Wednesday News: Amazon targeted; Pay what you will; Build guns in your basement; Data driven romances.
Publishing NewsAmazon / book-sales / metadata / subscriptions11 Comments
Wal-Mart aims to one-up Amazon with same-day delivery – Rumors have been swirling that with Amazon’s increased warehouse presence, same day delivery will start to erode businesses other than bookstores. Wal-Mart has stepped up to provide competition to Amazon with same day delivery service:
“The service, called Wal-Mart To Go, is a trial run for the holidays that lets customers order specific items and gifts, which can then be sent to their homes or offices that same day. Orders have to be made by noon, and there is a charge of $10 with no minimum order requirement.”Mobile – CNET News
Target Signs New Deal With Barnes & Noble – Nate over at The Digital Reader has a photo of a big Nook display in Target suggesting that Target and B&N have a new deal that allows a mini Nook section within the nearly 2000 Target stores. As Nate says, it is a good move by B&N. Not only has Target dropped Amazon’s Kindle but it has increased its competitor’s visibility dramatically. Well played. The Digital Reader
The Humble eBook Bundle (pay what you want and help charity) – I’m not sure whether this is a pricing experiment, a charitable event, or a promotional feature, but you get eight books by well known science fiction authors from Neil Gaiman and JohnScalzi to Mercedes Lackey for the price you set. You can also divide up the contribution, sending a certain portion to charity and some to the authors. The note says that “You determine how much we deserve to earn or lose from your purchase.” Clever phrasing. I didn’t follow the creation of this site, but I wondered if it was based off the business model of bundling software. MacHeist is famous for it and new entrant Productive Macs gained a lot of noise. It also reminds me a little of the Panera Bread stores that allow you to determine the price of your meal. Humble Bundle
Disruptions: With a 3-D Printer, Building a Gun With the Push of a Button – Oh look. People are doing really innovative things with 3D printers like building untraceable guns at home. Yay! Oh 3D printers, you both excite and terrify me:
But monitoring whether people make their own guns on a 3-D printer is going to be impossible, barring sticking an A.T.F. agent in every home. It’s also hopeless to try to build a technology into these printers that prevents people from printing a gun. One project mentioned in Mr. Wilson’s video, called the RepRap printer, will be capable of replicating itself by printing other 3-D printers.
After committing a crime with a printed weapon, a person could simply melt down the plastic and reprint it as something as mundane as a statue of Buddha. And guns made of plastic might not be spotted by metal detectors in airports, courthouses or other government facilities.NYTimes.com
The Data-Driven, 21st-Century ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ – Stick with me. I’m going to use a couple of examples to suggest that genre fiction may change according to seo studies. Bleacher Report is one of the most visited websites on the internet and it didn’t even exist before 2008. One of the reasons for its popularity is its data driven command of SEO.
“While nearly every major publication now has an SEO maven on board, Bleacher Report employs an entire analytics team to comb through reams of data, determining who wants to read what, and when, at an almost granular level. In this way, the site can determine the ideal times to post certain types of stories — thus meeting a demand that doesn’t yet exist, but will.”
Editors for Bleacher Report spot trends and create SEO friendly headlines that are handed down to writers who then create content to match.
Betsy Morais writes about how Coliiquy is collecting data on readers. Granted Colliquy’s sample size isn’t tremendously large, but using the readers’ responses, authors like Tawna Fenske are tailoring content. Harlequin has collected data on prospective readers for years, using their Valentine’s day survey to simultaneously provide them a major media push but also providing insight as to how readers are moved and engaged as it relates to love. Workplace romance on the rise in Harlequin books? It may be because a survey showed that more people were meeting and falling in love with co workers. Or merely had crushes on a co worker
But Colliquy and Harlequin are both working with small sample sizes whereas Bleacher Report is scouring the internet and assessing millions of bytes of data to predict what tomorrow’s hot stories will be. When will publishers use this type of data mining to create genre fiction? The Atlantic
The article on printing your own gun was so much sensationalist bs, the mind boggles.
If Amazon continues to use Lasership, I will definitely give Walmart a shot at my business.
It the same group who have done Humble Bundle games and recently music. They have done really well with games in the past. Techdirt has an article.
If workable guns could be made from plastic, they probably already would be.
Anyway, you can’t print gunpowder.
“If workable guns could be made from plastic, they probably already would be.”
Google “Glock.”
However, the whole printable gun article is a combo of scare tactics and ignorance. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to build a gun–no more than it takes to build a pipe bomb–whether it’s metal or polymer. All it takes is a search engine, basic reading skills and average small motor function. No criminal, intent on using a gun for illegal purposes, is going to spend big money on a 3-D printer when it’s cheaper, easier and less traceable to build it conventionally.
I would be so bad at being a criminal. I had no idea there even was such a thing as making guns with a printer. What a weird idea.
Even a Glock has metal parts. This kind of “reporting” does nothing to help your cause if you’re anti-gun/pro gun control.
The Humble eBook Bundles are from the people who do Humble Indie Bundles of indie video games. They have been awesome (for players and for charity and developers).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Indie_Bundle
LisaCharlotte has great points!
CNET has an awesome article about this whole topic of 3-d gun printing: the likelihood of a printable, plastic gun actually working (um, not much, and if you try it at home, I hope you don’t care if you have two working hands!), the federal laws regarding gun manufacture and resale (relatively comprehensive… unless of course you want to break federal law), etc.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57499326-76/you-dont-bring-a-3d-printer-to-a-gun-fight-yet/
If you want to really talk about “unlimited” or “unregulated” access to “firearms,” here are some more realistic things to worry about:
1. You could currently make a “gun” just with parts from your local hardware store (er, you end up with a crap weapon… but if all you want is to have an untraceable weapon to shoot someone…)
2. If you want to go the more sophisticated approach, a CNC mill (not as easily accessible like a 3-D printer, but…) could be used to machine gun parts right now (made of metal) and the firearm would actually work.
Again, both 1 & 2 would ride the edge of federal law, and break it most explicitly if you wish to sell your knowledge or work product without going through the proper, mandated-by-law processes.
@Ellen: You aren’t kidding. I’m normally quite pleased with Amazon’s service, but the only times I’ve had problems with shipments is when they’ve used those Lasership yahoos. And trying to reach a sentient being at that company is pointless. I’ve complained vigorously to Amazon about them.
I agree with LisaCharlotte and others that the gun article was a sensationalist bit of reporting. However, the key to the article is the last few lines.
The AR platform, in particular, is basically like lego bricks for gun nuts. Mix and match components to your heart’s content. Is a scope a gun? A trigger? The bolt? Rather than regulating every little part, the feds decided to regulate just the “lower” — the piece that holds the trigger and magazine. However, all the parts that go bang (and might need to be precision machined from high quality steel) are located in the upper. The upper and all other parts can be ordered from any number of on-line sources without any sort of license or ID check.
There are a couple of different printed gun projects, and the article kind of conflates them. There are folks trying to build a really crude zip-gun sort of thing that would fire a small caliber bullet entirely from printed parts. Then there’s folks trying to build a workable lower receiver for an AR or similar weapon.