Wednesday News: Food printer, Barnes & Noble as a showroom; and 1 Terabyte free storage from flickr
How Barnes & Noble Overlooks Its Biggest Asset – Forbes suggests Barnes & Noble become a showroom for internet companies such as the high end fashion coops like Gilt Groupe to hand crafted items from Etsy sellers. It’s not a bad idea in concept but could easily become on of those “As Seen on TV” stores. h/t Mike Cane Forbes
NASA is funding a 3D food printer, and it’ll start with pizza – Some positive news on the 3D printing front, NASA is funding research and development for a 3D food printer. The idea is that the cartridge will contain food based products that can produce consumable food. The goal is to feed astronauts but also address worldwide food shortages. It is not, I guess, an effort to make everything in Back to the Future a reality. The Verge
Flickr Announces One Free Terabyte Of Storage Space Per User, Officially Beating Everyone – Flickr is getting a major upgrade in look and feel and it is giving users a major upgrade in space. Starting now, all users will get 1 Terabyte of free storage space. “Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service is now offering one full terabyte for users, enough storage space to hold whole swathes of the world’s photos. The service is offering this benefit in addition to its full resolution photo storage service” TechCrunch
Rehydrated pizza! ahhh, memories. :)
Thanks for the nostalgia trip!
It can’t taste any worse than those astronaut snack packs they used to sell when you went on NASA tours.
@Patricia Eimer:
Oh good. I love those things. The ice cream sandwich especially. :D
OK, so I know the news post is already set, but I think this will be of interest to us given our relationships with ebooks and fan fiction.
Amazon launches Kindle Worlds
Looks like its only big name stuff as source now, but it certainly seems like a bold and interesting step to take. I’m reserving judgement on good and bad for now, but this definitely has the potential to shake up established practices and presumptions.
On that note, speaking about wanting to know the inner workings and deals of amazon, I really want to know how they pitched and scored these deals with the big license holders.
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@DB Cooper:
I think it’s a brilliant move.
Note that the three properties to which Amazon secured the rights are specifically from Alloy Entertainment. Alloy was acquired last year by Warner Bros., but they retain all written word rights to their properties. As a book packager, they are very well versed in creating concepts that are then written by work-for-hire authors. So this is a natural extension for them. I bet it was a slam dunk negotiation for both sides.
The true brilliance comes in capturing the fan fiction market. No more filing the serial numbers off the fic so you can sell it – now you CAN get paid for outright fanfiction! But unlike Fifty Shades, where the copyright belongs to E.L. James and not Stephenie Meyers/Summit Entertainment, now the copyright – and all worldwide distribution rights – belong to the original property owner. And the original property owner gets a cut of the proceeds. Plus there is some vetting going on – not everything will make it through, Amazon promises – so being on Kindle Worlds will be a badge of honor/quality to which fanficcers will aspire.
And Alloy gets lots and lots of fan-generated content to keep their properties alive long after the original book and/or TV series conclude.
What a smart, smart move.
I thought the web enabled Etsy by having very low overhead. Once those crafts have to be vetted and pay for the overhead of a B&N store, the prices will at least double.
I think Kindle Worlds is brilliant for Amazon, for the authors who want to license their worlds, and for those writers who are interested in and *capable of* writing within the strictures of the license-holders. (Not as easy as it sounds; I have a friend who makes a tolerable living writing licensed Star Wars, Star Trek, and other fiction based on sf, comics, and gaming franchises. Crafting a professionally competent and *entertaining* story within the guidelines is a definite skill, that many otherwise talented writers lack.)
Not so good for fanfic writers who want to write outside the boundaries (graphic sex, crossovers, RPF, whatever the license holders don’t like — will slash be allowed, for example?) Will the existence of this commercial enterprise backed by the Amazon juggernaut encourage lawyers to go after the fanfic sites that have been operating on the borders of legality?
Not so good for authors and other creators who, for whatever reason, don’t want to license others to play in their sandbox. There’s already considerable online hostility to authors who politely discourage fanfiction — will this increase the pressure?
Not so good for fanfic readers who want to go outside the boundaries, who enjoy the community / collaborative atmosphere of fanfic (if you’re going sell this story, why should I critique / edit it for you for free?), and most of all, who enjoy getting their fanficfix for free.
To be honest, I dislike fanfic and rarely read it. Still, I will be sad if this unique, quirky, maddening, creative, frustrating, occasionally brilliant aspect of wild internet culture becomes coralled and sanitized and tamed into the same old, same old.
Because I’m pretty sure this will all shake out in favour of the corporate behemoths. “To them that have, more shall be given.”
I have the Kindle Words thing in my news tomorrow.