Mike Macartney's Blog, page 2
December 2, 2012
When Digital Files Are Outlawed
The new Apple iTunes 11 is out. It is very social and the Old Man of Cupertino is smiling in Heaven. The Djinn is slowly being forced back into his bottle, the one with the fading bumper sticker on the side, "When Digital Files are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Digital Files." With the new law-and-order sheriff, the black hats are on notice that you do not really own all that much in this life. The earth is the Lord's and you are only borrowing it until the license terms are updated and you hit the "Agree" button again, and the credit card keeps working. In God we trust, everybody else pays cash and obtains.
Back in the day you owned your books and your records and your tapes; why you even owned your old newspapers and magazines. They stacked up in piles in the garage until you could not stand it anymore and joined the neighbors in that social ritual known as a garage sale, followed by a trip to the recycler or the goodwill truck for the less fortunate, those without a garage. In a later time all those sights and sounds ended up on little plastic disks, strips of plastic tape, and spinning wildly on the Mad Hatter's saucer in your very own computer hard drive. All that was yours, you owned it all.
The old owning days are over, and the garage sale will have to have other things to sell. Those new eBooks on the little electric window you peer through to all those other amazing worlds are only rented, like those tapes from the video store. Anytime the store wants them back they push a button somewhere and your magic window closes.
In the new iTunes 11 it is much easier to give Apple all your digital files and rent them back from them for only $24.99/year. Books, movies, music, all of it can be "put in the cloud" and you can access it anywhere, anytime with your magic window or even your old PC computer. But, when the credit card stops, the music stops and that chair you were going to sit on is no longer. You can rent the chair again when you wish to. It is convenient and simple that way.
We are not starshine, we are information, and we only rent it now. Those without the means will wander outside, disconnected in another parallel society of the informationless. They will think different and live different from the people with the windows. They will be the outlaws. Money always separates worlds that way.
Article first published as "When Digital Files Are Outlawed" on Technorati.com
Back in the day you owned your books and your records and your tapes; why you even owned your old newspapers and magazines. They stacked up in piles in the garage until you could not stand it anymore and joined the neighbors in that social ritual known as a garage sale, followed by a trip to the recycler or the goodwill truck for the less fortunate, those without a garage. In a later time all those sights and sounds ended up on little plastic disks, strips of plastic tape, and spinning wildly on the Mad Hatter's saucer in your very own computer hard drive. All that was yours, you owned it all.
The old owning days are over, and the garage sale will have to have other things to sell. Those new eBooks on the little electric window you peer through to all those other amazing worlds are only rented, like those tapes from the video store. Anytime the store wants them back they push a button somewhere and your magic window closes.
In the new iTunes 11 it is much easier to give Apple all your digital files and rent them back from them for only $24.99/year. Books, movies, music, all of it can be "put in the cloud" and you can access it anywhere, anytime with your magic window or even your old PC computer. But, when the credit card stops, the music stops and that chair you were going to sit on is no longer. You can rent the chair again when you wish to. It is convenient and simple that way.
We are not starshine, we are information, and we only rent it now. Those without the means will wander outside, disconnected in another parallel society of the informationless. They will think different and live different from the people with the windows. They will be the outlaws. Money always separates worlds that way.
Article first published as "When Digital Files Are Outlawed" on Technorati.com
November 10, 2012
Website Security
Goodreads is a book social site, but many here have their own websites, and many of those sites are Wordpress web sites.
Here are some ways to protect you Wordpress site from hacking, things I have learned the hard way. Wordpress is hacked constantly and there are holes in it that hackers exploit.
These are easy things to do and habits you can also carry to your other activities online as well.
+++
If you run your small business on a Wordpress site here are a few things you should do to secure it. Mine was hacked recently so I rebuilt it with security in mind.
First step - harden your password. Use 10+ characters with capital letters, numbers and symbols in it. Like (MdefoS567!( -- You can remember it easily as "Open"-My-dog-eats-fleas-on-Saturday-567"bang""Open" (Write down your passwords and login info in applications like "DataVault Password Manager" or something similar to store on your computer - if you use a spreadsheet and somebody gets a virus on your machine they can find the file and know all your passwords. Apps like DataVault are encrypted and you only need to know one password to get into them - make it a hardened one!)
