Mark Fox's Weblog

Amazon.com has stopped directly selling books from Macmillan and its imprints (including Tor Books) in a dispute about ebook pricing.

Macmillan CEO John Sargent has issued a statement. His vision for pricing is:

Under the agency model, we will sell the digital editions of our books to consumers through our retailers. Our retailers will act as our agents and will take a 30% commission (the standard split today for many digital media businesses). The price will be set the price for each book individually. Our plan is to price the digital edition of most adult trade books in a price range from $14.99 to $5.99. At first release, concurrent with a hardcover, most titles will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99. E books will almost always appear day on date with the physical edition. Pricing will be dynamic over time.

Amazon by contrast wants a maximum $9.99 fixed price for eBooks that for now can only be read on a Kindle.

Hovering over all this is the Apple iPad and its iBooks Store. The NY Times states:

Macmillan offered Amazon the opportunity to buy Kindle editions on the same “agency” model as it will sell e-books to Apple for the iPad. Under this model, the publisher sets the consumer book price and takes 70 percent of each sale, leaving 30 percent to the retailer. Macmillan said Amazon could continue to buy e-books under its current wholesale model, paying the publisher 50 percent of the hardcover list price while pricing the e-book at any level Amazon chooses, but that Macmillan would delay those e-book editions by seven months after hardcover release. Amazon’s removal of Macmillan titles on Friday appears to be a direct reaction to that.

Some reaction by Tor related writes and editors:

• Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a Tor Editor
• John Scalzi
• Charles Stross

Update - feb 1, 2010
Amazon.com has posted a message stating they will have to agree to Macmillan's pricing scheme, which was probably what they planned to do once they had Macmillan fingered as the party wanting higher prices.

Ten months after the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover got stuck in the Martian sand after it broke through a crusty surface and churned into soft sand hidden underneath NASA engineers have given up on attempts to free it. NASA will now focus on preparing the now stationary rover to survive the oncoming Martian winter that starts in May. When the Mars winter is over Spirit will be used as a stationary research platform. NASA’s press release describes some possible uses:

One stationary experiment Spirit has begun studies tiny wobbles in the rotation of Mars to gain insight about the planet's core. This requires months of radio-tracking the motion of a point on the surface of Mars to calculate long-term motion with an accuracy of a few inches. Tools on Spirit's robotic arm can study variations in the composition of nearby soil, which has been affected by water. Stationary science also includes watching how wind moves soil particles and monitoring the Martian atmosphere.

Spirit’s sister rover, Opportunity is still active has completed one third of a 12 mile trek begun in mid-2008 to a large crater called Endeavour.

Last week Sabrina Eaton, a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer noticed that a letter writer, Ellie Light had similar letters published by numerous publications around the country, often claiming different local residences. In her letters, Light defended US President Obama, in some she stated that “It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything,” These duplicate letters and her lack of responsive when questioned about the different addresses have lead some to believe that she is an actually a fake front for an Obama organized letter writing campaign. While it is more likely that she is just someone who a list of letters to the editor desks and a willingness to shade the truth about her address it does raise the question of how many publications fell for her fake address and whether others did any checking at all.

Maybe she should he stuck to sending letters to national publications, that way she could write what Ben Smith of Politico.com characterized as an articulate defense of Obama without the need for lying about her address in order to try to have it published.

On January 30th Cineplex will be showing a live broadcast of a National Theatre adaption of Terry Pratchett’s novel Nation. The play will be broadcast from UK live via satiellte. It’s described as:

< p class=”quote”>A parallel world, 1860. Two teenagers thrown together by a tsunami that has destroyed Mau’s village and left Daphne shipwrecked on his South Pacific island, thousands of miles from home. One wears next to nothing, the other a long white dress; neither speaks the other’s language; somehow they must learn to survive. As starving refugees gather, Daphne delivers a baby, milks a pig, brews beer and does battle with a mutineer. Mau fights cannibal Raiders, discovers the world is round and questions the reality of his tribe’s fiercely patriarchal gods. Together they come of age, overseen by a foul-mouthed parrot, as they discard old doctrine to forge a new Nation.

Aussiecon 4, the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention has opened nominations for the 2010 Hugo Awards which are awarded for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy. The convention is being held September 2nd - 6th, 2010 in Melbourne, Australia. Members of Aussiecon 4 who join by 31st January 2010 and members of the last Worldcon, Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Montreal, Quebec this year can make nominations. Nominations close at the end of March 13, 2010 PST.

