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Evan’s post last week, Do I Believe in Ebooks?: Part One, stimulated some interesting conversation in the blogosphere and I hope that Part Two, his bold recommendation, will encourage all of us to reconsider the potential of ebooks. I will be at the Tools of Change conference today and I hope some of my fellow attendees will share their opinions with me both in person and in the comments section below.

By Evan Schnittman

In my last posting I promised to delve into my vision of the evolution of ebooks and in doing so offer a dramatic proposal to make them more mainstream and more widely used. I propose that an ebook license be granted as part of the purchase price to anyone who buys a new print book. Yes, you read correctly; the ebook is free with a new print book purchase. (more…)

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By Evan Schnittman

Recently I was on an airplane reading an article in the New York Times when the woman in the seat next to me leaned over and asked what I was holding. I told her it was a Kindle, Amazon’s new ebook reader. I showed her how it worked, explained e-ink, walked her through my collection of titles and subscriptions, and showed how I could look up words in the built in Oxford dictionary. Her response; “That is really cool, but I prefer the feel and smell of a real book.” (more…)

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Chris Matthews may think he plays political HARDBALL on his news analysis show on MSNBC. He may think his condescending, arrogant attitude towards newsmaking women is entertaining and newsworthy. Alas for Chris "Tweety" Matthews, this bird mimics the corporate talking points with zero elbow room for genuine reflection or analysis. Like the Continental Congress urged that rascal chatterbox John Adams: "For G-d's sake, Chris, sit down," shut up and.. Just Go Away. Far far away. Fly, little bird, fly. Go. Breathe in, breathe deep, and revel in the aftershave of Sleepy Head Republican, Mr. Lazybones Fred Thompson and tell America what we need is a "Real Man" in the White House. Real Men smell like Fred Thompson. Scorned women become Senators. Governors. Speakers of the House, if you really play your mahjong cards right.

Somebody grab a bullhorn and welcome Chris Matthews to 2008. You know, the world where Nancy Pelosi, Jennifer Granholm, Angela Merkel, Valerie Plame, Claire McCaskill, Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, et al exist. Sorry to break it to you, buddy. We're not all devotees of the Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly backwards-thinking, backwards-thrusting theology. Thank g-d.

Sample this Matthews ditty as posted on the MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA media watchdog website:

"After Clinton won the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Matthews asserted: "[T]he reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around." He described her performance at a debate last Saturday as apparently "good enough to seem good enough here for women who wanted to root for her anyway."

The insult to mankind is self-evident.

Matthews Likes His News to come in one size: pretty. In August 2007, Matthews asked CNBC business analyst Erin Burnett to come closer to the camera while engaging in television commentary with her so he could.. well, I'm not sure what he wanted to do with her but any conclusion is inevitably sickening. (Television Sex?) He begs her to bring her face closer to the screen, using these romantic and cable-ready come-ons: "[Y]ou're beautiful" and "[y]ou're a knockout," before closing the interview by saying, "It's all right getting bad news from you."

There's too much more where this comes from.

I've had enough and, apparently, I am not alone.

There's a firestorm of revulsion streaming his way and we're not going to take it. MEDIA MATTERS lays out the skeletal issues and provides online e-contacts to express your opinion to the corporate cable channel. You can engage in a lively discussion with fellow repulsed members of the thinking world over at Plutonium's Page diary at Daily Kos, your one-stop-shopping progressive blog. My favorite anti-Matthews invective can be found at the aptly-named Sweet Jesus I Hate Chris Matthews blog. Imagine that! A tidal wave of bloggers angry enough to build websites simply based on their revulsion towards a news hack. It's all happening, kids. The Revolution is here and we're using words to fire shots heard 'round the world!

Here's a portion of the letter I snarked off to MSNBC TV @ [email protected] and HARDBALL with CHRIS MATTHEWS @ [email protected] :

I’ve long complained of the way Chris Matthews treats his audience and his guests. You never respond. Not the Hardball staff. Not MSNBC. It’s time you “found your voice,” MSNBC, and do something about the horrific, misogynist Matthews. He does not deserve an altar to spew his idiocy. Bring in the educated and wise David Shuster. Why would you waste your corporate dollars on Matthews? Shame on you for shaming the airwaves with this cruel and tactless barking head. Send him to FOX where he belongs.

As a long-time viewer of MSNBC, I deserve better. I deserve a response—not just to this note but to this call for action. It sickens me to think that I have wasted my loyalty if you do not treat your audience with the respect I have too long dedicated to you.

I know there are greater things to worry about in life but you've got to fight the windmills where they spin.


