The bones of Steve Jobs continue their easy rest, especially since November, when Adobe capitulated by announcing the end of mobile browser Flash development. Not only that, but they have moved their focus onto HTML5, something they should have embraced a long time ago. Sure, we’ve bitched about Flash for years, but there was a time […]
2010 is wrapping up like a 77-0 football game. Many experts are sifting through endless spreadsheets, looking for patterns in the numbers which will help justify their relevance to both the publishing and computer industries. Others are checking their offshore accounts. Still others are drafting wills. The Association of American Publishers has reported e-book sales […]
My friends at Red Hen Press (publishers of Beneath Stars Long Extinct) have asked me to write a brief article on self-run sites by writers. If you’re a writer or published author and want to get the word out about your writing, a well-conceived site written, run, and updated by you is critical. It should […]
The Great and Powerful Jeff Bezos and his Kindle team at Amazon.com continue to do whatever they can in hopes of staunching the excitement over the next generation of Apple iPads. Rumor has it the second generation of the same 9.7-inch form factor will be released in the first quarter next year. A fully-functional computer, […]
The final trains are leaving the station for the land of prosperity, or, at least, survivability. Now it’s time to see if newspapers and magazines will climb aboard. Whether they’ll be left behind remains a question of choice for these industries which have operated largely without change for most of their existence. The exciting news […]
With Apple’s stock at an all-time high, and Adobe employees bumming change on the corners of San Jose when not revising their resumes, it looks like the greatly-hyped clash over Flash has largely subsided. Chalk up another non-event for the computer technology history books. As AppleInsider reported, “Apple’s decision to allow intermediary tools to port […]
The publishing world continues to be as shaken as the Pope on his recent trip to England. The difference between that situation and the publishing world is that in the United Kingdom, citizens are avoiding the pews, and they don’t look likely to return to their former numbers in our lifetimes. With publishing, illicit sex […]
Once, in 1994, I found myself in a car with some well-known literary intelligentsia traveling to a poetry conference. It was a seminar on a topic once considered very important. Like everything, what was once popular buzz eventually becomes trivia. This is something all artists should keep in mind, but I digress, as usual. I was […]
As the summer draws to a close, we see Amazon.com dropping prices of Kindle e-readers faster than wet bikinis in a Minnesota February. In its Microsoft-like frenzy for market domination, we’ve seen Team Bezos do everything from sell e-books at loss to multiple revisions of their kludgey hardware. Now, following the Kindle’s move into Target […]
Recently, a saner mind than mine convinced me to clear out a rented storage space full of many things I’ll never use. As a writer, I went through a period of amassing articles, newspapers and magazines containing things which might eventually find their way into a short story, novel, poem, or article I would write […]