Get rid of plugins. Plugins are insecure so only use a few. Pick ones that have a good history and rating. Don't just add a plugin because it looks like fun. Plugin "toys" can cost you your website.
Security plugins to use are "Hide Login" "Secure Wordpress" "User Security Tools" "Wordpress Firewall2" and "AskApache Password Protect" (There are others, but these are top rated and recommended by security sites.)
If you do not use things like login redirect anybody can get to your login and brute force their way into your site in a few minutes. Just write down your new login address before you enable it or you will not be able to get into your own site.
Make sure you backup you own site and database on your own computer backup drive that you can touch with your hand. If your database is hacked your site is gone and cannot be restored by your host company. It will have to be re-installed from scratch.
Note. You should have two backup drives for your computer with regular backups on them. I just lost my backup drive when it crashed the disk and had to have a data recovery firm pull the data off it. Drives are cheap compared to what you can loose. There are cloud backups now, but they can be expensive if you have large amounts of data to store. The cloud sites, like Apple get hacked also. Here is a real story of just that. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/0...
Turn off comments if you do not need them.
Turn off all guest accounts so that only you can log into your site.
Modify your wordpress theme (and widgets) to get rid of the link to the "Meta" for site admin that appears on pages or footer of some themes.
Change the name of "admin" and never use defaults for anything - like post storage names.
If you don't need a contact form for people to fill out, don't use one - let people contact you directly or through other sites like your twitter or facebook pages. If you use a contact form pick a secure one and install the tools above first so that the form locks out users who try too many times to register for comments. Moderate comments and only allow previous approved users to post directly. (Wordpress setting)
These are a few things to start with as a minimum.
Just write everything down as you go so you do not lock yourself out of your site or forget how to get in.
Here are some ways to protect you Wordpress site from hacking, things I have learned the hard way. Wordpress is hacked constantly and there are holes in it that hackers exploit.
These are easy things to do and habits you can also carry to your other activities online as well.
+++
If you run your small business on a Wordpress site here are a few things you should do to secure it. Mine was hacked recently so I rebuilt it with security in mind.
First step - harden your password. Use 10+ characters with capital letters, numbers and symbols in it. Like (MdefoS567!( -- You can remember it easily as "Open"-My-dog-eats-fleas-on-Saturday-567"bang""Open" (Write down your passwords and login info in applications like "DataVault Password Manager" or something similar to store on your computer - if you use a spreadsheet and somebody gets a virus on your machine they can find the file and know all your passwords. Apps like DataVault are encrypted and you only need to know one password to get into them - make it a hardened one!)
Get rid of plugins. Plugins are insecure so only use a few. Pick ones that have a good history and rating. Don't just add a plugin because it looks like fun. Plugin "toys" can cost you your website.
Security plugins to use are "Hide Login" "Secure Wordpress" "User Security Tools" "Wordpress Firewall2" and "AskApache Password Protect" (There are others, but these are top rated and recommended by security sites.)
If you do not use things like login redirect anybody can get to your login and brute force their way into your site in a few minutes. Just write down your new login address before you enable it or you will not be able to get into your own site.
Make sure you backup you own site and database on your own computer backup drive that you can touch with your hand. If your database is hacked your site is gone and cannot be restored by your host company. It will have to be re-installed from scratch.
Note. You should have two backup drives for your computer with regular backups on them. I just lost my backup drive when it crashed the disk and had to have a data recovery firm pull the data off it. Drives are cheap compared to what you can loose. There are cloud backups now, but they can be expensive if you have large amounts of data to store. The cloud sites, like Apple get hacked also. Here is a real story of just that. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/0...
Turn off comments if you do not need them.
Turn off all guest accounts so that only you can log into your site.
Modify your wordpress theme (and widgets) to get rid of the link to the "Meta" for site admin that appears on pages or footer of some themes.
