2 x Tims, a Laurie and a Lorris • 20 December 2011 • The SnowBlog

2 x Tims, a Laurie and a Lorris

          


Mr Tim O'Reilly recently linked to a couple of publishing-related articles on Twitter which you might not have seen. (Particularly if you can't remember whether Twitter is the one where you see what old school friends are up to or the one where you bid on other people's secondhand junk.)
 Tim linked to this article on Publishers* Weekly about how Amazon might be tightening the screws on publishers. However the bit I liked best was Tim's own comment (here) about a bit of recent publishing history: "I've seen for a long time where Amazon is headed, towards a Walmart-like status where it can dictate whatever terms it likes to the publishing industry. And that was why I was amazed at the train-wreck of short-term thinking that led to the Google Books lawsuit by the Association of American Publishers and the Author's Guild. Faced with the threat of a future monopoly by a ruthless competitor as pbooks transition to ebooks, a potential white knight arrives on the scene...and the publishers promptly sue the white knight! And as a result, though no one is saying it out loud, Google has quietly de-prioritized its efforts and abandoned the publishers to their fate." Ha ha. We're such idiots.
 Mr Tim also linked to an article in the Observer about four startups taking innovative approaches to publishing. link.
 And on a non-publishing note, I wanted to share a quote from an article in The Independent on the subject of the recent Climate Change talks in Durban. This is Laurie Penny's summary of the outcome from Durban: "With a maximum of five years to go before carbon emissions at current rates make climate disaster a certainty, governments ask those already under water to give them 10 years to think about it."
 And finally, just in case you read that Laurie Penny article, you will now need what BoingBoing call a 'unicorn chaser' to cheer you up. Here's the all-important video of a Slow Lorris holding its little arms up so it can be tickled. 

* a note on apostrophes, which, let's face it, is the bit you care about most: I assumed that it was "Publishers' Weekly" because it's a weekly for publishers. Tim O'Reilly referred to it as "Publisher's Weekly" in his article. But their logo has no apostrophe at all, so I followed their lead.  
Rob