The last few months have witnessed a bloodbath in tech stocks coupled with a frantic re-definition of the web and of every player in it (as far as content is concerned). This effort is three pronged: Some companies are gambling on content distribution and the possession of the atte ...

Are content brokers - publishers, distributors, and record companies - a thing of the past In one word: disintermediation. The gradual removal of layers of content brokering and intermediation - mainly in manufacturing marketing - is the continuation of a long term trend. Consider ...

http://groups.google.com/ http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce.html The Internet may have started as the fervent brainchild of DARPA ...

A novel re-definition through experimentation of the classical format of the book is emerging. Consider the now defunct BookTailor. It used to sell its book customization software mainly to travel agents - but this technology is likely to conquer other niches (such as the legal and med ...

http://www.britannica.com There is no source of reference remotely as authoritative as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There is no brand as venerable and as veteran as this mammoth labour of knowledge and ideas established in 1768. There ...

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkablecomplexity. Line ...

OverDrive - an e-commerce, software conversion and e-publishing applications leader - has just expanded an e-book technology centre by adding 200 e-book editors. This happened in Montego Bay, Jamaica - one of the less privileged spots on earth. The centre now provides a vertical e-publis ...

http://www.doi.org/ The Internet is too rich. Even powerful and sophisticated search engines, such as Google, return a lot of trash, dead ends, and Error 404's in response to the most well-defined query, Boolean operators and all. Directories ...

http://www.doi.org/ The DOI Foundation has unveiled the DOI-EB (EB stands for e-books) Initiative in the Book Expo America Show 2001, to, in their words: "Determine requirements with respect to the application of unique identifiers to eB ...

http://home.wuliweb.com/index.shtml http://www.pshares.org/ The circulation of print magazines has declined precipitously in the last 24 months. This dissolution of subscriber ...

"In this digital age, the custodians of published works are at the center of a global copyright controversy that casts them as villains simply for doing their job: letting people borrow books for free." (ZDNet quoted by "Publisher's Lunch on July 13, 2001) It is amazing that the trad ...

http://www.realsci.com/ Scindex's Instant Publishing Service is about empowerment. The price of scholarly, peer-reviewed journals has skyrocketed in the last few years, often way out of the limited means of libraries, universities, indivi ...

http://www.archive.org/ "Digitized information, especially on the Internet, has such rapid turnover these days that total loss is the norm. Civilization is developing severe amnesia as a result; indeed it may have become too amnesiac alre ...

"The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely." (French National Assembly, 1789) I. What is a Book UNESCO's arbitrary and ungrounded definition of "book" is: ""Non-periodical ...

The Net was supposed to dissolve anachronistic national borders and cultural boundaries. It was expected to vitiate distance - both physical and mental. It was hailed as the invention that will unify Mankind and harmonize (though not homogenize) civilizations, east and west. Yet, this ...

http://www.webcredibility.org/ People are conditioned to trust written words, not to mention images. "I read it in the paper" or "As seen on TV" are worn out but still effective clichés. The Internet combines both the written and ...

UNESCO's somewhat arbitrary definition of "book" is: ""Non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers". The emergence of electronic publishing was supposed to change all that. Yet a bloodbath of unusual proportions has taken place in the last few months. T ...

THE CURRENT WORRIES 1. Content Suppliers The Ethos of Free Content Content Suppliers is the underprivileged sector of the Internet. They all lose money (even sites which offer basic, standardized goods - books, CDs), with the exception of sites profering sex or tourism. No user ...

A debate is raging in e-publishing circles: should content be encrypted and protected (the Barnes and Noble or Digital goods model) - or should it be distributed freely and thus serve as a form of viral marketing (Seth Godin's "ideavirus") Publishers fear that freely distributed and cost ...

http://www.ideavirus.com The recent bloodbath among online content peddlers and digital media proselytisers can be traced to two deadly sins. The first was to assume that traffic equals sales. In other words, that a miraculous conversion will spontaneously occur among the hordes of vi ...