Monday News: 2014 book sales, public-use photo app, feminism & media critique, and photographer explores anxiety in self-portraits
Publishing Newsanxiety / audiobooks / copyright / creative commons license / digital books / feminism / media critique / mobile applications / photography / publishing / subscription services1 Comments
The Verdict on 2014: Sales up 4.6% – 2014 book sales data shows a slight increase in digital books (3.8%), which represented an increase in unit sales of only 0.2%, because of higher digital book prices. Digital audiobooks also increased by 26.8% and subscription sales were also robust at $20 million.
Sales in the trade category rose 4.2% over the previous year, while unit sales increased 3.7%, and trade remained the largest category, with revenue from the year at $15.43 billion. AAP includes religion publishing in the trade category, along with adult and children’s sales. As AAP’s earlier data had shown, the fastest-growing category in the trade segment was children’s/young adult, where sales rose 20.9%, to $4.39 billion, and units increased 13.5%. Revenue of adult books fell 1.6% in 2014, as sales in the adult fiction segment fell 2.0% and nonfiction sales dropped 1.1%. –Publishers Weekly
Creative Commons is Out to Kill the Stock Photos Used on eBook Covers, and They Want Your Help – This is definitely one of those apps that makes you say, ‘it’s about time.’ Where finding an image to post that is not rights protected often requires the assistance of a stock photo site, this new mobile app, The List (doesn’t look like there’s an iOS version yet, though), is sort of like Craig’s List for creative commons licensed photos. Need a photo of the Brooklyn Bridge? Someone in NYC may have one you can use, or may be willing to take one for you. Have a great photo you took on vacation in the Florida Keys you want to offer up for use by a blogger, you can make it available through The List. This is a pretty great idea, although Nate Hoffelder points out that there’s not yet a repository of pictures you can browse, and he is looking to follow up with the app developers to see if they are planning to build out the app functions.
For the past six months Creative Commons has been hard at work on a mobile app called The List. This innocuous sounding app is intended to render stock photo sites obsolete by connecting people who need a photo with smartphone owners who don’t mind taking one.
Currently available on Android (from GitHub), The List assembles and maintains lists of locations, people, objects, and events that creators need pictures of. Users can view the requests one at a time and then take and submit photos which fit the descriptions. –Ink, Bits & Pixels (aka The Digital Reader)
Stop Asking “Is This Feminist?” – A really interesting and provocative piece from Lindsay Ellis on the anxiety she sees from many people, especially women, to consume what she would call “feminist approved media.” Acknowledging that there is no such thing, in part because feminism is vast and diverse, and also because media criticism isn’t about measuring personal feelings, but rather investigating the way a work functions according to its media, genre, and social and artistic context, Ellis suggests that instead we distinguish what we like from the way we critique media, which will keep us from engaging in what she sees as a personally contentious debate that devolves into mutual judgments. Ellis also makes note of the disconnect between feminist theory and Internet culture:
Feminist media criticism on the Internet is influenced by an academic framework, but it is far from beholden to it. And as much as I want to pump my fist and hail the power of the people for reclaiming feminism as a grassroots cause, I’m not sure the Internet’s influence on feminist media criticism is a good thing.
Most people, for better or worse, learn about feminist theory through osmosis. Given that we have a theoretical framework that is often misused and misunderstood by the people who appropriate it (I’m looking at you, “Male Gaze”), the discussion on how feminism applies to the media we consume has not only become more diluted, but also far more contentious, and far more controversial. Moya Luckett, media historian and professor at NYU’s Gallatin School, tells me: “Part of the problem with feminist theory and the level of rigor and sophistication it often involves often meant a problematic relationship to a real world context. What I do think is a problem is a lot of this work isn’t understood properly, including by scholars.” –The Mary Sue
Photographer explores her struggle with anxiety in surreal portraits – A sometimes haunting, beautiful, and moving self-portrait series from a photographer who is using art to explore her own anxiety, and who hopes to educate and inspire others.
Photographer and Louisiana State University graduate Katie Joy Crawford has battled both anxiety and depression for more than a decade, which is why she chose her personal fight as the subject matter for her senior thesis work, titled “My Anxious Heart. . . .
Beyond her own personal experiences with mental health, she also wanted to shed some light on common misconceptions about the disorders, which affect more than 40 million people in the U.S. over the age of 18, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. . . .
She hopes that her work helps people, and that others with the same disorders will “celebrate your little victories often and don’t dwell on your bad days. The simplest tasks can be so overwhelming … It’s such a slow process to becoming less and less anxious. It’s smaller than baby steps.” –Mashable
I own a free stock photo site so, after reading this article, I contacted Creative Commons, asking them if they wanted the photos (I have over 10,000 – it is my way of giving back to the blogging world). They replied back, saying they didn’t.
I got the impression they’ll looking for help with coding and perhaps funding and that’s about it. They don’t need photos.