps not always logical—reasons for this. But whatever their reasons are, this means they are not “pro-life”. They do not believe in the sanctity of life. They believe in the “sanctity” of one kind of life, unborn human life. Which is a whole different kettle of fish.
Pro-choice activists have taken a strange approach to debating the pro-life crowd. Most of the discussions have revolved around the question of when life begins. If life begins at birth, abortion should not be a problem. If life begins at conception, abortion would always be wrong. Anywhere between these two measurable milestones would only legitimise abortion at an early stage of pregnancy. The snag here is that the two groups differ on the definition of “life”, so they have no hope of defining a commonly agreed point of when life begins.
Let’s recap the anti-abortion platform: – save the lives of unborn human babies; – deep fry babies from other species;
To accomodate both pro-life and pro-choice groups, I would suggest the debate be shifted to another question: when does consciousness begin? For life isn’t really sacred at all, despite what Hindus might believe. Life is pretty much expendable, and millions of living creatures are dispatched wittingly or unwittingly every day. Edible creatures, nasty creatures, unwanted creatures, ranging in size from bull elephants down to single-celled organisms. We kill them off without a second thought. Because they do not show the level of consciousness we associate with being human.
Life is not sacred. Consciousness is. And consciousness is measurable and quantifiable. We can define a starting point when a fetus becomes aware of its surroundings, turns human. And then watch the anti-abortion crowd start slugging it out over the sanctity of consciousness.
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Yesterday, Doonesbury took on the idiocy of Intelligent Design and “teaching the controversy”. An excellent exposé of how cretinous the premise behind ID “science” is.
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