There's a good reason they call him "Tweety"

Watch Chris Matthews lose his kishkas on national television after the New Hampshire primary; Air America radio host and occasional MSNBC pundit Rachel Maddow delivers the delicately-articulated smackdown message at the end of the clip: Matthews, I don't know if you know this, but women think you're an imbecile!

By Evan Schnittman

You have heard rumors of it for nearly a year now – Amazon has an ebook reader that will run on a new ebook platform powered by Mobipocket. Well, after many stops and starts, today Amazon released Kindle, or, what I call the “readers’ iPod.” This device, coupled with the awesome power of the Amazon web sales machine, represents perhaps the most significant moment in the history of eBooks.

I have always maintained that the iPod coupled with iTunes model is the key to a compelling ebook business. The iPod, perhaps the most fantastic device any of us own, would have been just another cool device sitting in our junk drawer if Apple hadn’t been prescient about the duality in digital content; Device + Network = Adoption. (more…)

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Might the social networking site CafeScribe be the solution
Higher Ed publishers have been waiting for?

By Evan Schnittman

Last week Salt Lake City based social networking site CafeScribe visited our NY office to demonstrate their service and explain their business model. These kind of meetings happen all the time and I usually sit politely through a series of PowerPoint slides which show how Site X or Product Y appeals to a myriad of users who are in our target demographic, and how these users would love to have access to our content. When discussion of business models comes around, they are usually what I call “personal hovercraft business models” (i.e., this will start earning OUP and its author’s money when everyone is floating around on their own personal hovercraft.) (more…)

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By Evan Schnittman

To avoid confusion lets get everyone on the same page. Google Library (GL, as opposed to Google Book Search) is a program that has scanning facilities set up at 20+ libraries around the globe. These facilities digitize the print books in a given collection and then index the text so that it can be discovered by Google’s search engine. The search engine displays only a snippet(250 characters or so) if the book is in copyright, the full text if the book is deemed to be part of the public domain. In exchange for sharing their collections, Google gives a digital file of each book to the library for their archives. GL should not be confused with Google Book Search (GBS), which is a publisher sanctioned program in which Google licenses the right, from publishers, to digitize, index, and display 20% of a book for the purpose of making it “discoverable” in Google’s search engine. See The ABC’s of GBS, Part 1 for a complete description. (more…)

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Rebecca OUP-US

Last Monday I featured an excerpt from Evan Stark’s new book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. It garnered some interesting conversation on the internet and so I thought I would round-up some of the sites you can look to for more interesting conversation and debate about domestic violence.

• Salon’s Broadsheet writes: “…the idea that it’s the victims who are to blame eclipses an ugly reality: Ending a violent relationship is dangerous, and sometimes women (realistically or not) don’t think they could survive it.”

(more…)

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Evan Stark is a founder of one of the first shelters for abused women in the US and author of Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life . His book, which we have excerpted below, looks at the domestic violence and why law, policy and advocacy must shift their focus to emphasize how coercive control jeopardizes women’s freedom in everyday life.

In 1979, psychiatrist Alexandra Symonds, published an unusually candid article. When her profession dealt with families “where the main disturbance was violence against the wife or sweetheart,” she observed, they focused on how the women provoked their husbands, or how the women were getting satisfaction in some obscure way by being beaten. “The final proof of all this,” she wrote, “was invariably a learned statement such as ‘After all, why doesn’t she leave him?’” (more…)

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Evan Schnittman (an OUPblogger) gets interviewed at BEA on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Have an itch for prank calls? Have Nancy Drew call your friends. (Yes, someone did have Nancy Drew call me. Was it you?) (more…)

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By Evan Schnittman

Corey Podolsky has written an excellent essay, Book Widgets and Book Selling 2.0 that clearly explains the thinking behind the large scale repository efforts underway at a few publishing giants. He posits wisely that Web 2.0 viral marketing, especially on sites like MySpace.com, is wonderfully afoot. These publishers have enabled their content to be safely and securely discovered and displayed in the hope that at some point, some sort of monetary transaction will occur. (more…)

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Consumer choice and publisher dilemma in the era of Google Book Search

By Evan Schnittman

Google announced plans a few months ago to roll out “100% online access” in Google Book Search (GBS).

Currently, Google (and Microsoft with its Live Book search) have full book contents on their servers which are indexed for the purpose of discoverability (See the ABC’s of GBS – Part 1) (more…)

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Evan Schnittman wrote an article for Publishing News last week entitled “Facing The Digital Reality.” Schnittman writes in his article that,

“…at the 500-year-old publishing house where I am employed book sales still make up the lion’s share of our income. Yet, as print-oriented as we may be, we have successfully launched many digital products - all into institutional and library markets. Until recently, however, the boundaries of e-content success seem to have stopped at journals, reference, and STM content in institutional and library markets.” (more…)

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