Change the name of "admin" and never use defaults for anything - like post storage names.
If you don't need a contact form for people to fill out, don't use one - let people contact you directly or through other sites like your twitter or facebook pages. If you use a contact form pick a secure one and install the tools above first so that the form locks out users who try too many times to register for comments. Moderate comments and only allow previous approved users to post directly. (Wordpress setting)
These are a few things to start with as a minimum.
Just write everything down as you go so you do not lock yourself out of your site or forget how to get in.
October 9, 2012
New Book Out
Announcing Cinderella Was Here in ebook and print.
http://www.amazon.com/Cinderella-Was-...
http://www.syeopub.com/archives/produ...
http://www.amazon.com/Cinderella-Was-...
http://www.syeopub.com/archives/produ...
September 14, 2012
On Demand Books at CVS?
Interesting. Print your books at CVS on Kodak machines while you get a prescription filled? I wonder if Kodak will make it?
I have several books on On Demand's Espresso Book Machine that are printed in bookstores and libraries now. This would be a great addition to that.
http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/13/soo...
I have several books on On Demand's Espresso Book Machine that are printed in bookstores and libraries now. This would be a great addition to that.
http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/13/soo...
August 31, 2012
September
"September Song" is the title of a chapter in a book from childhood that always stuck in my mind. Maybe it is because September is such a wonderful month. School is starting again in the last hot and tired days of summer. Frost lingers at the edges just before dawn. The tall grass is dry and dusty, and the trees have weary leaves, a few are starting to drop. Sometimes September is a long month, with the early look of fall in that faded blue sky, just enough indigo left to not yet be October. There are promises of Indian Summer to come and just the touch of red in summer’s apples, to be picked starting at the end of the month. The local apples, eaten warm from the neighborhood trees, are really the best that there are. A great huge yellow moon comes one evening.
The borrowing is from an author no one reads much anymore, Robert Ruark. He wrote in the space somewhere between Hemingway and Jack Kerouac. His writing was much about hunting with his grandfather in North Carolina or hunting birds in Africa or the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. He died a bitter and unhappy drunk in Spain cursing America and the change that happened when he turned to look back at an imagined past perfect. His books and writing were music of a fashion, echoing bitter cold dawns waiting for ducks with a shotgun, or the sound that September makes in the American psyche circa mid 20th century. It was contemporary with the bottled golden elixir that Ray Bradbury sold or the drone of flies in an empty post apocalyptic diner imagined by Rod Serling, for your consideration.
In my September yard the Mexican Sunflowers are wild and past youth, a ragged bush of green and orange. Wasps and flies visit the tray of water on the bench next to them all day long. At other times there mourning doves sit quietly beside the water or sparrows flit and dance along the rim to drink. A squirrel drops down every now and then from the fence highway. Behind the sunflowers is buried an old orange cat that used to sit on the roof and watch the neighborhood. Everybody all around knew the cat and some fed it. It expired one day in a back alley between houses. My kids and the neighbor kids buried it there by the sunflower planter. Five sparrows are also in the ground with it. When I started to trim a bush in front of the house in the spring there was a nest in it with two little birds. When they jumped down one night learning to fly a cat got them and tore their heads off. The same thing happened to a small tree by the back window with three more birds killed the same way, after I waited a month before trimming the tree so they would be gone first.
Last night there was a skunk outside the window. Skunk smell has never really bothered me and it went on its way before I went to sleep. There is a raccoon that looks at you from a storm drain one street over from its nest in the dry leaves at the bottom. The neighborhood is lousy with crows now in the mornings. Glittering black eyes in black faces watching everything carefully from all the lawns.
On a hike in a park above Silicon Valley a while back a bobcat dropped in to walk on the path 75 yards in front. It did not like my walking behind it and faded off into the dry weeds beside the trail. From the top of the hill I saw two coyotes were bouncing along the trail below, next to an old abandoned apricot orchard. They hopped a few feet off the trail and vanished as if they never were.
