February 2012

Beloved Librarian Who Signed With Amazon: ‘The Vehemence Surprised Me’

Nancy Pearl, the famous librarian who recently partnered with Amazon to republish a handful of out-of-print titles each year, tells the New York Times and Seattle Times that based on the reaction she’s received it’s a “hard question” whether she’d do it again.

Amazon Publishing is launching Pearl’s line at a time when many in her community -- independent booksellers, librarians and some authors -- are very angry at Amazon for what they see as predatory business practices, relentless discounting and attacks on independent bookstores. “By aligning herself with Amazon, she’s turning her back on independents,” said Seattle Mystery Bookshop owner J.B. Dickey. “Amazon is absolutely antithetical to independent bookselling, and, to many of us, truth, justice and the American way.”

Google Books Lawsuit Lurches Forward

The fate of Google’s massive book scanning project has been up in the air since a legal settlement collapsed last year. New court filings this week suggest a possible end game.

The filings come after the Authors Guild decided in December to restart a class action lawsuit that demands Google pay authors for scanning their works without permission. The case was on hold for years as authors and publishers pursued an ambitious three-way deal to split digital book revenue with Google. After Judge Denny Chin rejected the deal last March, publishers have not gone forward with their original lawsuit and some have instead struck their own deals with Google. Google is responding to the revived lawsuit by trying to knock the Authors Guild out of the case on the grounds that it doesn’t have legal standing. If a court agree, this would force the three remaining individual plaintiffs in the case to continue to wage an expensive legal battle on their own.

The tone of life on social networking sites

The overall social and emotional climate of social networking sites (SNS) is a very positive one where adult users get personal rewards and satisfactions at far higher levels than they encounter anti-social people or have ill consequences from their encounters.

A nationally representative phone survey of American adults finds that:

85% of SNS-using adults say that their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind, compared with 5% who say people they observe on the sites are mostly unkind and another 5% who say their answer depends on the situation.
68% of SNS users said they had an experience that made them feel good about themselves.
61% had experiences that made them feel closer to another person. (Many said they had both experiences.)
39% of SNS-using adults say they frequently see acts of generosity by other SNS users and another 36% say they sometimes see others behaving generously and helpfully. By comparison, 18% of SNS-using adults say they see helpful behavior “only once in a while” and 5% say they never see generosity exhibited by others on social networking sites.

At the same time, notable proportions of SNS users do witness bad behavior on those sites and nearly a third have experienced some negative outcomes from their experiences on social networking sites. Some 49% of SNS-using adults said they have seen mean or cruel behavior displayed by others at least occasionally. And 26% said they had experienced at least one of the bad outcomes that were queried in the survey.

Sprint CEO: Failure Of AT&T/T-Mobile Deal Means 'Many More Options' For Sprint

Sprint spent much of 2011 battling a proposed merger between its competitors AT&T and T-Mobile USA. Seven weeks after that deal was officially declared dead, Sprint Chief Executive Dan Hesse said the break-off would create opportunities for Sprint.

“It means many more options for Sprint than we would have had if the merger had gone through,” said Hesse in an interview following Sprint’s Feb. 8th fourth-quarter earnings call. Hesse did not speculate on those options beyond referring to T-Mobile’s spectrum being back on “the table” in terms of general industry availability. During Sprint’s Feb. 8th call, Hesse said Sprint would entertain any transactions and partnerships that it viewed as benefiting shareholders. Analysts have suggested some possibilities. One of the most prevalent hypotheses is that Sprint will strike a network-sharing deal with T-Mobile. Such a move would grant T-Mobile access to a 4G/LTE network while giving Sprint additional spectrum/capacity and generating revenues.

AT&T users report getting throttled at 2GB despite 'unlimited' data plans

If you're an old-school iPhone user who still has one of AT&T's unlimited data plans, be prepared for a rude awakening. Some AT&T customers have reported that they are getting knocked from 3G speeds down to 2G speeds after they exceeded 2GB of data consumption per month despite having grandfathered-in unlimited data plans from the carrier.

