Buyers, beware

I don't know eBay rules, or even if the seller is serious. But surely this sale will not go through?



$430 bid for the box an iPad came in. On the one hand, the ad clearly says, "the ipad 2 box does not come with ipad 2 or any accessories.this auction is for the box only.it's for someone whom are trying to get the box to make their ipad 2 complete."

On the other hand, the box is also described as having "Connectivity: Wi-Fi + 3G" and "Storage Capacity: 32 GB." I'll bet it doesn't.

How to get on the wrong side of the internets, conclusion

Under a storm of negative publicity over acts of plagiarism and jaw-dropping ignorance of copyright law, Cook's Source magazine has been hounded into oblivion. Let that stand as two warnings: if you publish, you need a basic understanding of copyright; and, in the internet age, that presumed non-entity on the other end of your emails just might be able to conjure up a horde of rampaging barbarians faster than a Capital One commercial.

OED going all digital?

Here's a careless bit of writing:

The Oxford English Dictionary, as legendary as it is heavy, is facing a bleak future as there's not much of a market these days for a reference book that weighs 130 pounds.

The dictionary's publisher, Oxford University Press, said that the OED's online version gets two million hits a month. And that's from users who pay $295 a year to be able to access the exhaustive word list.

The point, of course -- and the article does get this right, despite those poorly-paired paragraphs -- is that the OED is doing just fine. In fact, it might be doing even better now that its clumsy technological limitations have been overcome. People are using the OED.

That $295/year, by the way, is the subscription rate for individuals and I expect most of those 2 million hits are coming from academic institutions who pay more, but provide most of the users. It's true that the OED online will never inspire the same awe as the rows and rows of hardbound volumes did -- but dammit, now everyone can use the thing!

No swearing allowed!

No swearing allowed! Even if it's not aloud! That's the new rule at Goldman Sachs, which has banned profanity in emails. Apparently, upper management was driven almost to the bring of hiri kiri when the world discovered one of their employees was so depraved as to write to another, "that was one shitty deal." If the world is forgiving enough, perhaps this drastic act of atonement will allow them to show their faces again.

It's not clear whether fines will be levied on people writing profane emails, but the article mentions that swearing on the trading floor can earn a trader a fine as large as $20,000. It just goes to show how well paid those traders are - you can't hope to modify their behavior for less than $1000 (the fine for a first offense).

Seriously. In the middle of the worst economic crisis since Herbert Hoover, Goldman-Sachs has nothing better to worry about?

As for the schmoes in the office, if they do get hit with fines ... they'll want to know what happens with the money:

Selling your soul

I missed this when it hit the news two weeks ago, but some 7500 gamers unwittingly sold their souls to GameStation earlier this month. In an April Fool's joke, but one with a serious point to make, they inserted the following clause into their online contract;

"By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions."

The point, of course, is how many of us click through contracts without really reading them. Bad on us. The roughly 10% who did read it, and selected the opt-out option provided, were rewarded with a £5 voucher and the right to entertain other options on their souls. Perhaps the most amusing part - or, perhaps not - is that the company feels compelled to email all these people and explicitly waive all claims to any souls, just because there are a lot of yahoos who would seriously worry about a thing like that.

Herding cats

Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is True links to one of my favorite commercials on all time:

Advertising v. royalties, QED

So are copyright owners harmed or helped when their material gets uploaded to YouTube? Are they being deprived of well-deserved royalties, or does the exposure count as free advertising that ultimately benefits them beyond any fees they could have realistically commanded?

The recently-released documents regarding Viacom's lawsuit against Google would seem to dispose of that question. It appears that even as Viacom was suing Google over unauthorized uploads, they were aggressively using YouTube as an indispensable marketing tool. The word-of-the-moment is "viral," the geometric expansion of attention as YouTube clips get linked from blogs, which get linked from more blogs, etc., until it's so famous that you can get a symphony orchestra to accompany a cat on the piano. Who, with anything to sell, wouldn't kill for that kind of fame?

