Amazon Category Archives
современные коллажи
8 September 2012 | Amazon, Art | No Comments
и столовая вилка может оказаться предметом искусства:
56 Broken Kindle Screens is a print on demand paperback that consists of found photos depicting broken Kindle screens. The Kindle is Amazon’s e-reading device which is by default connected to the company’s book store.
The book takes as its starting point the peculiar aesthetic of broken E Ink displays and serves as an examination into the reading device’s materiality. As the screens break, they become collages composed of different pages, cover illustrations and interface elements.
впрочем, разве шрамы не красивы? коллизии в обычной жизни непересекающихся пространств всегда отчасти сродни чуду.
о стратегиях, еще
7 September 2012 | Amazon, Apple, Google, Hardware, Software | No Comments
и заслуженная похвала:
Whereas Google’s credo seems tilted towards emulating the best practices of others so as to relegate them to a commodity, Amazon really seems to want to learn from the best, and then integrate those lessons into what they do well. No simple copying and pasting of good ideas for them, ala Samsung.
о стратегиях и рынках
7 September 2012 | Amazon, Apple, Google, Hardware, Software | No Comments
по следам вчерашней презентации Amazon:
It begs the question: If you are Google, once you get beyond the disciples, how do you compete in this domain [of ecommerce, digital media, publishing, cloud computing and hardware know-how]? If you are Samsung, and have no software story, then what IS your story now? HP, Microsoft, Dell, Asus, et al, time to calibrate what game you are in — because if we know one thing about Amazon, it’s that they play the long game. What’s your long game?
и дальше:
Moreover, if it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now — the game is no longer about technical specifications or hardware-only stories. It’s about the rise of integrated hardware-software platforms and a relentless focus on the customer through continual refinement of said platforms.
I told you so, I told you so.
распродажа
29 August 2012 | Amazon, Apple, Google, Hardware | 1 Comment
любители Android, кстати, распродают свои чудесные аппараты Samsung, точно горящие пирожки:
Since the $1.05 billion verdict Friday — which found that Samsung infringed on six Apple patents — customers of Samsung have been dumping their Android products on at least one major resale site. Gazelle.com reports a 50% increase in Samsung smartphones over the past three days, which has led to a 10% drop in prices for those devices. “Consumers seem to be jumping ship,” says Anthony Scarsella, chief gadget officer at Gazelle.com. “We expect this trend to continue, especially with this latest verdict.”
не отстает и сам Google: из-за всех сил рекламирует многострадальный Nexus 7 на самой дорогостоящей площадке, на собственной заглавной странице[1]. оно и верно, разумеется, ведь на подходе обновленный Kindle Fire и — кто знает? — iPad Mini; кому тогда будет до очередных воспоминаний?
умора, в общем.
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[1] — Marissa Mayer, Google Vice President of Search Product and User Experience; December, 2005:
There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.
наездники
28 July 2012 | AI, Amazon, Copyright, Lifeform, Technology | 1 Comment
A pair of artist-coders have unleashed a small army of bots designed to flood the Kindle e-book store with texts comprised entirely of YouTube comments. According to the artists, even they have no idea how many books their autonomous bots are posting to the store.
даже смешно, говорят — и я охотно этому верю:
The Internet slang of YouTube comments is treated as fresh dialogue, and sold through Amazon.com in the form of massive, self-generated e-books. In an auto-cannibalistic model, user generated content is sold back to the users themselves, parasitically exploiting both corporations: YouTube and Amazon.
The GHOST WRITERS project’s aim is to address and identify pertinent questions concerning the digital publishing industry’s business models, as well as to draw the lines of new trends for a possible new kind of digital literature, after the web.
плюс, и еще один интересный аспект:
[W]ho do YouTube videos/comments belong to? Where does authorship start and end? To what extent does the e-book format have to be reconsidered with regard to the traditional book form, and what are its most innovative opportunities?
ага.
о рынках
5 July 2012 | Amazon, Apple, Economics, Google, Hardware | 1 Comment
и о доходах:
The research firm UBM TechInsights has come up with a $184 preliminary estimate for the costs of components in the Google [Nexus 7] tablet[1]. That compares with its $153 estimate in November for the components inside Amazon.com’s identically priced Kindle Fire.