My younger son rides horses and is a groom at a big stable in Palo Alto. I can remember fall nights sitting on a chair on the porch of the lesson office, watching a lesson and having a raccoon scurry under my chair. Another time the horses got loose at night and ran like thunder down the dirt road in the pitch black, like heavy trucks thudding by and shaking the ground. The deer come down from the neighborhood hills in the dusk there and sit on the dressage ring ground to watch tiny children jump 1200-pound quadrupeds over white rails.
Last afternoon a big hawk glided over the trees up above Stanford University when I went to pick up my son for dinner. Another one came up from below and turned upside down so they could clash talons together, and then each went off to sit at the very topmost bits of two redwood trees. His two big dogs, one 100 lb. Labrador - Great Dane and one goofy Doberman, both from rescues, were particularly loud barkers when I came up.
We, the species with the big brain, are very close to unwinding the chemical helix that makes all the rest and us. It is only a short step then to learn to knit our own codes to make process all life. We struggle with our teeming numbers and what that means to a crowded and troubled planet that becomes less and less interesting, less and less special every day. Many hope that the big brain will make fast ships again, to take us first to Mars, then to everywhere else in the heavens, to escape ourselves.
The leaving for some place better in the mind, means crossing a vast darkness. We would sail in a wind of bits of atoms and the glare of harsh rays that can burn the life right out of you. It means to move our weak and fragile selves through nothing save the breath of stars, to land somewhere where we will build the first outposts of extraterrestrial humanity, where things will be better.
The question is not if we can go out to other worlds, or how we would do it, or even why. The real question is: “will we be happy there without September?”
The borrowing is from an author no one reads much anymore, Robert Ruark. He wrote in the space somewhere between Hemingway and Jack Kerouac. His writing was much about hunting with his grandfather in North Carolina or hunting birds in Africa or the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. He died a bitter and unhappy drunk in Spain cursing America and the change that happened when he turned to look back at an imagined past perfect. His books and writing were music of a fashion, echoing bitter cold dawns waiting for ducks with a shotgun, or the sound that September makes in the American psyche circa mid 20th century. It was contemporary with the bottled golden elixir that Ray Bradbury sold or the drone of flies in an empty post apocalyptic diner imagined by Rod Serling, for your consideration.
In my September yard the Mexican Sunflowers are wild and past youth, a ragged bush of green and orange. Wasps and flies visit the tray of water on the bench next to them all day long. At other times there mourning doves sit quietly beside the water or sparrows flit and dance along the rim to drink. A squirrel drops down every now and then from the fence highway. Behind the sunflowers is buried an old orange cat that used to sit on the roof and watch the neighborhood. Everybody all around knew the cat and some fed it. It expired one day in a back alley between houses. My kids and the neighbor kids buried it there by the sunflower planter. Five sparrows are also in the ground with it. When I started to trim a bush in front of the house in the spring there was a nest in it with two little birds. When they jumped down one night learning to fly a cat got them and tore their heads off. The same thing happened to a small tree by the back window with three more birds killed the same way, after I waited a month before trimming the tree so they would be gone first.
Last night there was a skunk outside the window. Skunk smell has never really bothered me and it went on its way before I went to sleep. There is a raccoon that looks at you from a storm drain one street over from its nest in the dry leaves at the bottom. The neighborhood is lousy with crows now in the mornings. Glittering black eyes in black faces watching everything carefully from all the lawns.
On a hike in a park above Silicon Valley a while back a bobcat dropped in to walk on the path 75 yards in front. It did not like my walking behind it and faded off into the dry weeds beside the trail. From the top of the hill I saw two coyotes were bouncing along the trail below, next to an old abandoned apricot orchard. They hopped a few feet off the trail and vanished as if they never were.
My younger son rides horses and is a groom at a big stable in Palo Alto. I can remember fall nights sitting on a chair on the porch of the lesson office, watching a lesson and having a raccoon scurry under my chair. Another time the horses got loose at night and ran like thunder down the dirt road in the pitch black, like heavy trucks thudding by and shaking the ground. The deer come down from the neighborhood hills in the dusk there and sit on the dressage ring ground to watch tiny children jump 1200-pound quadrupeds over white rails.
