Friday News: Hachette & Amazon make nice; Internet tax bill; map of uncolonized Africa; Microsoft patches 19-year-old vulnerability; and UK’s Project Remix
Updated: Amazon and Hachette finally reach deal; Hachette will set its ebook prices – The war appears to be over between Hachette and Amazon, and whatever the state of their relationship, readers get the return of Agency Pricing. Yippee.
When the new ebook terms take place in early 2015, “Hachette will have responsibility for setting consumer prices of its ebooks, and will also benefit from better terms when it delivers lower prices for readers. Amazon and Hachette will immediately resume normal trading, and Hachette books will be prominently featured in promotions.”
See that “responsibility for setting consumer prices”? Yep, that’s the return of agency ebook pricing about two and a half years after the Department of Justice first sued Apple and publishers for conspiring to set ebook prices. Obviously, neither Amazon nor Hachette is offering very specific details about the contract they agreed on, but the public disclosures about the deal make it sound similar to the one recently reached between Amazon and Simon & Schuster. — Gigaom
Amazon, Indies, Barnes & Noble Unite for E-tax Fairness – As anyone who orders goods online in the US knows, states have different laws for the collection of sales tax for these internet sales. Although consumers are supposed to pay “use tax” in many states when they are not charged sales tax, the onus is on the consumer to do so at tax time. The push for federal law covering internet sales tax is currently sitting in Congress, and it looks like it’s headed for a showdown between the newly elected Republican majority (forget about it) and the democrats (definitely). This may be one of the few issues on which Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent booksellers agree, so it will be interesting to see what, if anything, happens to the proposed legislation in Congress this year.
Last year the Senate passed the Marketplace Fairness Act by a wide margin. It would force online retailers to collect sales tax if they have $1 million or more in gross sales annually. Part of the reason for the push is that if Congress fails to act during the lame-duck session, the act will die. –Publishers Weekly
Africa, Uncolonized: A Detailed Look at an Alternate Continent – Talk about world building. Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon has rendered what we now know as the continent of Africa as he believes it would be if Europe has never colonized it. What such a historical shift that requires is pretty fascinating to contemplate, because the effects of colonization are global in scope and centuries old in historical sweep. It’s really a provocative undertaking.
To arrive at this map, Cyon constructed an alternative timeline. Its difference from our own starts in the mid-14th century. The point of divergence: the deadliness of the Plague. In our own timeline, over the course of the half dozen years from 1346 to 1353, the Black Death [3] wiped out between 30 and 60% of Europe’s population. It would take the continent more than a century to reach pre-Plague population levels. That was terrible enough. But what if Europe had suffered an even more catastrophic extermination – one from which it could not recover? . . .
Cyon focuses on Africa — or rather, Alkebu-Lan — which in his version of events doesn’t suffer the ignomy and injustice of the European slave trade and subsequent colonization. In our timeline, Europe’s domination of Africa obscured the latter continent’s rich history and many cultural achievements. On the map of Cyon’s Africa, a many-splendored landscape of nations and empires, all native to the continent itself, gives the lie to the 19th- and 20th-century European presumption that Africa merely was a ‘dark continent’ to be enlightened, or a ‘blank page’ for someone else to write upon. –Big Think
Microsoft fixes ’19-year-old’ bug with emergency patch – Oh, Microsoft. Finally fixing a 19-year-old vulnerability that was only discovered a few months ago. According to an IBM researcher, “The bug can be used by an attacker for drive-by attacks to reliably run code remotely and take over the user’s machine.” No biggie, right? Anyway, I hope you PC users have updated your software with the relevant security update.
The bug had been present in every version of Windows since 95, IBM said.
Attackers could exploit the bug to remotely control a PC, and so users are being urged to download updates.
Microsoft?has addressed the problem?in its monthly security update, along with more than a?dozen patches to fix other security issues, with a further two to be rolled out soon. ?–BBC News
Teen readers to remix classic literature into ‘drum and bass anthems and comic strips’ – This is so cool. Waterstone’s Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman is undertaking a project to engage teenagers in reading by getting them to rework some famous works of fiction into other forms of media, including music. The website for the project is www.projectremix.co.uk and some details are below:
The competition, entitled Project Remix, will see teenagers work with a list of 24 works, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
The primary literature will also include contemporary works, including The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, Geek Girl by Holly Smale, and Blackman’s own bestselling Naughts and Crosses.
