Novelist Nicholson Baker loves books, but not Jeff Bezos’s device: “Amazon is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things…fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch.”
The New York Times turned down a chance to borrow money from Hollywood mogul David Geffen last winter and went with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim instead. So says the New Yorker, which also reports that Geffen tried to buy the paper outright in September.
Publisher Condé Nast gets plenty of well-deserved criticism for its slow embrace of technology and the Web, but some of its individual titles do some interesting stuff. To wit: This video, which depicts how artist Jorge Columbo created this week’s cover art in an hour, using an iPhone and an app called Brushes.
Last fall, a small but vocal group of Twitterers managed to shame Johnson & Johnson into apologizing for one of its Motrin ads.
This weekend’s replay: a howl of outrage, amplified and directed via Twitter at Amazon, which may or may not have instituted a boneheaded policy regarding “adult” books on its site. Or “adult” books aimed at gay and lesbian readers. Or something.
No matter what really happened, the retailer is now in a real pickle.
User-generated news aggregators like Reddit are notoriously difficult sites to pitch to advertisers, but Condé Nast may have figured out how to do it. If it works, it could be promising news for Digg, which has a bigger audience but the same problems.
Earlier this month the music business got a rare piece of good news: Apple announced that it had posted “record” sales at its iTunes music store around Christmas. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming: I’m seeing more and more evidence that Apple notwithstanding, the industry’s last few months were bad even by the industry’s own terrible standards.
This won’t erase the sting of this month’s election, but at this point, every win must feel nice: John McCain’s eldest daughter Sid just got a promotion at EMI Music Group, the big label where she’s worked for many years. She’s now VP of Label Services, which, best as I can tell, means she’ll work with the indie bands that work with EMI’s Caroline arm.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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