Monday News: Super Bowl Commercials; Java Exploits; Beverly Jenkins’ Image Award Nomination; and Small publishers as a growth industry
Publishing NewsBook Awards / book-sales11 Comments
adblitz Did you miss a SuperBowl commercial? Adblitz compiled them all in this channel. Don’t worry, though, they were as sexist as ever. YouTube Ad Blitz Channel
Possibly the best ad, however, was the Oreo twitter response. The power went out in the SuperDome in New Orleans due to a power surge or something (the power company tweeted it wasn’t their fault). Oreo tweeted this ad:
The worst tweets:
Beyonce shit the house down
— Joe Theismann (@Theismann7) February 4, 2013
Oops! He meant shut.
Jay Z’s response summed up the statements of many who suggested Beyonce’s live performance at half time may have sucked up too much energy:
Lights out!!! Any questions??
— Mr. Carter (@S_C_) February 4, 2013
Java zero-day exploit: Don’t patch, just disable Java in your browser. – This past weekend, Twitter released information that over 250,000 accounts had been hacked and usernames and handles as well as encrypted passwords had been compromised. The Wall Street Journal reported that it had been the subject of sophisticated Chinese hack. A few months ago, Homeland Security recommended users disable Java on your browser. The reason is that Java browser plugin is the subject of many of theses hacks. To make your internet browsing safer, Slate’s Ryan Gallagher recommends using Java only in a secondary browser where you visit specific sites but keep Java disabled for most of your internet usage. Slate
As noted before, disabling the Java plug-in on your Web browser doesn’t require uninstalling it from your machine entirely, and it won’t prevent you from Java-based software outside of your Web browser. It just means that you’ll see an image like the screenshot above when you happen to visit one of the relatively few remaining websites that use Java applets. If you find you really need it for some sites, you can always disable it in your main browser but keep it enabled in a secondary browser that you use just for those sites.
Author Beverly Jenkins Nominated for 2013 NAACP Image Award – Author Beverly Jenkins was nominated for the 2013 NAACP Image Ward in the Literary Work – Fiction category for her work “A Wish and a Prayer: a Blessings Novel. Kimberla Lawson Roby won for “The Reverend’s Wife” “Jenkins, a writer of African-American historical romance fiction and has received numerous awards including five Waldenbooks/Borders Group Best Sellers Awards; two Career Achievement Awards from Romantic Times Magazine; a Golden Pen Award from the Black Writer’s Guild, and was named one of the Top Fifty Favorite African-American writers of the 20th Century by AABLC, the nation’s largest online African-American book club.” Examiner
Are Small Publishers the Future of the Industry? – BISG says that the small and medium-sized publishers are the healthiest part of the publishing industry. Small publishers are those that “need fewer than 10 ISBNs every year”. My question is whether a publishing house that puts out less than a book a month is really a publisher and whether those aren’t just author coops for self publishers. Saying that these groups are “small publishers” disguises the author oriented movement and reduces the numbers being generated by self publishing. GalleyCat
Get Lost in London’s 250,000-Book Maze – Using 250,000 volumes of printed matter, volunteers constructed a book maze in August 2012. Based on the “fingerprints of famed Argentinian author and educator Jorge Luis Borges”, a 5,000 square foot maze with 13-foot high walls was erected to celebrate curiosity and search for knowledge. When the book maze was taken down in August, members of the public were invited to take books home with them. Good.is
I thought most of the commercials this year were boring. The Oreo cookie whisper fight in the library was a funny concept, but I didn’t like all of the destruction. I did like the Clydesdales one.
That maze looks fun!
The Go Daddy commercial made me sick and put the final touch on me never wanting anything to do with their tasteless company and Danica Patrick.
Don’t get all the Jenkins love at all. I have tried to read her books, but I never finish. Dialog is cringe inducingly expository. Wish someone could explain her apeal.
@mari: I’m with you. I really want to like her, as she’s THE multicultural/AA historical author, but her books bore the tits off me.
@mari:
I read one of her books. It wasn’t awful, just very meh – classic C-range. Like Ridley, I so wanted to like what I was reading, but the prose and construction of it just didn’t work for me. I think her success has a lot to do with writing characters and plots that aren’t that common in romance (and certainly should be more common), rather than exceptional writing talent.
Very sad to have missed the maze. Not sad to have missed the Super Bowl.
Has GoDaddy ever had an ad that wasn’t disgusting/sexist/stupid? And not gonna lie — the Clydesdale one made me tear up a little.
I’ve read a few things by Jenkins and am reading her latest release right now, and I’ll disagree a little bit (but not entirely) with you all. I would argue her writing is pretty competent, and that liking or disliking it has more to do with taste. I can see why readers might find it boring, and I grant that it has a lot of exposition in it. The pace is slow and the dialogue and internal monologues can sound a bit formal and deliberate. But I think that might be a style choice, a feature rather than a flaw. In my head, it sounds like the way people might have talked in the period in which she’s writing (and it does sound like some books I’ve read that were written in that period).
@Morgan: Has anyone tweeted any names for the baby Clydesdale?
I thought the ads were pretty lack luster this year. I miss the days of clever ads like the herding cats ad. I enjoyed the Tide miracle stain and the Samsung next big thing, but mostly I thought they were meh.
I’ve read a couple Beverly Jenkins and I’m with Sunita – I think it’s a matter of taste more than anything. I’ve found that I have to be in the right mood for her, but I did really enjoy Indigo, because the story swept me away.
If those small publishers are doing the work of a publisher in providing proper editing, cover art, marketing and so on, then why wouldn’t you classify them as publishers? I’m not sure what the argument about size is.
@Morgan: Didn’t watch the game, but someone told me about the Clydesdale commercial a couple of days ago so I checked it out on Youtube. That, in turn, led me to a slew of the older ones I’d never seen, like the donkey and 9-11 tribute. They may be obvious and manipulative, but I still awwwed over every one of them.