<...>
Both Google and Amazon, as has been widely noted, have plans to make money beyond what they take in from the purchase price of their tablets, in Google’s case from expected online advertising revenues. Apple, by contrast, gets more from the hardware; UBM puts the cost of components in a Wi-Fi only model of its new iPad at $278, indicating a fatter profit from selling the $499 tablet.
иными словами, место для прибыльного “iPad Mini” у Apple определенно найдется. если только дело именно в этом.
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[1] — интересно, что в этой связи думают о Google другие изготовители Android-планшетов?
1984, postmoderned
1 July 2012 | Amazon, Privacy | No Comments
и еше оттуда же:
Amazon declined to comment on how it analyzes and uses the Kindle data it gathers.
<...>
Bruce Schneier, a cyber-security expert and author, worries that readers may steer clear of digital books on sensitive subjects such as health, sexuality and security—including his own works—out of fear that their reading is being tracked. “There are a gazillion things that we read that we want to read in private,” Mr. Schneier says.
вы ведь помните книгу, что убрали самой первой?
приз зрительских симпатий
1 July 2012 | Amazon, Lifeform, Literature | No Comments
сервисы пытаются узнать о нас как можно больше — в том числе и то, почему мы читаем:
The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.
все это само собой разумеется по нынешним меркам. но вот, что куда интереснее:
Amazon can identify which passages of digital books are popular with readers, and shares some of this data publicly on its website through features such as its “most highlighted passages” list. Readers digitally “highlight” selections using a button on the Kindle; they can also opt to see the lines commonly highlighted by other readers as they read a book. Amazon aggregates these selections to see what gets underlined the most. Topping the list is the line from the “Hunger Games” trilogy. It is followed by the opening sentence of “Pride and Prejudice.”
они знают, как объединять слова, чтобы запасть в душу. они знают, кого взять героем, дабы понравиться. и они знают историю, что должна произойти:
Few publishers have taken the experiment as far as Coliloquy, a digital publishing company that was created earlier this year by Waynn Lue, a computer scientist and former Google engineer, and Lisa Rutherford, a venture capitalist and former president of Twofish, a gaming-analytics firm.
Coliloquy’s digital books, which are available on Kindle, Nook and Android e-readers, have a “choose-your-own-adventure”-style format, allowing readers to customize characters and plot lines. The company’s engineers aggregate and pool the data gleaned from readers’ selections and send it to the authors, who can adjust story lines in their next books to reflect popular choices.
<...>
In “Parish Mail,” Kira Snyder’s young adult mystery series set in New Orleans, readers can decide whether the teenage protagonist solves crimes by using magic or by teaming up with a police detective’s cute teenage son. Readers of “Great Escapes,” an erotic romance series co-written by Linda Wisdom and Lynda K. Scott, can customize the hero’s appearance and the intensity of the love scenes.
так что же мешает завтра им самим писать те романы, что вы обязательно купите? уж только не Нобелевский комитет.
будущие Шекспиры
23 April 2012 | Amazon, Lifeform | No Comments
двойники крадутся следом:
There are a number of books on Amazon with similar titles to much more popular ones. Fifty Shades of Grey, the steamy romance novel that has created buzz around the world, is the No. 1 selling book on Amazon. Also available on Amazon: Thirty-Five Shades of Grey. Both books are written by authors with two first initials – E. L. James and J. D. Lyte – and both are the first in a trilogy about a young girl who falls for an older, successful man with a taste for domineering sex. The publisher of the bestseller Fifty says the book is “a tale that will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever.” The author and publisher of Thirty-Five, which came out in early April, apparently believe that description fits their book as well, word-for-word. Also selling on Amazon is I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Twilight New Moon. Neither is the book you are likely looking for.
несложно предположить, кто на самом деле автор этих книг — возможно, еще не сегодня, но завтра-то уж точно.
ghosts in the shell
27 February 2012 | AI, Amazon, Lifeform | 4 Comments
у нас появляются соседи:
Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It’s one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.
как говорится, не могу не вспомнить:
“The last seven, eight years, there’s been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. The new jockeys, they make deals with things, don’t they, Lucas?”
<...>
“Thrones and dominions,” the Finn said obscurely. “Yeah, there’s things out there. Ghosts, voices Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see? Sure, it’s just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it’s a whole universe. And every year it gets a little more crowded.”
они рядом. дышат нам в затылок.