Last afternoon a big hawk glided over the trees up above Stanford University when I went to pick up my son for dinner. Another one came up from below and turned upside down so they could clash talons together, and then each went off to sit at the very topmost bits of two redwood trees. His two big dogs, one 100 lb. Labrador - Great Dane and one goofy Doberman, both from rescues, were particularly loud barkers when I came up.
We, the species with the big brain, are very close to unwinding the chemical helix that makes all the rest and us. It is only a short step then to learn to knit our own codes to make process all life. We struggle with our teeming numbers and what that means to a crowded and troubled planet that becomes less and less interesting, less and less special every day. Many hope that the big brain will make fast ships again, to take us first to Mars, then to everywhere else in the heavens, to escape ourselves.
The leaving for some place better in the mind, means crossing a vast darkness. We would sail in a wind of bits of atoms and the glare of harsh rays that can burn the life right out of you. It means to move our weak and fragile selves through nothing save the breath of stars, to land somewhere where we will build the first outposts of extraterrestrial humanity, where things will be better.
The question is not if we can go out to other worlds, or how we would do it, or even why. The real question is: “will we be happy there without September?”
August 22, 2012
Whew
Finished the six modern romance stories for "Cinderella Was Here" and sent them off to the editor.
Put together a cover and hope to have the book out in October - one story is about a Halloween costume. A very special costume.
Other stories are SciFi, Twilight Zone, Horror and even a couple about regular people working hard in these days of trial.
Put together a cover and hope to have the book out in October - one story is about a Halloween costume. A very special costume.
Other stories are SciFi, Twilight Zone, Horror and even a couple about regular people working hard in these days of trial.
August 18, 2012
Foundation, Empire, Second Foundation
With apologies to Isaac Asimov.
Back in the last century, about half way through, and just before the great war that laid the foundation of the American Empire, there were bad times. All over. Everyone everywhere was lost and in search of security and order - and empire. In the middle of that a little government agency, called the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created. It was part of the government response to the Great Depression and tried to catch the falling collapse of agriculture, America’s biggest economy at the time. One of the things it did was to send out a pack of unemployed artists, in this case photographers, to look at America. Magic happened. Some of the best and most powerful images ever taken of America and its people blinked to existence. They are a national treasure and kept in the Smithsonian.
You have seen many of the black and white photos from this effort, by now famous photographers like Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Dorthea Lang. Recently the Denver Post Photo Blogs published some of the color capture of this time and place. Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943. http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/... Have a look.
Are these the people who made the greatest accidental empire the world has ever seen? Shsss, don’t tell anybody - all empires are accidental. “Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations” “Empire to empire in . . .” Look at the faces, the land, the technology. It is gone and distant and strange today. The context these people lived in and the thoughts they had and the way they explained life and their place in it, are only left in these colorful shadows of the once was.
The scribes and thought shapers and those who want to take credit will tell you that: “America is not imperial.” “America is not an empire.” “America is different and special in history.” Yes, they are absolutely correct. You only have to look at these photographs and others like them to know that. People driving horses and wagons, dripping oil on steam engine wheels, and sitting in the dirt eating white bread off paper plates are not imperial storm troopers. They were not the foundations of empire. What a stupid idea. Nobody will buy THAT book. Except that they did, and a million books have been written, read, written again, and then again.
There are many times many answers and opinions and myths about how America got from there, in these photographs, to here in 2012. Stories about the strange and magnificent “founding fathers” who were not really human at all, but angles sent to light our way and give use “The Constitution” to guide us in our struggle against the darkness. Sound like some of the things you have heard on CSPAN or at a Sarah speech? Then there are the stories about our virtue and morality and hard work and innovation and freedoms and capitalism handed down generation to generation to carry on the great experiment in Democracy. Not to worry, no more examples! The difficulty is squaring all the opinions with the photographs. Doesn’t work with that “Greatest Generation” pap either. Look at the pictures again.
