You didn't actually believe all those founder's myths about tech billionaires like Bezos, Jobs and Musk pulling themselves up by their bootstraps from some suburban American garage, did you? In reality, our corporate kings have been running the same playbook since the 18th century when Lancashire's own Richard Arkwright wrote it. Arkwright is credited with developing a means of forming cotton fully into thread — technically he didn't actually invent or design the machine, but developed the overarching system in which it could be run at scale — and spinning that success into financial fortune. Never mind the fact that his 24-hour production lines were operated by boys as young as seven pulling 13-hour shifts. In Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech — one of the best books I've read this year — LA Times tech reporter Brian Merchant lays bare the inhumane cost of capitalism wrought by the industrial revolution and celebrates the workers who stood against those first tides of automation: the Luddites. Hachette Book GroupExcerpted from Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant. Published by Hachette Book Group. Copyright © 2023 by Brian Merchant. All rights reserved.The first tech titans were not building global information networks or commercial space rockets. They were making yarn and cloth. A lot of yarn, and a lot of cloth. Like our modern-day titans, they started out as entrepreneurs. But until... Continue reading at 'Engadget'
[ Engadget | 2023-09-10 14:30:56 UTC ]
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Written By: Graeme Neill Publication Date: Fri, 13/05/2011 - 08:30 The Who guitarist Pete Townshend and "Little Britain" star David Walliams are the latest figures to have memoirs put in front of publishers, as the trade shows no sign of losing its appetite for celebrity autobiographies. Ed... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Philip Stone and Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Thu, 12/05/2011 - 09:45 Analysis has revealed that £4.6m of books were sold under the W H Smith Spring Richard and Judy Book Club promotion, as the retailer released the celebrity couple's new summer titles. The eight Spring Book... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Wed, 11/05/2011 - 08:22 Sainsbury's has singled out book sales as an area of strong growth in its most recent financial year, and has said that it will now devote more new space to "non-food ranges". For the 52 weeks to 19th March 2011, the retailer... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Wed, 11/05/2011 - 09:54 Hachette has the lion's share of titles featured in the W H Smith Summer Richard and Judy Book Club list. Five out of the eight books featured in the celebrity couple's high street retailer promotion are from the publishing... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Philip Stone Publication Date: Tue, 10/05/2011 - 15:50 Book sales bounced back after a dire seven days in the week of the Royal Wedding in which physical book sales plummeted to an eight-year low. According to Nielsen BookScan data, spending in the seven days to 7th May was up... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Tue, 10/05/2011 - 08:59 Book sales for April were "well down" in a month where general UK retail sales rose by 5.2% on last year. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) today (10th May) reported like-for-like sales were up 5.2% in value from April... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Publication Date: Tue, 10/05/2011 - 08:24 Random House imprint Yellow Jersey Press has scored a hat trick of wins at the British Sports Book Awards, with W H Smith also taking home the best sports book retailer prize. Catrine Clay's Trautmann's Journey won best biography, while Promised Lane by... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Benedicte Page Publication Date: Tue, 10/05/2011 - 09:03 Publishers are unlikely to be able to replace the revenues lost in the shift from print to ebooks unless they can significantly grow volume sales, according to HarperCollins c.e.o. Victoria Barnsley. read more Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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And the winner of this years Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theatre is... the Drama Book Shop, an independent New York City bookstore dating to 1917, 30 years older than the Tony Awards. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2011-05-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The editor Robert Loomis, who is retiring from Random House after 54 years, is known for nurturing writers including Maya Angelou, William Styron, Shelby Foote and Calvin Trillin. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-05-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Mon, 09/05/2011 - 15:19 BBC Radio 5 Live has launched a Blokey Book Club to encourage men to read more fiction. The Mens Hour show formed the club, which will ask listeners to recommend and comment on their favourite fiction through the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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In starting Bookish.com, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group USA and Hachette Book Group hope to provide one-stop shopping for books and information about authors. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-05-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Fri, 06/05/2011 - 08:55 Random House has hit the landmark of two million ebooks sold in the UK, with other leading publishers reporting a first quarter explosion in digital sales. E-books currently account for 8% of RH's overall sales, with... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A $5 million lawsuit against Simon & Schuster over a book by former President Jimmy Carter was dropped by the plaintiffs on Thursday, three months after it was filed. The plaintiffs in the class-action suit had argued that Mr. Carter's "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," about the Arab-Israeli... Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2011-05-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Barnes & Noble Inc. will unveil a new electronic book reader later this month, the bookseller told analysts and investors on Wednesday, according to a federal filing released after the close of trading. Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2011-05-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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All of those Amazon Kindle sales -- and, presumably, sales of competitive ebook readers from Barnes & Noble and Apple -- have made an impact at publisher Simon & Schuster. The CBS unit says Q1 digital sales doubled over the previous year, and now represent 18 percent of the company's the... Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2011-05-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Monday nights Sandra Boynton book event at the Barnes & Noble on Manhattans Upper East Side looked like a pretty normal book signing--normal for Boynton, the bestselling childrens book author, anyway. Toddlers and slightly older kids, some dressed in pajamas, crammed into the event space,... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2011-05-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Publishers Association have released new figures which explain how much damage ebooks are doing to their paper based alternatives. Continue reading at BBC News
[ BBC News | 2011-05-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Philip Jones Publication Date: Tue, 03/05/2011 - 11:42 E-book sales at Hachette UK quadrupled in the first quarter of 2011 and are more than 5% of HUKs trade sales, the company revealed today (3rd May), adding that it was beginning to catch up with the US, where ebooks now account... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Tue, 03/05/2011 - 08:30 High street retailer Argos intends to increase its online book range from 500 to 5,000 titles over the next month. The chain store, known for stocking a large range of non-food products, launched its books category on its... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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