Seamless, Efficient Plumbing for Digital Books
1. A believer in digital books loses the faith.
"As a consumer of digital books I feel delighted, but as a reader, I feel crestfallen. All of the consumption parts of the Kindle experience are pitch-perfect: a boundless catalogue, instant distribution, reasonable prices (perhaps once too reasonable, now less so with recently updated contracts). It’s easy to forget that Amazon doesn’t just frustrate publishers, it also powers a huge chunk of the internet – hosting files and providing servers for many of the largest companies in the world. That business alone accounts for nearly $2 billion of their bottom line. So it’s no surprise that Amazon has built seamless, efficient plumbing for digital books. But after a book has made its way through the plumbing and onto the devices, the once-fresh experience now feels neglected."
"A few years ago, many in the space industry hadn’t heard of this bank. Even today, its role in the industry is not widely known except among those who build commercial satellites and sell commercial launches. Yet in the last five years it’s become a critical tool for those companies. At least, when the bank is open for business. The bank in question is the Export-Import Bank of the United States, usually known simply as Ex-Im. It is the official export credit agency of the U.S., providing financing for American companies who want to export products but can’t get financing from the private sector, at least on favorable terms."
3. An investigative journalist argues that Saudi Arabia will collapse in the next decade.
"In Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Egypt, civil unrest and all-out war can be traced back to the devastating impact of declining state power in the context of climate-induced droughts, agricultural decline, and rapid oil depletion. Yet the Saudi government has decided that rather than learning lessons from the hubris of its neighbours, it won’t wait for war to come home – but will readily export war in the region in a madcap bid to extend its geopolitical hegemony and prolong its petro-dominance."
4. A 1995 supercut of telephones by artist Christian Marclay of telephones in use.
"Using his building blocks – dialing, greeting, conversing, farewells and hang-ups – Marclay plays with the notion of cinematic continuity by splicing newer and older films into his own narrative. The video opens with a man walking into a booth, the word “telephone” in all caps, he slowly dials. His action is followed by several more clips of dialing, technology jumps from clunky rotary dialers from the pre-area code days to “up-to-date” push buttons phones (apple would later, ahem, appropriate the spirit of Telelphones for an ad)."
5. A rundown of 10 recent acquisitions of robotics companies.
"As robots move out from behind fixed and caged locations to take their place alongside us (as the new collaborative robots are doing, providing assistance or augmenting skills, and as the new surgical systems and low-cost data collecting drones are doing, as they move from sci-fi movies and toys to real-life cognizant and communicating assistants), business people once again can see the tide rising, and they want in (or put another way, they don’t want to be left out). Ray Kurzweil said that auto companies don’t want to be ‘Nokia’d’, i.e., they don’t want to be pushed aside as typewriters were by WordStar, WordPerfect and MS Word, or Nokia’s operating system was by Google’s Android."
1. aeon.com 2. spacenews.com 3. middleeasteye.net | @harikunzru 4. nasher.duke.edu | @kathrynschulz 5. robohub.org
Seamless, Efficient Plumbing for Digital Books