The people and the world and the beliefs of the people in these photographs are gone forever. So it the world of 1776 and the world of 1968 and the world of 1997. These photographs are so powerful and regarded as a national treasure because they show a painfully clear snapshot of people and meaning from the middle of “The American Century.” When people drove horses to town and had outhouses. Just 70 years ago. You can see it and imagine it and go back to it.
It might be time to send unknown artists out again to see what America and Americans look like now. Really look like. Are they people who will try build the road to empire or the meek followers of the road to yesterday’s history. Same road, same amount of work. Has to be paved by every generation new. Only they own it. Put down the struggle and it changes in the blink of a thought, and is undone like it never was.
It is all about what you believe together, and how hard you work - and how the dice fall. Without the dice the other two do not get you there. Catch 22.
Back in the last century, about half way through, and just before the great war that laid the foundation of the American Empire, there were bad times. All over. Everyone everywhere was lost and in search of security and order - and empire. In the middle of that a little government agency, called the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created. It was part of the government response to the Great Depression and tried to catch the falling collapse of agriculture, America’s biggest economy at the time. One of the things it did was to send out a pack of unemployed artists, in this case photographers, to look at America. Magic happened. Some of the best and most powerful images ever taken of America and its people blinked to existence. They are a national treasure and kept in the Smithsonian.
You have seen many of the black and white photos from this effort, by now famous photographers like Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Dorthea Lang. Recently the Denver Post Photo Blogs published some of the color capture of this time and place. Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943. http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/... Have a look.
Are these the people who made the greatest accidental empire the world has ever seen? Shsss, don’t tell anybody - all empires are accidental. “Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations” “Empire to empire in . . .” Look at the faces, the land, the technology. It is gone and distant and strange today. The context these people lived in and the thoughts they had and the way they explained life and their place in it, are only left in these colorful shadows of the once was.
The scribes and thought shapers and those who want to take credit will tell you that: “America is not imperial.” “America is not an empire.” “America is different and special in history.” Yes, they are absolutely correct. You only have to look at these photographs and others like them to know that. People driving horses and wagons, dripping oil on steam engine wheels, and sitting in the dirt eating white bread off paper plates are not imperial storm troopers. They were not the foundations of empire. What a stupid idea. Nobody will buy THAT book. Except that they did, and a million books have been written, read, written again, and then again.
There are many times many answers and opinions and myths about how America got from there, in these photographs, to here in 2012. Stories about the strange and magnificent “founding fathers” who were not really human at all, but angles sent to light our way and give use “The Constitution” to guide us in our struggle against the darkness. Sound like some of the things you have heard on CSPAN or at a Sarah speech? Then there are the stories about our virtue and morality and hard work and innovation and freedoms and capitalism handed down generation to generation to carry on the great experiment in Democracy. Not to worry, no more examples! The difficulty is squaring all the opinions with the photographs. Doesn’t work with that “Greatest Generation” pap either. Look at the pictures again.
The people and the world and the beliefs of the people in these photographs are gone forever. So it the world of 1776 and the world of 1968 and the world of 1997. These photographs are so powerful and regarded as a national treasure because they show a painfully clear snapshot of people and meaning from the middle of “The American Century.” When people drove horses to town and had outhouses. Just 70 years ago. You can see it and imagine it and go back to it.
It might be time to send unknown artists out again to see what America and Americans look like now. Really look like. Are they people who will try build the road to empire or the meek followers of the road to yesterday’s history. Same road, same amount of work. Has to be paved by every generation new. Only they own it. Put down the struggle and it changes in the blink of a thought, and is undone like it never was.
It is all about what you believe together, and how hard you work - and how the dice fall. Without the dice the other two do not get you there. Catch 22.
July 27, 2012
A Kodak Moment for Books
I feel sorry for Barnes & Noble, the last man standing in the big box print retail business. They are having their Kodak moment. They are flailing in the water next to the ship that is rapidly sinking, but they can't let go of the gunnel. "If we can just arrange the deck chairs once more, everything will be all right...."