What Viacom did (and it's surely a widespread practice) was not only post videos to YouTube, but go to great lengths to pretend that the clips were uploaded without authorization, or had even been stolen. They had third parties use untraceable email accounts, or reduced the quality to make it appear that they had been surreptitiously acquired, to disguise their advertising campaign as grassroots enthusiasm. Google charges that Viacom's smoke screen was so effective that they frequently lost track themselves, demanding their own clips be removed and later asking for reinstatement.

Google argues this as proof that they can't possibly keep track of authorized v. unauthorized uploads, if Viacom can't keep track of their own work. We'll see how that works out as a legal argument, but I'm more interested in the economic reality it indicates. As with radio play, free advertising benefits the bottom line far more than does trying to squeeze every last dime of performance royalties. At least, Viacom thinks so and they probably know their business.

Is the Kindle succeeding?

Via The Scholarly Kitchen:

Doing the Kindle Math — Does Amazon’s Opacity Conceal a Shameful Truth?

[V]ery few have seen fit to question the actual success of the current market leader, Amazon’s Kindle. That may be changing, as Amazon’s steadfast refusal to release sales figures and reliance on convoluted statistics is wearing thin. Blogger Mike Cane has gone so far as to call the Kindle “an outright fraud”.... Cane has called on publishers to start releasing e-book sales numbers, and suggests we’re going to be shocked at how low they are.

Faces, faces

American Express has this neat commercial where they've created happy and sad faces out of everyday objects:



It's easy to do, of course, because human brains are more or less programmed to identify faces; almost any upside-down triangle arrangement has a chance to trigger this sort of recognition. Amex did a clever job of choosing unexpected objects to represent the faces, but they were able to make them quite clear.

Sometimes you come across a natural arrangement that isn't quite so perfect, yet still triggers recognition - an even stronger indication of just how prone we are to finding faces. For example, this goofy, but happy, tree:

Those medical decisions ...

Apparently, this can happen in Canada, too: small-minded bureaucrats making medical decisions, instead of your competent doctor. As you can probably predict, it's not a government denying health care - it's the hack at the insurance company.

A Quebec woman on long-term sick leave is fighting to have her benefits reinstated after her employer's insurance company cut them, she says, because of photos posted on Facebook ....

She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on the popular social networking site, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday — evidence that she is no longer depressed, Manulife said.

There's no indication that any medical professional was consulted before deciding to cut off benefits. Anyone competent in mental health could have told them that depression is episodic, or that a depressed person will put on a good face at times, or try to have fun even when it takes an effort. I can't imagine a doctor would try to make a clinical diagnosis based on a handful of photographs, especially non-representative party pics. But then, a doctor doesn't have a financial incentive to deny treatment.

Oh, just to make it creepier: Blanchard claims that she posted those photos under private settings, meaning they were supposed to be visible only to people she had approved. If that's true, every Facebook user ought to be asking how an insurance company managed to get access to them.

[via ars technica]

The Little Leather Library

A few months ago, I found a set of miniature books at Mom's house that looked rather old and which I don't recall ever seeing before. They were sitting in the garage, which has the typical lack of climate-control - so I brought them home for better care.

They turned out to be a set of books from the Little Leather Library, which published over a hundred classic titles from about 1916-1926. The brown book in the photo is one of the earlier editions, but the rest (with the green covers) would date from between 1920-1924. I had imagined that Mom's parents bought these for their kids sometime while they were growing up, but they actually predate her parents' marriage in 1925.

I don't know whether it was my grandmother or grandfather who bought them, but they would have been affordable to a young adult or a newlywed couple. They were mainly sold in sets, at prices that came to about 10¢ per copy. Early editions were sold through Woolworths department stores, but later they were marketed directly through the mail. I expect these were a set, because otherwise it's hard to imagine my conservative grandparents choosing two Oscar Wilde titles. LLL also published many books of the Bible, but grandma and grandpa would have already had Bibles.

