Last night I republished This Book is not a Kindle Single [The Rejected Essay] with the originally-intended title (The Principles of Disruptive Design) and major content updates. The preface and afterword are gone (as they pertained to the gimmick title) and there are updates throughout, the most considerable to the first section.
The updates deal directly with Apple iPhone 5s and 5c nd questions about Apple innovations, or lack of them.
My cat wants to know: Why haven’t you grabbed a free copy of my new ebook Comic-Con Heroes: The Fans Who Make the Greatest Show on Earth, before the promotion ends at 11:59 p.m. PDT? […]
Yesterday, I finally published Comic-Con Heroes: The Fans Who Make the Greatest Show on Earth to the Kindle Store. For San Diego Comic-Con 2013, I interviewed attendees and chose a dozen to profile. Their stories say much about the roles we play and who are the Con’s real superheroes.
I wrote the full-text using Google Docs on Chromebook Pixel, which combined is the best writing platform I have ever used.
I remain concerned about Motorola’s choice to launch Moto X with AT&T—the carrier that failed with HTC First (the Facebook phone), like Verizon did with Microsoft Kin, which were targeted at similar audiences. I don’t have Moto X. Motorola graciously provided BetaNews with a review unit, and my colleague Brian Fagioli has that one. A second isn’t available, which is perfectly reasonable.
So my only experience is the AT&T store, yesterday. The sales display impresses. There is a demo phone, iPad with flashy sales info, and selection of back covers so buyers can see exactly what they get if choosing to customize. Cards for the 16GB and 32GB models are there. Grab, pay, and go to Moto Maker site to personal and order the phone.
“The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can’t do Groklaw without your input”, Pamela Jones writes today. “It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate”.
She responds to recent revelations that the U.S. government reads your email: “The owner of Lavabit tells us that he’s stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we’d stop too. There is no way to do Groklaw without email”.
We’re doing the worst thing people can do: lying to our young. Nobody, not even this president, who was swept to victory in large part by the raw enthusiasm of college kids, has the stones to tell the truth: that a lot of them will end up being pawns in a predatory con game designed to extract the equivalent of home-mortgage commitment from 17-year-olds dreaming of impossible careers as nautical archaeologists or orchestra conductors.
One former law student I contacted for this story had a nervous breakdown while struggling to pay off six-figure debt. It wasn’t until he tapped into one of the few growth industries open to young Americans that his outlook brightened. ‘I got my life back on track by working for a marijuana delivery service in Manhattan’, he says.
Matt Taibbi
Google+ reminds subscribers all about birthdays in the stream, and in sending wishes to someone from Nexus 7 FHD this morning, the default message, “Happy Birthday, +person’s name!”, lit up my synapses.
I wonder about the hidden, subliminal positive connotations of Google using a plus-sign before all subscribers’ names. Does seeing it make us feel happier?
Facebook uses “Like”, which is loaded with positive connotations, and Google copied the approach with +1, which makes sense for a company where numbers are so important—from the math behind search to all the data associated with the search keyword business model.
Yesterday, my first ebook published to Amazon, with the strangest of titles, having nearly nothing to do with the contents. In May, I submitted “The Principles of Design” to the bookseller for consideration as a Kindle Single. Singles are curated, short-form works, between 5,000 and 30,000 words. Amazon acts as editor and publisher. Four weeks later to the day, I received a rejection letter, without any explanation.
That put me squarely down the self-publishing path, which is exactly where I didn’t want to be for this first work. Books are a strange frontier to me, a vaguely familiar landscape but alien—like Mars is to Earth. I wanted Amazon to walk me across this domain. Besides, to start, I plan to write mostly shorter non-fiction essays, which look to be perfectly-suited for Kindle Singles. But the rejection email, and realization that editorial approval takes up to a month, changed plans.
Wow, All Things D’s Kara Swisher sure has some advice for Jeff Bezos as he takes ownership of the Washington Post.
I think her real point is this:
To me, the most important trick is to deeply inculcate the joy of Internet journalism, without losing (actually restoring to some degree, after recent cutbacks) the great editorial values and breakthrough journalism of the Post. Fusing the old-media storytelling and news-integrity values that I learned at the Post with the Internet values of speed and personality—and, well, some level of fun at the right times—is critical.
Today, in the Guardian, former CIA analyst John Kiriakou accuses the Obama Administration of abusing the 1917 Espionage Act, claiming that “only 10 people in American history have been charged with espionage for leaking classified information, seven of them under Barack Obama”.
From Day One, the Obama Administration sought to plug any leaks. What’s said in the Oval Office stays in the Oval Office. That’s context for understanding the aggressive approach to whistleblowers. It’s philosophical. The current White House sees leaks as betrayals, so why not view whistleblowing as treason?
For most of July, I used a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display and iPhone 5, abandoning Chromebook Pixel and HTC One during the last few days of June. I’m moving away from writing principally for the web to ebooks, following the advice authors Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch give in APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How To Publish a Book. I chose these tools based on recommendations they, and other writers, made. Also, my Apple boycott ended in January. I’m not anti-Apple.
There are many things I like about MacBook Pro, which screen resolution is comparably high to Chromebook Pixel: Audio fidelity of streamed music is punchier, my Sony MDR-1RBT Bluetooth headphones work, battery life is longer and Chrome tabs don’t idle and force refresh (the 8MB memory makes a difference). There is the promise of better digital content manipulation, like photos or properly formatting ebooks for submission to major ebook stores.
Last night I came home from San Diego Comic-Con Day 1 to find the newest Rolling Stone open, facedown on the living room carpet; the controversial cover, with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, stared up like Jim Morrison. I had heard about the controversy over the photo, and accusations that the magazine somehow glorified the bomb suspect, for days. So had my wife, who finished Janet Reitman’s riveting account, soon as we both settled in for the evening.
Anne never reads Rolling Stone. But the cover caught her attention enough that she consumed this one article, neglecting the New Yorker, which also arrived in the mail yesterday, coincidentally containing a smart editorial defending RS editors. She doesn’t approve of the cover, and yet it clearly was effective enough. As an editor, I must commend Rolling Stone for doing with a picture what tabloids like the New York Post or online aggregator Huffington Post does with snarky headlines: Get people to read the story.