Interesting Links for 15-04-2013

[andrewducker]

• Jacquard Looms! I didn't know there were still working ones!
  (tags: history computers clothing )
• Towards psychohistory - the limits of harnessing data to predict the future of society.
  (tags: thefuture predictions society )
• Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride.
  (tags: chemistry dangerous )
• Be careful on your birthday
  (tags: birthday

Comments

[autopope]

WRT. ebook subscriptions: this is WIRED. I'd give it more credence if it was coming out of Publishers' Weekly or a similar trade journal.

Yes, Tim Waterstone is planning something innovative involving short fiction ... the term for this business model is "a short story magazine", and it's only a couple of centuries old, but everything old is new again if you just prefix it with the letter "e-", right?

Before deciding ahead of time that Sir Tim is going to make it work, it's worth taking a salutary look at the surviving SF magazines. SF is the only literary field where the short story really survived as a commercial form much past the late 1950s, and even so, they're living hand-to-mouth. The "digital revolution" hasn't exactly resurrected the sales of Analog and Asimov's SF magazine; it has just about kept them on life support. And that's a field where short fiction is popularBaen have been selling monthly bundles of e-books for a decade. DRM-free, no less, in all the file formats the readers ask for. It's a good tactic, but it

[andrewducker]

Thanks, that was pretty much what I was expecting :->

I have been curious as to whether a subscription model would work for books. It seems to be working for music (insofar as I'm currently spending £120/year on music that I could download for free if I felt like it).

Whether people would be willing to do the same for books, and what the value would need to be to make it sustainable, I don't know. (I'd do it, and then feel much happier trying out the first chapter of a bunch of books to see whether I'd want to read the rest.)

[kiffkin]

While I agree with your general point about learning from existing markets, you seem to have overlooked that short stories - usually romance stories - in women's magazines (e.g. Woman's Weekly, My Weekly, Best) are still popular. Like the article says, the romance genre is thriving, and there's a massive potential target there between magazine readers, book buyers and library book borrowers.

[autopope]

Genre romance isn't merely thriving; it's more than 50% of total fiction sales (at least in the USA, and probably also in the UK).

That's where I'd expect to see a subscription model for books show up first.

[naath]

Portugal> that's 70% of electricity, not 70% of "power". Still, very impressive.

[artkouros]

Now I know why the garbage men won't pick up the leftovers from my canned Eels in Dioxygen Difluoride.

[makyo]

Jacquard Looms! I didn't know there were still working ones!
They have one in the Industrial Museum at Wollaton Hall, Nottingham (which you might recognise as Wayne Manor in the most recent Batman film), but as far as I know it's not operational. On the other hand, they do have a working beam engine that a group of volunteers runs one Sunday afternoon a month.

[sigmonster]

A company in Chilwell, a few miles out of Nottingham, still runs 200-year-old stocking frames. (And much newer looms as well, of course, but they do still produce things on the hand frames.)

[makyo]

Interesting - thanks for this. I should have known that, actually - I grew up in Chilwell, a bit further along the High Road, and would have walked, cycled or bussed past G H Hurt a few times a week for several years. Alas, I wasn't always the most attentive of people at that age.

[sigmonster]

I grew up on Dovecote Lane in Beeston and in due course went to Chilwell Comp, but I didn't know of the company either until I bought a scarf in the lace museum a few years back!

[erratio]

The toxicity of news is exactly why I'm glad people like you are around to read the news on my behalf and tell me the interesting bits :p

[apostle_of_eris]

I thought that was one of the story ideas Heinlein sent Sturgeon.