Page 62 of the National Geographic book, “The New Solar System: Ice Worlds, Moons and Planets Redefined” includes a rather funny example of why books need a good production team.

In discussing the proton-proton chain reaction in the Sun:

Under normal circumstances, two positively charged protons would repeal each other. But in the intensely heated conditions of the solar core, a few are slammed together at high speeds. Once they are within 10 to 15 meters (33 to 49 ft) of one another, they are pulled together by the “strong force”, one of the fundamental forces of the universe.

The distance should be 10^-15.

Notwithstanding a few small issues like this, it is a great book with lots of brilliant pictures and clear and detailed text.

As the 2009 baseball season came to an end with the Toronto Blue Jays out of the playoffs and trade rumours concerning their ace pitcher Roy Halladay swirled, I kept a close watch on which games he would be starting. I was fortunate to attend his 5-0 shutout of the Seattle Mariners on September 25, which turns out with be his last game as a Blue Jay as it has been announced that Halladay has been traded to the Philadelphia Phillies as part of a three way deal also involving the Seattle Mariners.
Key pluses for Halladay are the chance to play for a team that has a shot at being playoff bound and has a spring training facility near his off season home. The Phillies’ wish for a contract extension is likely also a positive for the 32 year old Halladay.
For Toronto the key was more arms. Toronto Star baseball columnist Richard Griffin writes:

The highlight of the trade for the Jays would be the addition of two starting pitchers. The Phillies would send J.A. Happ, who went 12-4 as a rookie last season. He would join the Jays' major-league rotation while the Mariners would send Phillippe Aumont, a 20-year-old from Gatineau, Que., who has a chance to be a No. 2 starter down the road. Halladay would stay with the Phils and the M's would land Cliff Lee to pair with Felix Hernandez at the top of their rotation.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced (PDF) the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team has won the DARPA Network Challenge which is “to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.”
DARPA’s rationale for the challenge is that it is “a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.”
The MIT Team has not released how the balloons were spotted but their plan is to split the challenge’s $40,000 reward at a rate of $2,000 to the people finding one of the balloons, $1000 to the person who invited the finder to the team, $500 to their inviter, $250 to who invited them and the final $250 to charity.

All of the balloon locations where near urban areas (smallest city appears to be Katy, Texas, population 11,775), so that must of helped the MIT team find them.

Red Balloons before the contest

Canadian prices for a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 10.1 MP Digital Camera with 12x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom range between $385 (at a unknown store) and $429 (at Vistek). The price at Amazon.com is $271 US. Even with an 85 US cent Canadian dollar this is $318 Canadian.

Is Panasonic responsible for these prices or is it Canadian retailers?

Four months after its announcement and slight more than one year after the release of its key component, the Google Chrome Browser, Google demonstrated an early version of its upcoming Google Chrome Operating System which is described an “open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.” It uses a custom Linux kernel and window manager that runs the Chrome browser and nothing else. Its expected release date is the second half of 2010. It will run on custom designed netbooks using flash memory solid-state drives, Google is not aiming at supporting regular hard drives.
Key ideas of Chrome OS and the Open Sourced version, Chromium OS include:

• Three tier architecture (from lowest level to top level):
  1. Firmware which has the ability to verify and reinstall the OS if corrupted or compromised.
  2. System-level software and user-land services: the Linux based kernel drivers, connection manager, and so on
  3. The Chromium-based browser and the window manager which handles the user's interaction with multiple client windows. It is similar to other X Window managers. Rendering is done by OpenGL or OpenGL|ES. The Browser uses Html 5, JavaScript and Flash to produce a rich environment without native apps. All user interaction is via the browser.
• Deploy defences in depth including verified boot, rebooting when system may be comprised. It mitigates data loss if a device is stolen by encrypting all local data and storing copies in the cloud.



• Automatic OS updates with all OS files in a pair of read-only partition, one active and one containing the previous version of the OS so it can be used as a fallback in case of error.

Looking at Google’s design it is reminiscent of Oracle’s thin client idea and many bring to fruition Marc Andreessen’s idea of replacing Windows’s “poorly debugged bag of device drivers” with a browser.

The question is can a user have an acceptable experience with only a browser? Google certainly thinks so.