Exact Editions Blog

David Hepworth, whose day job is at Development Hell, writes a well-informed but sometimes rather jaundiced column on the magazine business for the Guardian. This week’s column is typically bleak on the industry’s prospects for 2008 and it includes this comment:

The chief executive of one big publisher of women’s weeklies told me that he had given up pretending with investors and was prepared to confess that he could not see a way that his company would ever make

Yesterday Google announced (see Udi Manber on the Googleblog) that it was developing and supporting a Wikipedia-like network of Knols which will provide us all with authoritative, collaboratively-authored, information resources. Here are some enthusiastic responses from John Batelle and Peter Suber.

Amazon announced that it was putting SimpleDB its enterprise-scale cloud-based database into private beta. Here are some enthusiastic responses from Nitin Borwankar and Erick Schonfeld.

Google and Amazon are two terrific companies. These both look like important … Keep Reading

Rufus Pollock, a researcher at Cambridge University, has produced a rather brilliant but difficult, because formal and mathematical proof (whilst yet embodying many empirical propositions), that the term of copyright should be much lower than it is now, and that it should in general become shorter as technology advances. He suggests that the optimum term of copyright should be about 15 years from creation. The argument is complex, but he provides some neat informal guidance vis:

……..consider the situation with

The Exact Editions system now makes ISBNs clickable and the first examples (for subscribers only, as the issue is behind the subs pay-wall) are in the current issue of Opera magazine.

This is the example that I tried first:

Opera

January 2008

Page 95

Which today takes you to this page. ISBNs have recently gone to 13 digits (that allows for a lot of books and publishers) but Amazon is currently using a look-up table for the 13 digit … Keep Reading