These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• Con­fes­sions of a Com­mu­nity Col­lege Dean: Self­ish Tech

  “The tech world loves to bandy about the term “social,” but its con­cept of “social” seems to be based on what sin­gle twen­tysome­things do. “Social” in the sense of “fam­i­lies” is off the radar, as is “social” in the sense of “shar­ing.” It’s happy to make rec­om­men­da­tions for indi­vid­ual pur­chases social, but shared pur­chases are ver­boten. It’s short­sighted. If the demise of the music indus­try has taught us any­thing, it should be that walls don’t work. Sooner or later, demand will find a way around. The blis­ter­ing suc­cess of itunes showed that there’s a sub­stan­tial mar­ket for above­board, legal ways to allow peo­ple to get what they want; this isn’t just about piracy. But piracy may have to hap­pen to make the lit­er­ary ver­sion of itunes accept­able to pub­lish­ers. Put dif­fer­ently, the indus­try needs to learn to lean into change, rather than resist­ing it. I fore­see a mon­ster mar­ket for e-​​textbooks as soon as they offer some­thing anal­o­gous to re-​​selling your used copies. Until then, the value propo­si­tion mostly isn’t there. (Yes, there are issues with dis­abil­ity access, but those strike me as solv­able if the will is there.) Stu­dents will con­tinue, quite ratio­nally, to buy paper text­books and re-​​sell them. ”
  
  academic-​​culture pub­lish­ers ebooks intellectual-​​property DRM disintermediation-​​targets