Blogger John Cozen wrote a detailed post this weekend describing his attempts to get AT&T to justify throttling his data speeds despite the fact that he had only consumed 2.1GB of data on the month. AT&T representatives told Cozen that the carrier begins throttling users' data speeds if they are among the top 5% of data users among users with unlimited plans. In other words, if the top 5% of data users consume 2GB of data or more on their unlimited plans, then they get their service reduced for exceeding 2GB, despite the fact that AT&T offers users tiered data plans that charge $30 a month for 3GB of data.

AT&T Says Throttling Policy Isn’t as Bad as You Think

Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, said that as of last summer, the top 5 percent of AT&T’s heaviest data users have typically used 2 gigabytes or more per month. Siegel said that even if you do exceed 2 gigabytes of data usage and qualify as one of the top 5 percent, that doesn’t absolutely mean you’re going to be throttled.

AT&T will only reduce speeds for the top 5 percent of users in areas where network capacity or spectrum is insufficient, he said. In other words, throttling is done on a case-by-case basis, not based on a hard number, according to AT&T’s claims. “There’s a very good chance you wouldn’t be slowed,” Siegel said. He added that in the last month, less than 1 percent of AT&T smartphone customers were affected by the policy. AT&T’s throttling policy only applies to customers with unlimited data plans. The wireless company stopped offering an unlimited data plan in 2010; those who had already signed up for one before the cut-off had the option of being grandfathered in.

Who really was behind the SOPA protests?

Some critics have blamed Silicon Valley tech firms for the massive online protests last month against two controversial copyright bills. Other groups have trumpeted the grassroots nature of the protests. The reason it’s important to explain what happened is to show that it’s possible to again organize large-scale online protests in the US.

“What we’re seeing here is this integration of the organizations with [Washington] expertise, and these organizations that are very plugged into these user-driven social networks,” said Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, one of several groups that worked behind the scenes on the protest. “Multiply all of that across a community that is used to figuring out ways in which people can use these technologies for social interaction very quickly.” Fight for the Future, a fledgling group started in late 2011, plans to build on the SOPA protest model to draw together a network of websites to form an “Internet defense league” to contact Congress about future bills that threaten Web freedoms, said Tiffiniy Cheng, cofounder of Fight for the Future and OpenCongress.org, a congressional watchdog site.

eRx makes steady gains in California, report shows

Electronic prescribing is continues to grow steadily in California, potentially increasing the safety of the prescribing process, according to a new report from Cal eConnect.

About 25 percent of the state's physicians are sending prescriptions electronically, the report estimates, compared with 3 percent in 2007. At the same time, just 16 percent of eligible prescriptions are routed electronically, despite the fact that most community pharmacies are set up for ePrescribing. According to the study, while most patients have prescription benefit information and medication histories available from their health plans, the utilization of this information at the point-of-care is low. Only 18 percent of patient visits involved a prescription benefit query and only 10 percent involved a check of medication history. This measure does not include Kaiser Permanente and Veterans Affairs.

A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That's Watching Your Every Click

In this excerpt from his new book, The Daily You, University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow takes you on a tour of the industry that's trafficking in the data you generate every day on the Internet. You don't have to be a privacy stickler to be worried.

How Americans are Spending their Media Time… and Money

Americans spend more than 33 hours per week watching video across the screens, according to the latest Nielsen Cross-Platform Report. But how they’re consuming content -- traditional TV and otherwise -- is changing.

Demonstrating that consumers are increasingly making Internet connectivity a priority, 75.3 percent pay for broadband Internet (up from 70.9% last year); 90.4 percent pay for cable, telephone company-provided TV or satellite. Homes with both paid TV and broadband increased 5.5 percent since last year. Changes are afoot, however, as consumers seek out the entertainment option that makes the most sense for them. The number of homes subscribing to wired cable has decreased 4.1 percent in the past year at the same time that telephone company-provided and satellite TV have seen increases of 21.1 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively.
Though less than 5 percent of TV households, homes with broadband Internet and free, broadcast TV are on the rise—growing 22.8 percent over last year. These households are also found to exhibit interesting video behaviors: they stream video twice as much as the general population and watch half as much TV. Whether they’re cord-cutters or former broadcast-only homes that upgraded to Internet service, these homes represent a very small but growing group of U.S. consumers.

Benton

Search