Wednesday News: Amazon’s endgame, creativity considered, Rowling’s new Galbraith mystery, and Candy Crush tries to crush its competition

JanetPublishing NewsAmazon / Big Five / gaming / JK-Rowling / Macmillan / mystery / Nail Gaiman4 Comments

CHEAP WORDS: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books? – An ambitious look at Amazon and the extent to which its presence as the “Everything Store” may — in Packer’s view — ultimately devalue the book by sacrificing it to an omnipresent focus on selling rather than on the integrity of the “product” (and even referring to books as a product is, for Packer, a diminishment). It’s pretty amusing to read John Sargent’s perspective on Amazon, and to see the extent to which the Big Five are still enmeshed with Amazon, and I do think Packer raises some important points about how Bezos’s endgame (whatever that may be) could conceivably be incompatible with Amazon’s origins as a bookseller.

Bezos originally thought of calling his company Relentless.com—that U.R.L. still takes you to Amazon’s site—before adopting the name of the world’s largest river by volume. (If Bezos were a reader of classic American fiction, he might have hit upon Octopus.com.) Amazon’s shape-shifting, engulfing quality, its tentacles extending in all directions, makes it unusual even in the tech industry, where rapid growth, not profitability, is the measure of success. Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about. –The New Yorker

How Creativity Works: Neil Gaiman on Where Ideas Comes From – A snippet of a 2011 interview with Neil Gaiman, as well as a brief but link-packed discussion of creativity from different perspectives, there is a good deal here with which to continue a discussion on the relationship between commercial and creative interests. The two are definitely not mutually exclusive, although sometimes it’s refreshing to focus on the sometimes magical process by which the mind seems to generate something completely unexpected and novel.

“A lot of times ideas will turn up when you’re doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence — they come from two things flowing together. They come, essentially, from daydreaming.” –Brain Pickings

NEW J.K. ROWLING NOVEL, “THE SILKWORM” TO BE RELEASED ON JUNE 24TH – Rowling has not abandoned her literary experiment under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, and this time the victim is a novelist, who, “has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows.” These book within a book stories are always fascinating, because you have to wonder whether there’s a bit of authorial fantasy at work. Although in this case, it probably would have been easier to accomplish had Rowling’s cover not been blown. –Leaky News

Candy Crush developer King gets angry open letter from rival over trademark dispute – Anyone who plays Candy Crush should read this article, in which the creator of a game called Candy Swipe has been fighting King, creator of Candy Crush, for over a year, because King is trying to obliterate the Candy Swipe trademark. So what’s bad about that? Candy Swipe was created and registered first, and King is essentially trying to claim trademark over the word “candy,” at least as it connects to gaming, and get rid of any perceived competition. Albert Ransom’s game has been seen as a copy cat, in part because there are some startling similarities between it and Candy Crush. Not only a good example of why corporate ownership of intellectual property can be highly problematic, but also an implicit and potentially powerful argument against spending one more penny to get to the next level in Candy Crush.

Ransom alleges that King purchased the rights to a game called Candy Crusher, which allows them to challenge his own trademark containing Candy. According to the US Patent office, the Candy Crusher trademark is still held by Harrier Software, but this could be referring to a separate filing. Ransom provides a link to his own trademark opposition paperwork, which have gone back and forth with King, for the past year. –Gamespot

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

→ Janet