Will Books Be Napsterized?

in Books, e-books | October 4th, 2009

The rise of e‑books opens up new hori­zons for read­ers, and also the pos­si­bil­i­ty that books will be “Nap­ster­ized,” as The New York Times explains. The Times arti­cle begins:

You can buy “The Lost Sym­bol,” by Dan Brown, as an e‑book for $9.99 at Amazon.com.

Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy from anoth­er online user at Rapid­Share, Megau­pload, Hot­file and oth­er file-stor­age sites.

Until now, few read­ers have pre­ferred e‑books to print­ed or audi­ble ver­sions, so the pub­lic avail­abil­i­ty of free-for-the-tak­ing copies did not much mat­ter. But e‑books won’t stay on the periph­ery of book pub­lish­ing much longer. E‑book hard­ware is on the verge of going main­stream…

With the new devices in hand, will book buy­ers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded with­out the copy­right holder’s per­mis­sion? Mind­ful of what hap­pened to the music indus­try at a sim­i­lar tran­si­tion­al junc­ture, book pub­lish­ers are about to dis­cov­er whether their indus­try is dif­fer­ent enough to be spared a sim­i­lar­ly dis­mal fate. (Get the rest here.)

Need­less to say, pub­lish­ers are get­ting ner­vous. But some see the “Nap­ster­i­za­tion” of books being more hype than real. As author Seth Har­wood told me on Twit­ter (find our Twit­ter stream here), The “nyt arti­cle on ebook pira­cy is spin. If more peo­ple are read­ing, even stolen books, pub­lish­ers win. Too much fear of zero sum.” In the com­ments sec­tion below, Seth goes beyond 140 char­ac­ters and spells out why pub­lish­ers should take a deep breath. They might actu­al­ly have more to gain than lose, if they play their cards right. Give his thoughts a read, and keep in mind that he land­ed a Ran­dom House con­tract by giv­ing his books away as free audio pod­casts.

Anne Frank: The Only Existing Video Now Online

in History, Life | October 2nd, 2009

There’s no sound, and the clip only runs 20 sec­onds. But this is the only known footage of Anne Frank, and it’s now online. The Anne Frank House does a good job of set­ting the scene for the video tak­en on July 22, 1941. “The girl next door is get­ting mar­ried. Anne Frank is lean­ing out of the win­dow of her house in Ams­ter­dam to get a good look at the bride and groom… At the time of her wed­ding, the bride lived on the sec­ond floor at Mer­wede­plein 39. The Frank fam­i­ly lived at num­ber 37, also on the sec­ond floor. The Anne Frank House can offer you this film footage thanks to the coop­er­a­tion of the cou­ple.” Find more videos on YouTube’s Anne Frank Chan­nel.

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Fora.TV Goes Mobile

in Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society | October 2nd, 2009

Yes­ter­day, YouTube EDU went inter­na­tion­al, and FORA.TV went mobile. FORA is an excel­lent resource for smart video (you’ll find it in our col­lec­tion of Top Intel­li­gent Video Sites), and now it has launched its new mobile web site. Just point your mobile brows­er to m.fora.tv, and you can start watch­ing smart video on the move. The mobile site works well on the iPhone, and hope­ful­ly that holds true for oth­er smart phones. For more intel­li­gent mobile con­tent, please check out our Free iPhone app, and send it along to a friend. To access the app, you can always use the short­ened link: http://bit.ly/opencultureapp

Fol­low us on Face­book and also Twit­ter, where we tweet and re-tweet extra cul­tur­al good­ies that nev­er make it to the blog.

Archive

in | September 29th, 2009

You can sort through our Archive by Date (below) or by Sub­ject (scroll fur­ther down the page).

