As with the printing press and the dotcom boom, initial frenzy and speculation obscures the lasting legacy of new technologies“Innovation,” wrote the economist William Janeway in his seminal book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, “begins with discovery and culminates in speculation.” That just about sums up 2023. The discovery was AI (as represented by ChatGPT), and the speculative bubble is what we have now, in which huge public corporations launch products that are known to “hallucinate” (yes, that’s now a technical term relating to large language models), and spend money like it’s going out of fashion on the kit needed to make even bigger ones. As I write, I see a report that next year Microsoft plans to buy 150,000 Nvidia chips – at $30,000 (£24,000) a pop. It’s a kind of madness. But when looked at it through the Janeway lens, ’twas ever thus.“The innovations that have repeatedly transformed the architecture of the market economy,” he writes, “from canals to the internet, have required massive investments to construct networks whose value in use could not be imagined at the outset of deployment.” Or, to put it more crudely, what we retrospectively regard as examples of technological progress have mostly come about through outbreaks of irrational exuberance that involved colossal waste, bankrupted investors and caused social turmoil. Bubbles, in other words. In recent times, think of the dotcom boom of the late 1990s. Or in earlier times, of the US railway... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-12-30 16:00:37 UTC ]
Penguin Random House worldwide chief executive Markus Dohle says he is "optimistic" about the future of the publishing industry, claiming "it's the best time in this business since Gutenberg invented the printing press". Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-11-20 11:07:03 UTC ]
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The Pointless presenter’s second crime novel, The Man Who Died Twice, has sold 114,202 copies in its first week on saleRichard Osman’s follow-up to The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice, has become one of the fastest-selling novels since records began.Published on 16 September, The... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-09-21 14:37:39 UTC ]
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Judge says demonstration was ‘peaceful’ but impacted Murdoch, Mail, Telegraph and Standard titlesSix Extinction Rebellion protesters on trial for blockading the printing press of some of the UK’s biggest newspapers have been found guilty.The activists appeared at St Albans magistrates court on... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-07-16 12:17:11 UTC ]
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Last March, amid the myriad upheavals and uncertainties that marked early pandemic life, various scientists and public health officials started to model out how many cases and deaths we might be looking at in the long run, and the press, unsurprisingly, took great interest in their work. A team... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2021-02-23 13:34:38 UTC ]
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IN THE LATE 1990s and early 2000s, millennials in the United States were tweens and teens, and the Harry Potter phenomenon hit hard. There was nothing so comforting in the face of overseas wars and 9/11 as a bit of Blairite neoliberalism from abroad: the British school novel wrapped up with a... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-09-19 15:00:45 UTC ]
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HarperCollins will no longer publish books by the historian and is reviewing his backlist after he said ‘slavery was not genocide’HarperCollins has dropped David Starkey as an author, saying that the racist views the bestselling historian expressed in a recent interview were “abhorrent”.On... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-07-03 11:40:12 UTC ]
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Throughout my life I’ve been a fan of Mind Body Spirit (MBS) books; in fact, I’m curently at book proposal stage for my own. In recent times, however, I have been less inclined to get excited about the launches I get invited to. Despite the camaraderie of fellow writers, the very visible lack of... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-06-29 03:20:51 UTC ]
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Starting a new job can be tough under any circumstances. But starting a new job just weeks before one of the biggest global crises in modern history is nearly unthinkable. Yet, for Scott Omelianuk, editor-in-chief of Inc., that was his reality. Omelianuk spent nearly 12 years as the top editor... Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2020-06-04 18:52:38 UTC ]
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The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating a planned shift from print to digital at Michigan-based BNP Media, where management has informed staffers that the company will be phasing out the print editions of all of its controlled-circulation trade magazines by the end of July. The... Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2020-04-28 15:18:48 UTC ]
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From Gutenberg’s printing press to Google’s AMP format, the publishing world has gone from zero to one million miles per hour, with revolutionary changes to the way we produce, distribute, and consume content. Here is a breakdown of some of the key changes in digital publishing, plus tips for... Continue reading at Publishing Executive
[ Publishing Executive | 2020-03-05 15:43:14 UTC ]
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Journalism is arguably in one of the most fragile states since Gutenberg’s advent of the printing press almost 600 years Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2019-12-13 17:13:57 UTC ]
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The unintended consequences of the printing press are a good reminder that we have no idea what the internet has in store for us. Continue reading at The Atlantic
[ The Atlantic | 2019-12-10 12:00:00 UTC ]
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A decade after rescuing it from an imminent shutdown, Duncan McIntosh has sold newspaper industry trade magazine Editor & Publisher to consultant Mike Blinder for an undisclosed sum. In an announcement late last week, E&P indicated that its upcoming October issue will be the first... Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2019-09-03 20:10:05 UTC ]
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In a push to lure high-end brands to the cinema advertising circuit, National CineMedia announced today the launch of LuxeNet, a portfolio of 130 of its premium movie theaters in high-income areas of key U.S. cities. According to Nielsen data, NCM is the country’s most prominent cinema... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-07-24 14:06:00 UTC ]
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The giddy excess of the Peak TV era has culminated in a sort of option paralysis among consumers, many of whom, when presented with a near-infinite number of entertainment choices, make none whatsoever. According to Nielsen’s newly released Total Audience Report for the first quarter of 2019,... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-07-02 20:18:24 UTC ]
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The reaction to the exposure of the bestselling American author as a serial liar reveals more about our own insecurities than his duplicityWhat’s the difference between something going viral and a storm in a teacup? Not an awful lot, it often seems to me. Last week, everyone in publishing and... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-02-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Peter Mayer in the late 1990s at the Overlook Press in Manhattan, where he published out-of-print books. “The real issue ought to be, is the book readable, is it valuable, is it good?” he said. “Who cares if it’s old or new?” Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2018-05-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The standards by which the internet is controlled need to be open and subject to impartial judiciaries – not left to advertisersThe revelations we publish about how Facebook’s data was used by Cambridge Analytica to subvert the openness of democracy are only the latest examples of a global... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2018-03-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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"Publishers want to scare Facebook because there have been so many different gripes." The post ‘There’s an awful lot of showmanship’: Confessions of a publishing consultant on Facebook’s news feed changes appeared first on Digiday. Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2018-02-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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