I enjoyed a recent article in The Bookseller by Philip Jones.  Philip Downer, who used to run Border Books’ UK operation, warned of the glut of content and the control by Amazon, Google, and Apple of the pipelines to the consumer with proprietary formats.  He urged change and a pooling of resources by the publishers.  He expressed concern about the “seduction of colour, movement and noise” with digital ink, and concern that publishers are not quick to act, stating in their slowness, “Steve Jobs is dead, but sometimes I think Queen Victoria is still alive.”

In Richard Caves’ 2002 book Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and CommerceCreative Industries, he stated that without the natural filters (like agents and publishers) within creative industries, which make money by making judgements for production, the vast volume of creative properties becomes overwhelming.

The cost of creation has plummeted, as has music.  When we all can (and we already can) self-publish to our hearts content, will we be under the deluge of new books like we are underwater with new tracks coming into the music systems from the likes of Tunecore, CD Baby, and Reverbnation?

Past Tidbits and Explorations

Augmenting My Mind

How much in technology is augmenting me versus being a digital vampire? How much is one tool or another improving my life vs. taking time and control away? I'm now about 21 months into having short-term memory problems. I had some kind of a memory degradation when I...

From Music in LA to Digital and Music in Austin

We've just ended the second cycle of our Future of Music in LA projects at the Center for Music Innovation at UCLA Alpert.  We helped run a half-day symposium with the City of LA Dept. of Cultural Affairs and the UC Digital...

Playing with Facebook Stories Camera Effects

My Facebook friends must be thinking I'm nuts (again).  I've been tinkering with Facebook Stories and its Camera Effects.  In fact, I've been playing so much I'm also looking into the Camera Effects and AR (augmented reality) developer group. First, here's some of the...

Craft, Process, and Thinking of Becoming

Today I'm working on taxes for our two college students' FAFSAs and watching "Abstract: The Art of Design" on Netflix in the background.  Christoph Niemann is both in his story and telling his story about craft and life.  He is a character and an animated...

HUD: Stories on How We Work and Decide

Gigi enjoyed sharing thoughts over YouTube and the US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) OCIO Learning Series.  This session was recorded in January and ran as a webinar on March 17.  You can find it now...