Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
- The Scots edition of Wikipedia is apparently a 50 thousand plus page practical joke written by someone who is not Scottish, nor do they speak the language.
- A new translation of Beowulf uses modern vernacular for parts that would otherwise be untranslatable.
- Kris Rusch is expecting an L-shaped recovery, and thinks you should plan accordingly. (I agree with her.)
- Powell’s books is no longer going to sell on Amazon.
- Scammers have moved on from pretending to be Nigerian prices to pretending to work for major publishers.
- Amazon and its fellow plaintiffs have won a preliminary injunction against a pirate ebook site.
- Here are four points to consider when designing your next book cover. (It was inspired by a terrible cover published by Penguin.)
- As one author explains, KDP is not a great platform so much as it is slightly less awful than its competition (but still awful).
- Texas Monthly has a lengthy profile of RWA founder Vivian Stephens that you need to read.
Tweeted and emailing “L shaped recovery” to a few folks, eye opening beyond my (I thought) wide open eyes already, lol! Thanks! ?
Not sure about other countries but in the US the real estate “sorting” she refers to had already started and like so many things it is only accelerating by an order of magnitude. A couple years ago, big media was crowing about millenials abandoning the suburbs for the big cities. Which peaked and was starting to reverse by 2019 as the young’uns tried to build adult lives in the urban zoos and discovered why previous generations created suburbs in the first place. Livability matters.
All those reasons are only magnified by the pandemic.
There will be winners and there will be losers and the winners will be those that were allready offering the goods and services required by the new reality. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Kobo, Tesla, online in general.
The shape of tbe economic recovery isn’t the only thing to consider: people’s habits will be changed ahd many old assumptions about how people think and act will be obsoleted over the next two years.
The same old, same old isn’t coming back.
When it comes to entertainment all those people reading ebooks and streaming video aren’t going back to the old ways any more than people are going to dive into “Black Friday” crowds. Anybody betting on a return to the old “normal” aren’t going to enjoy the new normal.