Amazon now lets you “lend” your ebooks to other readers for a period of 14 days. And, in an interesting touch that adds a physical limitation to a digital product, you can’t read a book you’ve lent to someone while they’re borrowing it. River of Babylon ; Up Front: Why Criticism Matters We live in the age of opinion — offered instantly, effusively and in increasingly strident tones
Bubble Bubble, Boil and Trouble: No, In Fact, We Haven't Seen This Movie Before
N othing new under the disinfectant sun … Seems talk of another tech bubble occurring in the stock market has been making the rounds of numerous media dragons
Thanks to monster private financings from Groupon and Facebook, as well as the promise of major IPOs from Demand, LinkedIn, Zynga and others, the predictable "watch out, here we go again" buzz is rising up in the press. This article from Ad Age, subtitled "With Billion-Dollar Dot-com Valuations Back in a Big Way, It's Time for Alarm Bells to Start Ringing," is typical of the bunch. With a "we've seen this movie before" tone, it points out that most of the successful companies of today had models that were tried ten years ago, and in the main they failed.
• Big Way: Facebook facing bubble; [Speculation that Google plans on creating an electronic book reader were given more fuel with the company's acquisition of eBook Technologies - a company that specializes in both hardware and content distribution for electronic readers. ; Last week, the YouTube Blog buried its lead. Midway through a post that proclaimed "Music videos now on YouTube app for Android," was the really important news for marketers: "YouTube now exceeds 200 million views a day on mobile, a 3x increase in 2010." Watch dog of search engines]
• · I sense how hard we’ve all worked… It’s not easy. Even a not-so-good translation is not easy to produce. How Edith Grossman and Lydia Davis manage not to get lost in translation. When Done Right, Little Gets Lost In Translation; How much do Bruce Guthrie and Julian Assange have in common?
• · · Crime does not pay; Yuli Margolin spent six years in a gulag. His 1949 memoir, with its gimlet eye for literary detail, should have appeared in English decades ago
• · · · History repeats itself in Agora ; The incredible shrinking sound biteIt’s true, our politics has been reduced to sound bites It's not just a modern problem — and may not be such a bad thing after all
• · · · · Labor's disintegration decades in the making ; News about John Hatton
• · · · · · Mr Hatton said the attacks on Mr Assange leading to his arrest showed governments were determined to enforce the privacy of immature conversations and decision-making, and the spats that occurred between world leaders John on Assange; Border city “the forgotten corner of NSW” John on Albury