Stupid Nonsense

How Kobo Overcame Great Odds & Showed Maverick Thinking, Or, How to Masturbate in Public

18 June, 2016 // 30 Comments

Kobo published a self-congratulatory post on Medium this week which was sorely lacking in any achievements worth celebrating. They've posted the text of the talk Rakuten Kobo CEO Michael [Read More ...]

Clickbait: B&N Plans to Close 197 Bookstores by 2022

5 January, 2016 // 1 Comment

There's a ridiculous little story making its way around the web this week. A certain ebook blog has used bad math, a magic 8-ball, and their own wild guesses to reach the wild conclusion that Barnes [Read More ...]

The Atlantic: Amazon Just Replaced the Public Library

3 November, 2015 // 7 Comments

When a news organization has to cover an important story like Amazon's new bookstore, they can usually either find an expert to write the article, or just have a staff writer do it. Or they can take [Read More ...]

Japanese Readers Spend the Most on eBooks, And Other Unsubstantiated Clickbait

4 August, 2015 // 12 Comments

So yesterday Business Insider posted a nifty-looking chart that claimed Japanese readers would be spending the most on ebooks this year, followed closely by Brits. As you can in the chart at right, [Read More ...]

Book Industry Hates Its Biggest Customer, Collectively Calls on DoJ to Investigate Amazon

13 July, 2015 // 30 Comments

Judging by the media circus that just came to town, something huge is about to happen in the book world. The book industry has kicked off a massive coordinated media campaign today. The target? [Read More ...]

HarperCollins Missed an Opportunity With the “Watchman” Excerpt

8 July, 2015 // 2 Comments

Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is due to hit store shelves next week. This is one of the more anticipated releases of the year. The publishers ( HarperCollins in the US and Penguin Random House in [Read More ...]

New Conspiracy Theory: Amazon to Expand Pay-Per-Page to Entire Kindle Store

25 June, 2015 // 4 Comments

I hope you have had your tin foil hat ready because I have a whopper of a conspiracy theory for you today. Update: Before you go further, let me warn you not to get angry. The subject of this post [Read More ...]

YOLO Juliet Improves on Shakespeare By Adding TextSpeak

14 June, 2015 // 4 Comments

Over the past 400 years Shakespeare's works have been staged innumerable times, with each new performance making subtle alterations to the original. Few of those productions, however, have [Read More ...]

Girl Ordered to Stop Reading on the Bus Because “She Might Poke Herself in the Eye”

23 April, 2015 // 15 Comments

A Canadian bus driver has starter a one person campaign to save the next generation from becoming a bunch of eyepatch wearing book lovers. The CBC reports: An eight-year-old girl in [Read More ...]

Porter Anderson Wants Indie Authors to Sit Down And Shut Up

3 April, 2015 // 16 Comments

In a classic case of concern trolling, noted publishing industry pundit Porter Anderson calls on leading indie authors to stop being so noisy at recruiting new authors to their segment of the [Read More ...]

Ancestry.com Files Bogus DMCA Notice to Keep Public Domain Records Offline

8 February, 2015 // 2 Comments

Long the go-to site for declassified US govt documents, The Black Vault has recently faced a setback in its efforts to digitize and upload records from Project Bluebook, the US Air Force's decades [Read More ...]

France Bans Wifi From Nursery Schools

3 February, 2015 // 9 Comments

If I had to put together a list of all the things I don't fear, the harmful effects of Wifi would come right after dihydrogen monoxide and kittens. Guess what was just banned from French preschools? [Read More ...]

Time Thinks “Amazon’s Dispute With Hachette Might Finally Be Hurting Its Sales”

27 October, 2014 // 9 Comments

Over the past 6 months I have read many questionable arguments about the Amazon-Hachette dispute, but few rose to the level of sheer unsubstantiated clickbait as the piece that Time published [Read More ...]

Apple Just Shipped the 500 Millionth iPhone, But if They Don’t Ship an iWatch in the Next Couple Months They’re Doomed

25 March, 2014 // 2 Comments

In the past 7 years Apple has sold more smartphones and more tablets than anyone, but according to one analyst none of that matters if Apple neglects to ship a smartwatch. The company is doomed, [Read More ...]

The “Book as a Luxury Item” is not the Future of Publishing

31 December, 2013 // 10 Comments

Do you recall how David Streitfield, Mike Shatzkin, and others have been writing about the general market failure of anything but the more basic ebooks? Some are misinterpreting that as a sign that [Read More ...]

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