traditional publishing – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

Predatory business practices

The government’s lawsuit against Adobe shows deceptive design is good for business—until it’s not by Hunter Schwarz (Fast Company)

Get em FTC! 👏 (I mean I wish you’d stopped them from purchasing every viable competitor for the past thirty-odd years but that ship has sailed.)

See also: Scale requires deskilling

Internet era life skills

500,000 Books Have Been Deleted From The Internet Archive’s Lending Library by Mike Masnick (techdirt)

If you found out that 500,000 books had been removed from your local public library, at the demands of big publishers who refused to let them buy and lend new copies, and were further suing the library for damages, wouldn’t you think that would be a major news story?

The Internet Archive really screwed up by allowing limitless lending during the pandemic, but their regular lending shouldn’t be destroyed because of that mistake 🫤

But it needs to be clearly communicated that this lawsuit is 100% about killing the very concept of libraries.

And, why? Because copyright and DRM systems allow publishers to massively overcharge for eBooks. This is what’s really the underlying factor here. Libraries in the past could pay the regular price for a book and then lend it out. But with eBook licensing, they are able to charge exorbitant monopoly rents, while artificially limiting how many books libraries can even buy.

The vision of libraries

When “ambiguity is a feature, not a bug” (and comment)

Curating for yourself, curating with others

Replied to The Memex Method – Cory Doctorow – Medium by Cory Doctorow (Medium)

Clay Shirky has described the process of reading blogs as the inverse of reading traditional sources of news and opinion. In the traditional world, an editor selects (from among pitches from writers for things that might interest a readership), and then publishes (the selected pieces).

But for blog readers, the process is inverted: bloggers publish (everything that seems significant to them) and then readers select (which of those publications are worthy of their interests)

I much prefer following people to publications, and curating for myself what’s interesting out of what those people have curated for themselves. There’s a good bit of noise, but there’s also a lot of serendipity — neat things I would never have encountered on my own, that I wouldn’t have thought to investigate.

While news publications focus on appearing neutral, people (bloggers and newsletterers) have opinions and share context often missing from news articles. I *want* others’ opinions, especially from people who are better informed than I am. I’m interested in news and information as it relates to people, not as discrete incidents. I care more about the trends and the roots of an event, which are all too often left out of the news. Individuals are publishing from a rich, deep, broad perspective in a way publications cannot have, the same way corporations and brands are not people (no matter how they exploit their social media managers).