Zinio and E-Book Systems are part of an effort to bridge the gap for people who want to take advantage of the Internet without breaking from the comfort of print. Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin told the Mercury News, quite rightly, that magazines and other print publications need to make moves like this if they want to be in business tomorrow.
I still hope, however, that the perks of paper technology -- the way it bends, folds, creases and feels -- will remain a part of our lives. It might be messy and disorganized, but it is something that we can touch and manipulate easily. Maybe E-Book Systems (or some unknown kid in a garage somewhere) is experimenting with a new technology that will truly bring us the best of both worlds. Count me as a customer when that happens.
| ___About Random Access___ Random Access is a daily column by Robert MacMillan that explores the latest trends in technology and how they are changing daily life. Random Access won't tell you why a new gizmo will revolutionize your ad server. It will tell you about episodes from daily life -- exasperated waiters who use blogs to vent about their customers, whole runs of salmon injected with nanoparticles for individual tracking in Norwegian fjords and the growing number of DJs who are sick of being sidelined in favor of iPods. (Only one of these stories is fake.) Most of what you see will be culled from news sources and blogs from around the world, though we will supplement Random Access with original files on the novel, unusual, bizarre and reactionary happenings in the world of technology and society. E-mail: Send links and comments. | | |
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Is This Technology Fishy?
USC law professor Jennifer Urban is sharing on the edge. As the Los Angeles Times reported today, she is one of the people who uses a new file-sharing program called "Grouper." This is a new technology that allows people to share digital files, but unlike the programs under assault by the entertainment industry for making it easy for millions of people to pirate music and movies, it restricts the sharing circle to 30 contacts.
More from the L.A. Times: "Grouper Network Inc.'s founders, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel, say the built-in limits of their peer-to-peer software make it a poor substitute for more controversial file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and Grokster, which are hotbeds for piracy. In addition to limiting the size and accessibility of groups, they say, their program requires songs to be streamed -- that is, played through the Internet -- not downloaded."
Grouper is intended to help people get access to digital files that might be too large for e-mail -- like high-resolution digital photos -- or in Urban's case, DVDs and videos recorded in Europe's PAL format instead of America's preferred NTSC. No surprise -- some copyright experts say that the technology could skirt the borderline of what is legal, however. "There's no family-and-friends exception in copyright law," attorney Robert Schwartz of O'Melveny & Myers told the L.A. Times.
Revenge of the RIAA
Kids, take note: "RIAA News Teleconference to Announce Major New Enforcement Initiative Against Emerging Piracy Threat on College Campuses." That's the subject of a press release that I received this morning from the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA won't let us tell you the nature of this beast until 12:30 p.m. ET today, but I can tell you this: When releases like this hit the wires, it's invariably bad for people who illegally share digital music files on the Internet.
My advice? If you've been here before, you already know. You can justify your activity however you want, but it's still wrong. Stop sharing.
Larry Wilco
File this under the "nothing you haven't heard before" department, though that's not to say it wasn't interesting. The New York Times carried a story last Saturday on a copyright colloquy at the New York Public Library. The headliners were Stanford law professor and all-around Internet smart-guy Lawrence Lessig, along with Jeff Tweedy, the Wilco frontman who threw open the doors to his music online and actually made money.
Judging by the Times's writeup, the discussion was heady and carried its share of prog-rock bombast. Note these gems from Tweedy:
* "To me, the only people who are complaining are people who are so rich they never deserve to be paid again."
* "Once you create something, it doesn't exist in the consciousness of the creator."
* Tweedy also suggested that downloading was an act of rightful "civil disobedience," the Times said.
I propose that we collar Tweedy and Elvis Costello, that other prophet of doom for the entertainment industry, and get them to expound on this topic in a special celebrity edition of Random Access. Anyone have their phone numbers?
Send links and comments to robertDOTmacmillanATwashingtonpost.com.
