Skip to main content
Macmillan CEO John Sargent claims Amazon will make more money under the new deal, receiving 30 percent of the price of each book sold. If Macmillan is right, and people are willing to pay physical-book prices for digital books, both Macmillan and Amazon stand to make more money, by pocketing the digital-distribution surplus.

Macmillan’s Amazon Beatdown Proves Content Is King | Epicenter | Wired.com


Oh, I am going to love to see this one play out. I can assure you there isn’t a single eBook purchaser out there that is going to willingly agree that eBooks should cost the same as their physical counterpart. The only reason we are going to pay that price for the book is because you are forcing us to, not because we want to.


It all comes down to greed. Nothing more, nothing less. Just greed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On sleep deprivation and Incan Monkey Gods

From: Dilbert comic strip for 08/03/1992 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. I was trying to show this strip to a coworker who is dangerously toying with the harsh mistress that is Insomnia. What shocked me is how quickly I was able to look up the strip, which was published when he was just 11 years old, and two weeks before my just-out-of-college ass shipped out to US Army Basic Training.
Post a Comment
Read more

Add custom speed settings to your ifit map workout

Ifit.com allows you to build a workout walk/race/bike route simply by clicking on a Google Maps interface. You can then use a compatible ifit-enabled workout machine to recreate the route automatically. The problem is that the user interface still isn't final, so there are features in place that aren't exactly obvious. For example, if you create a workout your machine starts at 1 MPH, because that's the default. But how to set it to start at say, 3 MPH? Easy, just switch from map view to graph view: That button switches from the Google Maps interface to a chart that allows you to visualize and control effort: You can't change the elevation, this is fixed due to the geography that you selected. But you can drag the yellow (speed line) to change the speed of your device.  What if you want to have segments at different speeds? Easy, just click and drag and it will break the line, and you can drag each segment of the line independently: ...
1 comment
Read more

Software Entropy and the Strangler Fig: Surviving a 20-Year-Old Codebase

Right now, I find myself fighting a three-front war. Front one is keeping a 20-year-old behemoth of a B2B application alive. We are talking about decades of legacy ASP.NET and VB.NET where two decades of tweaks, patches, and "temporary fixes" have become permanent, load-bearing pillars of the architecture. Every time I touch it, it feels like playing Operation with oven mitts on—spending 90% of my week untangling logic just so a simple bug fix doesn’t cause a ripple effect that crashes a critical service. Front two is modernizing the architecture. I am actively trying to implement a rudimentary Strangler Fig pattern—slowly carving out legacy functionality and pushing it into a clean, testable shared library project so we can actually run proper unit tests and stop the bleeding. Front three is modernizing the team. While keeping the lights on and quietly rebuilding the engine, I am also pushing a retraining effort to get my peers up to current framework versions and embracing ...
Post a Comment
Read more