Time

[clea­n­ar­chives­re­loaded]

Sub­jects

• Ama­zon Kin­dle
• Apple
• Art
• Audio Books
• Books
• Busi­ness
• Com­e­dy
• Cur­rent Affairs
• e‑books
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• Edu­ca­tion
• Eng­lish Lan­guage
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• ipad
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• Lit­er­a­ture
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• Most Pop­u­lar
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• Phi­los­o­phy
• Physics
• Pod­cast Arti­cles and Resources
• Poet­ry
• Pol­i­tics
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• Ran­dom
• Reli­gion
• Sci Fi
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• Stan­ford
• Tech­nol­o­gy
• TED Talks
• Tele­vi­sion
• The­ater
• Twit­ter
• UC Berke­ley
• Uncat­e­go­rized
• Video – Arts & Cul­ture
• Video – Politics/Society
• Video – Sci­ence
• Web/Tech
• Wikipedia
• Yale
• YouTube

Nabokov Makes Editorial Improvements to Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”

in Literature | September 27th, 2009

Vladimir Nabokov admired Franz Kafka’s novel­la, “The Meta­mor­pho­sis.” Hence the lec­ture that Nabokov ded­i­cat­ed to the work here. But he also saw some small ways to improve the sto­ry, or at least the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of it. Above, we have some edits that Nabokov penned him­self. And, just as an fyi, you can down­load a free ver­sions of Kafka’s work in our col­lec­tions of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Filmmaker Roman Polanski Arrested After 31Years

in Film | September 27th, 2009

A lit­tle bit of break­ing news com­ing out of Zurich, Switzer­land. More cov­er­age in The New York Times here.

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking Remixed

in Physics, Science | September 25th, 2009

It’s rare that a video trend­ing on YouTube actu­al­ly fits the mis­sion of this blog. But here you have one. As the pro­duc­er of this video writes, this is a “musi­cal trib­ute to two great men of sci­ence. Carl Sagan and his cos­mol­o­gist com­pan­ion Stephen Hawk­ing present: A Glo­ri­ous Dawn — Cos­mos remixed. Almost all sam­ples and footage are tak­en from Carl Sagan’s Cos­mos and Stephen Hawk­ing’s Uni­verse series.” You can down­load the track here. And, mean­while, I’ve added this clip to our YouTube Favorites.

Armstrong’s Case for God

in Religion | September 24th, 2009

In recent years, we have seen a num­ber of books pub­lished that have made the case for athe­ism: Richard Dawk­in’s The God Delu­sion, Christo­pher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Sam Har­ris’ Let­ter to a Chris­t­ian Nation, and Daniel Den­net­t’s Break­ing the Spell: Reli­gion as a Nat­ur­al Phe­nom­e­non. It was almost as if a dam had bro­ken, and sud­den­ly a voice that had­n’t been heard in some time, at least not in the US, was let loose. The books hit hard, one after anoth­er, and they made their point. And now Karen Arm­strong, who has writ­ten more than 20 books on Islam, Judaism and Chris­tian­i­ty, offers a reply. Her new book pub­lished this week, The Case for God: What Reli­gion Real­ly Means, takes a his­tor­i­cal look at God and con­cludes that we mod­erns (athe­ists, evan­gel­i­cals and the rest) are work­ing with a facile con­cep­tion of God. And then she sug­gests an alter­na­tive way of see­ing things. You can get a taste for her think­ing in this NPR inter­view con­duct­ed this week: Lis­ten with the play­er below, or via these links (MP3 — iTunes — Stream):

Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials

in Television | September 23rd, 2009

Thanks to Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, you can now access a dig­i­tal archive of vin­tage tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials dat­ing from the 1950s to the 1980s. Even­tu­al­ly, this col­lec­tion will fea­ture close to 12,000 dig­i­tized com­mer­cials, and it will let you see how Amer­i­ca’s tra­di­tion­al brands (IBM, Maxwell House, Amer­i­can Express, Avis, etc) evolved through the medi­um of main­stream com­mer­cial tele­vi­sion. You can learn more about this col­lec­tion called Adviews with this intro­duc­to­ry video or via the Adviews web­site, and you can watch the vin­tage com­mer­cials through iTunes. (Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I don’t see a way to access these clips via oth­er means. Sor­ry about that.) Via @LibrarySecrets

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Aus­tralian Screen Archive

Rewind the Video­tape: Mike Wal­lace Inter­views 1950s Celebri­ties …

The Free Music Archive

Bob Dylan Christmas Preview

in Music | September 22nd, 2009

Here’s a sneak pre­view of Bob Dylan’s forth­com­ing Christ­mas album. It will hit the streets in Octo­ber, and you can pre-order now. A safe assump­tion: this will be a “love it” or “hate it” album.