In the last year or two B&N has tried taking out large chunks of their inventory and reducing shelf space. They have built up their game section and have tried white label presses for old and non-mainstream books. They have reprinted old classics in hardcover, like Poe, at huge prices, and printed hardcovers with cheap graphics on the cover and no dust jackets. The stores added new sections: like "teen" to traditional fiction and mysteries, and put small nook ereader displays in and then made them much larger, and so on and so on. But never have they relaxed their white knuckled grip on print books and large anchor stores, at least in Northern California where I live.
I walked through the local B&N in Silicon Valley on Saturday and looked at the new titles. I photographed a few with the smart phone to look up later to see what was being said about them and what they were about. The Nook section at the very front this store is larger all the time and there are always a few people in it. The usual old people were sleeping in the soft chairs and there were a couple of people buying things. There were more laptops in the attached Starbucks than people in the bookstore.
Why is B&N afraid to take on Amazon head-to-head? It would be scary and unknown waters, and they might drown, but they are slowly drowning now. Why not go down fighting? Why not create a phone app to allow shoppers to scan the bar code on a book and get the reviews of it? Why not have the app give a menu of things to check about the book? Why not have another app that allows the shopper to buy an ebook of the book and download it to their Nook while they are shopping, so they can read it when they get home? Why not have the app email the ebook to the shoppers Kindle so they can read the book on their Kindle when they get home? Yes, or email the book to the reader's iPad too. Maybe they could get really aggressive and show the shopper the Amazon and Apple prices and match them for price on the book? After all ebooks now outsell hardcovers, what are they protecting?
The apps to buy and review books inside B&N would take all of a month to write, simple. They could use the bar code on the book, nothing special. B&N already has the sales site and the Nook SW done behind it. Kindle and iPad already have email capability to send ebooks to them by anybody, even B&N.
Kodak, B&N, film & books. Why don't these old behemoths shake it off and fight? Guess it just does not work that way. Old dogs, new tricks, slowly dying as the ship sinks.
Originally published on Technorati. http://technorati.com/business/articl...
In the last year or two B&N has tried taking out large chunks of their inventory and reducing shelf space. They have built up their game section and have tried white label presses for old and non-mainstream books. They have reprinted old classics in hardcover, like Poe, at huge prices, and printed hardcovers with cheap graphics on the cover and no dust jackets. The stores added new sections: like "teen" to traditional fiction and mysteries, and put small nook ereader displays in and then made them much larger, and so on and so on. But never have they relaxed their white knuckled grip on print books and large anchor stores, at least in Northern California where I live.
I walked through the local B&N in Silicon Valley on Saturday and looked at the new titles. I photographed a few with the smart phone to look up later to see what was being said about them and what they were about. The Nook section at the very front this store is larger all the time and there are always a few people in it. The usual old people were sleeping in the soft chairs and there were a couple of people buying things. There were more laptops in the attached Starbucks than people in the bookstore.
Why is B&N afraid to take on Amazon head-to-head? It would be scary and unknown waters, and they might drown, but they are slowly drowning now. Why not go down fighting? Why not create a phone app to allow shoppers to scan the bar code on a book and get the reviews of it? Why not have the app give a menu of things to check about the book? Why not have another app that allows the shopper to buy an ebook of the book and download it to their Nook while they are shopping, so they can read it when they get home? Why not have the app email the ebook to the shoppers Kindle so they can read the book on their Kindle when they get home? Yes, or email the book to the reader's iPad too. Maybe they could get really aggressive and show the shopper the Amazon and Apple prices and match them for price on the book? After all ebooks now outsell hardcovers, what are they protecting?
The apps to buy and review books inside B&N would take all of a month to write, simple. They could use the bar code on the book, nothing special. B&N already has the sales site and the Nook SW done behind it. Kindle and iPad already have email capability to send ebooks to them by anybody, even B&N.
Kodak, B&N, film & books. Why don't these old behemoths shake it off and fight? Guess it just does not work that way. Old dogs, new tricks, slowly dying as the ship sinks.
Originally published on Technorati. http://technorati.com/business/articl...
