Exact Editions Blog

Microsoft has usually beaten its chosen opponents. Google does not look like such a straightforward proposition. In this case most of my sympathies would lie with the upstart, however Microsoft has chosen its ground carefully. Microsoft will have plenty of allies in questioning Google’s attitude towards copyrights. Google has fights here with the Association of American Publishers, with a group of Belgian newspaper publishers, with many TV companies over YouTube, etc. Too many fights.

So Tom Rubin, Microsoft’s … Keep Reading

Mathewingram’s blog notes that HarperCollins and Random House have popped up with widgets on their home pages which allow one to browse and search quite a few of their in-print titles. If you want you can take the widget off and plant it in you own web page or blog. This is an interesting experiment and may help to sell a few more books, but it does not seem like an adequate response to the Google Book Search project. Do … Keep Reading

Time to declare an interest (several of them). I use a Mac and I am not a great fan of Windows or of its latest release Vista. So I have not yet tested the new Microsoft reader which is clearly in some ways pretty spiffy. Bobbie Johnson reviews the Daily Mail’s implementation here. But the new Microsoft system is clearly in some sense a serious competitor to the Exact Editions approach (another interest declared). Nor am I too sure … Keep Reading

Monty Panesar gets five mentions. ‘Five’ means five pages in our language — ie there are five pages in the trial issue which have ‘Panesar’ on them. The name might appear more than once on some pages, but our search counts pages. Google works the same way counting pages rather than ‘occurrences’ in the strict sense. Techie point, to keep you awake in the slips.

Cricket attracts obsessional supporters. And I used to have a deceptive off-cutter in my … Keep Reading

The ABC figures are out and they are a tale of woe for the men’s magazines market. The women’s magazines sector has done better and especially the relatively new trend for weeklies, eg Grazia. Stephen Brook has some comments in today’s Media Guardian.

Stephen Brook suggests that one cause for the collapse in the men’s titles could be the rise in digital subscriptions, he cites the new Dennis publication Monkey. But it could well be that the digital … Keep Reading