Readers will be tasked with remixing their chosen text into one of five categories: creative writing, comic strip, cover design, trailer, or music. –Telegraph
I have no idea who “won” or “lost” the feud that Amazon launched against Hachette, but I do know who became collateral damage–Hachette authors. The sanctions Amazon imposed on my Forever Yours books made them drop rapidly from being the the Top 100 of their categories to almost invisible. I am so very pleased this is finally over!!
“Africa, Uncolonized” turns out to be “Africa, Colonized Differently.” I’d like to see someone do a What-If excluding the invaders from the east as well as the ones from the north. It’d be fascinating.
And then, how far back before the Arab invasions could it go? Exclude the Romans and Greeks? A map for each scenario? There were lots of potentially civilisation-destroying plagues over the centuries that could be applied. I wish I had the knowledge for a thought-exercise like that….
MFA supports big business who can absorb the compliance costs and regulation, and foreign biz who will not be touched by the bill. It also hurts Brick/Mortars who have successful websites and states that don’t collect a sales tax…b/c they would have to start. All around unfair and anti-free market…which the bill alludes to by the way it was named.
Search eMainStreet Alliance MFA videos for great resource. Boehner is doing right by killing it and to have forced it through committee where it has stalled due to all the problems w/ the bill.
Re “Africa, Uncolonized” – it seems that “what if the Black Death killed more in Europe than it did” is a popular speculative fiction/alternate history starting point. There was a very interesting book by Kim Stanley Robinson called “The Years of Rice and Salt” that starts with several premises, one of which is that the plague killed about 90% of Europe.
I would agree with Carolyne that you’d have to go really, really far back to remove any trace of invaders’ influence in Africa – I seem to recall reading (lo these many years) of established goods and/or slave trade practice between West Africa and the Near East/Mesopotamia via Egypt, putting that trade route’s timeline at least at 1500-2000 BCE, if not earlier.
@Carolyne: The article makes it clear that the premise is the continent without European colonization, and Cyon was working specifically with that question as his starting point, so I think it’s more that the article title is overbroad.
@cayenne: Cyon is well aware of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work:
Cyon borrowed this counterfactual hypothesis from The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. The book, first published in 2002, explores how the depopulation of Europe would have altered world history. Robinson speculates that Europe would have been colonized by Muslims from the 14th century onwards, and that the 20th century would see a world war between a sprawling Muslim alliance on the one side, and the Chinese empire and the Indian and native American federations on the other.
I highly recommend reading the whole article, and even checking out Cyon’s website, which features a number of his maps and projects.
@Robin/Janet: Yes, that’s the premise. It’s just that it’s less interesting–to me–to look at that colonization developing in place of the other. I’d be much more intrigued by a premise eliminating any drastic cultural invasion more recent than, say, 2500 years ago. Or earlier. I’d still like to see that What-If. That’s just me.
…I wish I could edit my comments.
By which I mean: that’s the premise or story I’d like to see someone wrap their minds around. So I can read about it.
@Robin/Janet – thanks for the additional info…and whoops. I was at work and didn’t have the opportunity to read the article – which I will do now! (It’s much easier to hide slacking at work by commenting since the typing provides camouflage, but clearly it’s not as good for allowing me to offer anything original in those comments, so thank you for your forbearance :D)
You have to go so far back in history and then move forward. Since the 14th century, so many ideas have changed in Europe. In religion, there was one true church. Monarchy was the only way to govern, etc. The borders of so many countries in Central Europe (where there are fewer natural boundaries, like the mountains separating France and Spain or the English Channel) have changed so much.
Take Serbia. It was part of the Roman Empire, the Serbian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Yugoslavia and the Soviet sphere of influence. All of those had very distinct and different cultures.
To create a different path for Africa is to have to create all this history.
@Kimberley: Oh, don’t apologize; you don’t have to read the article if you don’t want to – I just wanted you to know that Cyon was on the same ‘page’ as you with regard to the Robinson book.