The growth of e-books is rattling publishers: Hardback books could be killed off if Amazon’s e-books and Google’s digital library force publishers to slash prices, Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette, has warned. Mr Nourry said unilateral pricing by Google, Amazon and other e-book retailers such as […]
Via Ed Driscoll, this fine rant from 2000 against those who insist that urban life is the best there is: The book frowns on gated communities, of course, because they’re exclusionary. Conversely, they praise urban developments with dense housing – which include, I presume, apartment buildings with doormen and security […]
Another Crawf starts the long, painful, lonely trudge to high blogging readership. If ’twere done, ’twere best done early… Nice name!
Who is to lead Europe? The French and Germans, of course. Who else? Gordon Brown is barely surviving as UK prime minister, and the Conservatives are as provincially Eurosceptic as ever. Europe simply cannot count on the British, at least for a while… Silvio Berlusconi’s sexcapades and Spain’s dire economic […]
Aaargh. Bosnia hits another political crisis or two or three: Meanwhile, Bosnia’s state government – the Council of Ministers – is facing a similar crisis after the strongest Bosniak party, the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, announced it may boycott the government over the issue of top appointments to key state […]
Edwin Forprogress helpfully comments on one of my postings about Edward Kennedy and briefs us on the legacy of the great man: edwin forprogress.org So much of his ‘The Dream Shall Never Die’ speech is relevant now. It makes me sad that so many Americans do not know how much it was […]
Some people are trying to use Edward Kennedy’s death to reboot Obamacare into Kennedycare. What about a single sensible national health insurance scheme for the USA? What a hero would be the person who put forwarda credible plan. And what a jerk, if not a Nazi and a rabble-rouser would […]
What if a huge business kept getting huger by ignoring every business rule about good organisation? This web-based business: gets 20 billion pageviews a month has 30 employees scorns advertising, marketing, sales, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate shuts down third-party applications designed to make the product work better […]
Damn. When I wrote my few words about Edward Kennedy I had at the back of my mind John Profumo. But I did not make the link. So Mark Steyn has done so, brilliantly (emphasis added): An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only […]
Think. It as far from here to Sergeant Pepper as it is from him to 1925. Lawks. Getting old. And so it is that I recently have meandered back again to a couple of the records of my, hem, student years. Quadrophenia, by The Who. And (gulp) Tales of Topographic […]
