February 14, 2006

ComingSoon.net : The Da Vinci Code

Boing Boing: Princeton DRM researchers release Sony debacle paper

Princeton’s Ed Felten and Alex Halderman have published the final version of “Lessons from the Sony CD DRM Episode,” a spectacular paper that they published in draft form in a series of blog posts reported on here. The final paper is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the technology and business behind sneakily crippling our PCs in the name of stopping us from copying. 156k PDF Link (via Freedom to Tinker)

Must read.

Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth

Summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical blogger

s

Technorati Weblog: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search

Must-read data and analysis.

The Publishers Weekly review of ADVERBS on Amazon.com raises one key question.

Amazon.com: Adverbs : A Novel: Books: Daniel Handler

Starred Review. The qualities that draw millions to Lemony Snicket—absurdity, wicked humor, a love of wordplay—get adulterated in this elegant exploration of love. Handler brings linguistic pyrotechnics to a set of encounters: gay, straight, platonic and all degrees of dysfunctional. Amid the deadpan (”Character description: Appropriately tall. Could dress better.”) and the exhausting (”Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.”) are moments of blithe poignancy: quoth a lone golfer, “Love is this sudden crash in your path, quick and to the point, and nearly always it leaves someone slain on the green.” In “Obviously,” a teenage boy pines for his co-worker at the multiplex while they both tear tickets for Kickass: The Movie. In “Briefly,” the narrator, now married, recounts being 14 and infatuated with his big sister’s boyfriend, Keith. “Truly” begins “This part’s true,” and features a character named Daniel Handler, who has an exchange about miracles with a novelist named Paula Sharp. Handler began his career with the coming-of-age novel The Basic Eight; this lovely, lilting book is a kind of After School Special for adults that dramatizes love’s cross-purposes with panache: “Surely somebody will arrive, in a taxi perhaps, attractively, artfully, aggressively, or any other way it is done.”

Does PW know what “adulterated” means?

RomanceWiki.com Tells The Story of Romance Novels

The story of romance novels, from the roots of the genre to today’s New York Times bestsellers, is being written online at www.RomanceWiki.com. The new site launches on February 14th, in celebration of the official holiday of romance novels, Valentine’s Day.

By encouraging the entire romance community to add their stories and insights, RomanceWiki will create an ongoing history of the market-leading romance genre. Never before has there been a single resource to combine the various elements of the genre: authors, books, publishers, awards, reviews, influences, and connections. In addition to building the history of romance novels, RomanceWiki provides resources for journalists, authors, and readers.

… According to the Romance Writers of America, romance fiction continues to command over 50% the mass-market fiction sales and over 30% of fiction sales in general. Key elements of romance novels are included in every other genre of fiction and are commonly found in other media.

From the massive flow of cutesy or bizarre Valentine-themed press releases from authors and publishers, I select this one as worthy because of the nice way it ties together books and technology. Doing that was my original goal when I created this site’s progenitor, the Internet Book Information Center, on March 30, 1994.

eBook Technologies, Inc. (ETI): Press Release

eBook Technologies, Inc., (ETI) the leading supplier of intelligent reading solutions, announced…

Gosh, I wish people who write press releases would quit calling themselves “the leading {foo} of {carefully chosen phrase}.”