The Little Leather Library was all about bringing classic literature to the masses, at as cheap a price as possible. Classic literature, of course, meant out-of-copyright, royalty-free literature; to further reduce costs, the original leather covers were quickly replaced by cheaper synthetic covers. However, the expensive look remained, as the publishers understood that middle America not only wanted good literature to read, but wanted nice things to display in their homes. One of the publishers even later coined the term "furniture books" to describe volumes which sold on appearance as much as literary content.* Their success can be gauged by the fact that the little books aren't rare: you can find them on E-Bay for about $3-4 dollars per book.

As a point of interest, LLL founder Albert Boni went on to found the Modern Library; the men who bought the company from him, Harry Scherman and Maxwell Sackheim, later started the Book-of-the-Month Club.


For more, see Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: the Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire , or Little Leather Library


Titles:
Robert Browning, Poems and Plays
Robert Burns, Poems and Songs
Samuel T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems
W.S. Gilbert, The "Bab" Ballads
Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Addresses
Thomas Babington Macauley, Lays of Ancient Rome
Thomas Babington Macauley, Lays of Ancient Rome (misidentified on the cover as Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish)
Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisande
Olive Schreiner, Dreams
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Enoch Arden and other Poems
Henry David Thoreau, Friendship and other Essays
George Washington, Speeches and Letters
Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol and other Peoms
Oscar Wilde, Salomé
Multiple authors, Fifty Best Poems of America

_________________
* No to accuse my grandparents of mere pretension, however. Grandma was the daughter of a newspaper publisher and raised a family that valued education.

Your 2-minute giggle

Via The Scholarly Kitchen, "apple-polishing at Apple:"

An observation on social media

From The Scholarly Kitchen, an interesting comment on the "narcissism" of Facebook and other social media:

And this is where the real twist comes in — students, in general, don’t have anything other than themselves and their social lives to promote via social media. But once they’ve published books, established consultancies, started careers, invested in hobbies, etc., you can bet they’ll turn immediately to social media to promote aspects of these goods and services ... It might look like narcissism now, but really, it’s just practice.

In which Microsoft makes me giggle

Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo have teamed up to form something called the "Open Books Alliance" to oppose the Google Books settlement. You can read about it here.

"Open Books Alliance." At least they got that last part right. But it's worth noting that Microsoft is the only one who has been in the book digitizing business and they quit when they couldn't figure out how to make money at it. Now they say it's unfair that someone with a better business model will have an advantage over their own inferior business model. Yes, exactly. Free enterprise is supposed to work that way.

Let me repeat it again: Google is the only one doing this because they're currently the only ones who have both the desire and the financial incentive to do so. That's not a monopoly, at least not in any restraint-of-trade sense.

I suppose I can understand MS's confusion, though - it's a novelty for them to be on this side of a monopoly complaint.

IP and OLD technology meeting a changed culture

James asked for a post on the pending legislation that would require radio stations to compensate performers for playing their music on the air. So here goes.

The crux of the issue is this: when a radio station broadcasts a song, they have to pay royalties. But those royalties are due only to the composer of the song, not the performer. I'm not sure entirely why, other than that this arrangement dates back to the early 1920's when it was more common to identify a song by the composer than by the performer. Few composers would ever sing their own tunes and, for example, a Gershwin tune would remain a Gershwin tune regardless of who sang it. The notion of a "cover," have to acknowledge the fact that you're not the first to sing this song, would have generally been a redundancy.*

Well, times have changed and people care more about who sang the song than they do about who wrote it (if they're not the same person). A lot of folk won't recognize the names Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, but they can't help but think of Elvis Presley if they hear "Hound Dog" (most won't know that he didn't sing the real lyrics, either). Does it make a difference to heavy metal fans whether "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" is performed by Judas Priest or Pat Boone? You better believe it. Performers have eclipsed composers in the public's mind when they think of musical creativity.

So, if radio stations have to pay the composers when they broadcast music, why shouldn't they have to pay performers, too? Indeed, why not? I can't think of any good reason at all.**

Of course, the broadcasters can think up one really good reason why they don't want to, and plenty of weaker reasons why they shouldn't. To my mind, almost none of them fly.

