A flurry of critical letters, petitions and tweets came in the wake of the announcement of the University’s decision to discontinue funding for Stanford University Press, the primary printing ope...
And, yes, shame on Stanford.
“Austerity” When You Are Wealthier Than Just About Anyone
It’s been a rough week to be a star, and a rough week to be someone who listens to what stars have to say. At least, that’s what social media tells me. Some of the most famous people making music today—Ariana Grande, Cardi B, and Justin Bieber (as well as Lizzo, a darling of critics and her fans but not quite of superstar status... yet?)—have shared their thoughts online regarding the state of media in 2019. None of it advocates for a free press, much less even contends with that notion. The gist is that journalism should be service journalism that primarily serves the powerful and their images.
LifeWay Christian Stores plans to close all of its locations by end of the year and move all of the company's retailing online. Its bricks-and-mortar division has been losing money since 2013, and the company says it has tried just about everything to keep the business going, including overhauling several stores last summer and experimenting with features like coffee bars.
The New England Journal of Medicine just published an editorial saying open access publishing isn't necessary, because they already make most of their content free. What are they so worried about? Yours truly breaks down a few of their bogus arguments.
Pollen is a publishing system that helps authors make functional and beautiful digital books.
Saturday, April 13th | 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Sunday, April 14th | 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.<
Since 1996, The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has become a world renowned experience gathering writers, poets, artists, filmmakers, musicians and emerging storytellers like no other. Today over 150,000 people attend, making it the largest festival of its kind in the United States. Join us this year as we celebrate our literary culture and the Los Angeles Times’ passion for story.
February was a pretty good month. Or maybe it's just that I have a lot more reminders of how good it was.
Our Daily Bread
Fear of rejection utterly justified; the agent says publishers want something less bitty, "a biography of a commodity, like Kurlansky's Cod". In sales terms, I'll bet that's what they want. But it is not at all what I want to write. So, back to making self-publishing a reality, ASAP.
It’s the least I could do since I feel like I may be at least partially responsible for starting you down the primrose path of Our Daily Bread… I also suspect that what you’d like to write is going to be far more interesting and nourishing a project.
As publishers struggle with ‘whack-a-mole’ websites, experts, authors and Guardian readers who illegally download books, assess the damage
As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.
Now if only we could get them to all go IndieWeb using a Domain of Their Own and practice academic samizdat…
Dries Buytaert (dri.es)Dries is the Founder and Project Lead of Drupal and the Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer of Acquia.
Tom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)A blog without a publish button
I’m stealing this quote from my modern friend Ryan Dawidjan who has been pioneering this concept of open-access writing and blogging without a publish button. For a long time he has maintained a quip file called high cadence thoughts that is open access and serves as a long-running note of his thinking and ideas.
It’s a less-performative version of blogging - more of a captain’s log than a broadcast blog.
The distinction will come down to how you blog - some people blog in much the same way. For me however blogging is mostly performative thinking and less captain’s log. So I am looking for a space to nurture, edit in real time and evolve my thinking. ❧
Tom Crichtlow (tomcritchlow.com)How I built myself a simple wiki using folders and files and published via Jekyll
Having enjoyed the mobile app TimeHop and its functionality for a long time, I’d spent a long time a while back searching for what I was sure would be multiple WordPress plugins that might offer such functionality. At the time I could only find one and seemed deeply hidden: the Room 34 Presents On This Day plugin which has served my needs for a while.
While the two are implemented somewhat differently and have different levels of UI features, it’s nice that there’s now a bit of competition and options available in the space. Alan’s excellent version is a shortcode-based plugin with some options for configuring the output and he’s got lots of additional details for customizing it. The Room 34 version creates an archive view of most of its data and also includes a widget for adding the output to various widget locations.
I’ve added some of these examples and links to the On This Day page of the IndieWeb wiki, so that others looking for UI examples, options, and brainstorming for their WordPress-based or other sites might have an easier time tracking them down and building additional iterations or coming up with new ideas.
These sorts of plugins provide some useful functionality commonly found in other social media sites, including Facebook which allow you to go back in time. I find they’re even more valuable on my own site as my content here is generally far richer and more valuable to me than it is on other social sites which often have a “throw away” or a more ephemeral feel to some of their content. It’s nice to be able to look back at old thoughts, revisit them, possibly reshape them, or even see how far I’ve come in some of my thinking since those older days.
Now, if we could only get Timehop to dovetail with the WordPress API so that they could add WordPress websites to their offerings…