Posts by Mark Harris
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Re Sterling.
I didn't go to Webstock this year, so I missed this "controversy" to which you allude. But reading his notes - do people not get the satire in there? -
And that's pretty close to the new business paradigm: publish and hope. Pay if you feel charitable.
Which people are, it seems, if they think your product is worth it. And I doubt that Yale University Press would have published hard copy if they didn't think they'd make any money on it.
if you're thinking of a new career as robbery's spokesperson, you'll need sharper analogies and a more discursive style.
Heaven forfend! :-o
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Is it?
- lack of control over the author's ideas?
- lack of consideration/royalties for the additional format?
- automated text-to-speech readers seem to be built on the chasis of a 2-stroke lawnmower with a broken throttle?
- format shifting becomes easy, royalty-free & awful with kindle-like devices.From the article by the Author's Guild, it appears to be number 2
seems to me that this stuff is a bit like bootlegging a concert.
I thing the Kindle is more like bootlegging a crap covers band singing your hard rock songs a cappella recorded from the radio using a cheap microphone positioned 20 feet from the speaker.
Format shifting is taking a piece of content and moving the identical content from, say, CD to HDD or vinyl to tape. It's still the same content, by the same artist. The Kindle is more about a different access method of the same content and I'd argue that no real value has been added to the work, certainly not in a transformative way.
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I wish they'd put the reader's name on the blurb, so you can decide whether to listen or not. At first, I thought it was paying some homage to Disney documentaries, but it soon became something that left Hawking sounding over-emotional.
Which is why I say the TTS feature on a Kindle was never going to be confused with a good audiobook version. A bad audiobook version is another story...
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For those in London interested in such stuff, James Boyle (author of The Public Domain) is giving a lecture on 10 March
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:-)
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Mark, I think you under-estimate the ingenuity of visually-impaired people - and the portability of laptops.
I think you overestimate the number of blind people with laptops.
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I am all in favour of further developements that help visually-impaired people (well, I would be, wouldnt I?!) I just dont think - given other technology currently available, that the Kindle2 TTS function would help more than a very tiny -&wealthy- percentage of us.
However, successfully blocking the Kindle2 TTS will have a chilling effect on anyone developing a cheaper, better model. If Amazon got knocked back, what chance will they have of getting their feature in. So why bother.
And it condemns blind people who have to use TTS (and not all choose that) to sitting where their computers are, instead of where they want to be, like in bed, or on the deck on a hot day.
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And was Melody Rules really that bad? I confess I didn't see any of it.
I watched the first episode and sought to avoid future contact. The main problem that struck me was Belinda Todd's character and I don't completely blame her for it.
Why they cast someone with a reputation for "zany improv bimbo" (in the nicest possible way) in a straight role I could never understand. Melody was not the comedy character, she was the "sane one in a field of insanity" that everything happened to. Todd cut her teeth on TV3's late news where Joanna Paul filled that role and Todd played the naughty, but sexy, BFF. And they had some good moments together.
I recall the script being very formulaic, and unfunny, and all the 'humour' was channelled through a series of grotesque interludes with 2 dimensional characters impinging on Melody's life. Plus the age of the two kids was enough to push her from MILF to "looking good for her age" territory, which wasn't going to score her points with a large part of the demographic.