First off, let's dispense with the BS about royalty fees representing a "tax." Royalties aren't taxes; people just hate the word more. That's just faster-than-78-rpm spin.

Nor will it drive radio stations out of business, or force them all to become talk radio stations (surely that market is already saturated!). We've heard it all before, every time the minimum wage goes up or automobile fuel efficiency standards are raised. "Can't be done! We'll all go out of business!" Nonsense. Remember how you used to see McDonald's and Burger King on every street corner, until they raised the minimum wage in 1993? And now you just can't find a fast food res - yeah, right.

You have to try to pass the cost on to your customers, but so do all your competitors. Unless the customers stop patronizing all of you, they end up paying the cost and everything goes on as before. Unless advertisers desert radio altogether, they'll just have to make their contribution to paying those royalties.***

The broadcasters do have one true argument. It's not really a legal argument, but they simply point out how much musicians benefit from having their music on the radio. And indeed they do. The payola scandals of the 1950's prove it - it was considered cheating for a record label to pay the radio stations to play certain artists. This wouldn't make any sense if they thought of that broadcast as a rip-off, but is perfectly sensible if they viewed it as advertising that boosted their overall revenue. Follow the money, if you want to know what they really believe.

Here's my take. Demanding revenues for the performers is perfectly fair and justified. However, it might be short sighted, especially if the fees are too hefty. So let's do this: let's let someone muscular, like Clear Channel, refuse to broadcast any music unless the performers pay for the advertisement. The market can be the referee and we'll see who really had whom by the balls all along.



[PS. The ringtone post was already getting long, or I would have discussed the performance-as-advertising aspect of that case. There should certainly be some awareness that selling ringtones has increased the market for popular music, to the artists' advantage. They deserve their cut, but trying to milk it that hard just shows a certain lack of respect for how little they directly contributed to expanding their own market.]

[PPS. It occurs to me (soemtime later) that composers for theater still enjoy preeminence over the performers. For example, Andrew Lloyd Weber enjoys a tighter association with his music more than any singer ever will, not even Sarah Brightman. I presume this reflects the difference between a transitory stage performance vs. the "imperishable" recorded performance.]


_____________________
* This may have much to do with the relative infancy of the recording business, too. In the age of live music, the performance was transitory and only the composition could have any permanence.

** In fact, internet radio - under more recent legislation - is already doing just that and would like to see the playing field leveled.

*** The broadcasters do point out that advertising receipts are down, but that can mean one of only two things: everything will be fine once the economy improves, or else radio is a failing industry anyway. Either way, special protections don't make long term sense.

Can't argue with this

On insularity

It takes a special level of cluelessness to allow a multinational corporation to publish ads of a Hindu goddess eating hamburgers. And Burger King has achieved it.

You CAN buy this kind of press

Elsevier is caught trying to bribe 5-star Amazon reviews for one of its textbooks.

Congratulations and thank you for your contribution to Clinical Psychology. Now that the book is published, we need your help to get some 5 star reviews posted to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble to help support and promote it. As you know, these online reviews are extremely persuasive when customers are considering a purchase. For your time, we would like to compensate you with a copy of the book under review as well as a $25 Amazon gift card.

This is the same company that has been publishing fake journals that were designed to hide the fact that they were nothing but corporate advertising.

Here's my favorite part - the attempt at damage control that proves they really don't get it:

Cindy Minor, marketing manager for science and technology at Elsevier, said that the e-mail did not reflect Elsevier policy. She called the request for five star reviews "a poorly written e-mail" by "an overzealous employee."

Poorly written? Is there some clever way to write a bribe offer that would be something other than a bribe offer? Bribery is wrong only when it's done without a sense of style? Why do people always do this - you get caught in a bad action and you apologize only for the fact that it looked bad?



[via librarian.net]

Bad advertising

I like the Great Wraps restaurant next to campus, but I have no idea what they were thinking when they put out this sign:

Open Access Week

This is Open Access Week at the University of Michigan and I wish I could attend the events; unfortunately, I have places I need to be (at another institution, no less) and won't be able to grace them with my presence. I have to content myself with having helped contribute a poster.