Exact Editions Blog

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

EMAP has sold its consumer magazines to the German media company Bauer, but was not able to realise a satisfactory price for the B2B businesses. When the company was put on the block the commentators thought that it would be the consumer magazines that would be hard to sell. Perhaps Bauer know something that the industry pundits and the EMAP management did not understand. Consumer magazines could yet become a growth business. EMAPs consumer business has been rudderless in … Keep Reading

A year ago there was a flurry of legal action between Google and European newspaper publishers. A group of publishers (newspapers, book publishers and others) have since supported the development of a new and more complicated protocol which is intended to supplement and, to an extent, to replace the ‘robots.txt‘ protocol that regulates the behaviour of spiders and search engines. ACAP (Autormated Content Access Protocol) is the result. This proposed standard has received sceptical notices from O’Reilly Radar… Keep Reading