Friday News: Kobo nixes tablets, grammar rules you can forget, libraries and Adobe ADE, and Agatha Christie’s jewels
Publishing NewsAdobe / Agatha Christie / auctions / DRM / e-readers / Ebooks / grammar / Kobo / Libraries / privacy / security / Tablets / writing7 Comments
Kobo: tablets ‘no longer a focus’ – So Kobo President Michael Tamblyn has confirmed that Kobo is not going to be developing any more tablets, but will focus on the Kobo Touch, Kobo Aura and the new H2O. Without enough “unique content,” according to analyst Douglas McCabe, Kobo is now more like Barnes and Noble than Amazon.
Tamblyn added that its “most valuable customer for us is the customer who reads on e-ink devices and tablets. They are worth 23% more to us in terms of sales”. . . .
Douglas McCabe, analyst with Enders Analysis based in London, said that Kobo needed to acquire exclusive content to be competitive in the e-reading market. “Kobo has to establish itself as the niche e-reader competitor to Amazon’s Kindle,” he said. “The tablet market has too many very successful players—Apple, Samsung, Sony, Google, Tesco, Amazon itself. Kobo is lost on that battlefield.” –The Bookseller
Steven Pinker: These Are the Grammar Rules You Don’t Need to Follow – Steven Pinker, who is chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, challenges a number of the grammatical “rules” that people often struggle to follow, including split infinitives, dangling modifiers, contractions like “ain’t” and other examples of usage Pinker says are either not true rules or are imperiling to clear speech and conversation. There is a lot that people who scoff at grammatical formalism will love, and some generally interesting insights into language and communication. I thought his comments on “classic style” were incredibly useful for thinking about why we gravitate toward broad acceptance of a certain style of writing:
Classic style makes writing, which is necessarily artificial, as artificially natural as possible, if you’d pardon the oxymoron. That is, you’re not physically with someone when you write. You’re not literally having a conversation with them, but classic style simulates those experiences and so it takes an inherently artificial situation, namely writing, and it simulates a more natural interaction, the more natural interaction being (a) conversation (b) seeing the world. So two people in the same place, one of whom directs the other’s attention to something in the world, is a natural way in which two people interact and classic style simulates that. –New Republic
The Reader Has No Clothes – A nice, succinct post about the implications of the new Adobe Digital Editions on libraries and librarians, which are in a unique position in that library patrons won’t necessarily know about the surveillance when they take out library books, even though they have no choice about the book’s format. So privacy concerns with libraries are not singular, but they are specific and require a pointed conversation about how to protect patron privacy while still maintaining ebook collections.
Librarians who have ebook collections need to inform their patrons right now that if they are using the latest Adobe Digital Editions software, their reading history, including ebooks they didn’t borrow from the library, belongs to Adobe and anyone else who’s watching. (See how librarians at Ryerson responded within 24 hours.) Next, they have to figure out what steps to take to fix the problem.Beyond that, we all need to have a serious conversation of whether our devotion to privacy is merely lip service, an old-fashioned hang-up we have decided doesn’t matter anymore and should scrub from the American Library Association website, or whether we will actually, you know, stand up for it. Because right now, that’s not happening. –Inside Higher Ed
Crime writer Agatha Christies’s lost diamonds to be auctioned – Eight years ago, Jennifer Grant bought a trunk owned by Agatha Christie for a mere £100, and then didn’t open it for several years. So imagine her surprise when she finally pried the thing open and found a literal treasure. So if you’re an Agatha Christie fan, you may be able to own a piece of the writer’s jewelry, which will be auctioned off at Bonhams in Knightsbridge. I’m always amazed at these kinds of stories — I’m lucky if I win one new lottery ticket from a pile of scratchers.
Four years after buying the trunk, Mrs Grant had builders in and wrenched open the box with a crowbar.
Inside she found a purse of gold coins, a diamond brooch and a three-stone diamond ring, items that are mentioned in Agatha Christie’s biography as pieces earmarked for her and her sister Madge. –BBC
Good for Ryerson to get the privacy officer in on this because here in Ontario we have very strict privacy rules regarding data collection and its usage. I can see Adobe taking all of this reading data and selling it to companies as market research. I think the next step is to take all of those super long terms and agreements that no one reads and to make them short, plain language, and in bullet points. No more burying things in legalese.
One thing I haven’t seen anywhere in the recent Adobe reader coverage is a mention of Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture a few years back. Omniture is a major player in web analytics and consumer behavior tracking and that acquisition made Adobe a leader in that space too. If you shop online or have other online accounts, Adobe likely has a lot more data about you than just your reading habits.
The fact that is was Agatha Christie’s diamonds makes it even better. Now that’s a twist ending she would have appreciated.
@Milly: I think the next step is to take all of those super long terms and agreements that no one reads and to make them short, plain language, and in bullet points. No more burying things in legalese. Wouldn’t that be a giant leap for customer-kind. That would get my vote!
For what it’s worth, the American Library Association (through both the Information Technology and Intellectual Freedom offices) is investigating the Adobe debacle. The Councillors that I know are all furious about this, but want to make sure that they have all the facts before they issue a statement and make recommendations to librarians.
(The ALA has no legal authority over US libraries and librarians, but we do tend to take what they say [about library issues, at least, not when they dabble in foreign policy] very seriously. )
@Milly: There’s always https://tosdr.org. They’re nowhere near as comprehensive as anyone would like, but it’s a start.
Here’s my fantasy: some tech-savvy people (funded by a crowdsource maybe) create an open-platform e-reading format that works on any device, is non-proprietary, non-DRM-able, and it becomes the standard format. So that readers (and writers, and publishers) aren’t tied to a particular company’s whims and policy changes and privacy violations, and legal theft of their legitimately-purchased books.
Yes, I’m a wild-eyed, unrealistic optimist. That’s my burden to bear.