Digital Content Consortium is Using My Content Without Crediting the Source

Bums! ... Rascals! ... Scoundrels!

A blog called "The Digital Content Consortium" has been posting some of the Net's finest essays, articles and reviews.

The problem is: All these fine pieces are written by me, and used without any reference to me or to the EPW blog.

The Internet was made for sharing. I am happy to share most of my content. About my writings that are not marked "Copyright" you may reprint them in your electronic publication, but you must link back to me or acknowledge the source. Then everybody is happy.

But don't pretend that you are the authors of the writing that you've posted.

Readers reading the Digital Content Consortium: come on over to Epublishers Weekly, and get the information from the original source.

Take a look and see if they have reprinted this blog post that reveals their nefarious ways:

http://www.dcc15.com/

Every time I post to Epublishers Weekly, the DCC takes all my content, and formats things to look as if they are the authors. Of their 15 most recent posts, 7 were written by me and appeared first here at Epublishers Weekly.

Of course, there is no contact information, so what is to be done? ...
I've added a tagline to the bottom of all my posts.
And I've left a comment on their blog:

===========================
Most esteemed gentlemen,
I write to inform you that your blog, the Digital Content Consortium, is using the content from my blog, without permission from the author.
In fact, from your 15 most recent posts, 7 of these have been written by me.
Fortune will smile upon you if you remove my content before the rising of the next moon.
Your friend most sincerely,
Michael Pastore
Epublishers Weekly
==========================

My comment is awaiting moderation. The comment will not be posted, and spam in great quantities will be sent to the email address that was required in order to post the comment.


Michael Pastore
Epublishers Weekly
http://www.EpublishersWeekly.com

—Michael Pastore is a novelist, and the author and/or editor of a number of non-fiction books including The Zorba Anthology of Love Stories, and 50 Benefits of Ebooks: A Thinking Person's Guide to the Digital Reading Revolution. A new (2010) edition of 50 Benefits of Ebooks will be released by Zorba Press on September 8, 2010.

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A Protest Against the Commercialization of Ebooks

Acolorful advertisement at the top of the New York Times (online) today asks us to click to read "The First Shoppable Children's Storybook."

I hope it is also the last.

In an ebook, the marriage of videos and commerce creates a monstrous mutation, not a genuine reading experience that should bring delight and wisdom. Books are one of the last refuges in our world from the constant cry by advertisers to spend money and fill our lives with unnecessary things.

I am not against videos in ebooks (although they should not be called "books"); I am not against commerce, done with balance and integrity. But these two things together, inside a book for kids -- takes us backward into a world obsessed by consumerism and overconsumption, an approach to life that has been the cause of so many of our present troubles and crises.

You can read the ebook online, and then judge for yourself:

http://www.ralphlauren.com/shop/index.jsp?categoryId=4357818&camp=KidsStorybook_NYTimes

Technology can be used to enhance our lives, or to diminish them — here is an example of an ebook that I could happily do without.

— Michael Pastore, author
50 Benefits of Ebooks


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The Incredible Parking Ticket

From Australia comes this very funny story about
a parking ticket: read to the end -- the victim's letter, and the
response from the Melbourne police department.

Read the story from the Huffington Post.

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Book Price Wars and Sustainable Ebook Publishing

What is happening to the price of new hardcover books? ... While just about everything else these days is going up, book prices from the major book retailers are plummeting downward.



And why not? ... These booksellers are offering the same product. Why buy from store A, when store B can give it to you cheaper?

It all points to chaos in the publishing industry, and the fact that publishers have given control of the prices to the online booksellers. I say that these prices should be set by the publishers; and that the profit of online booksellers should be smaller; and that authors should receive much more for each book sold.

And what about ebooks? ... Ebooks, if managed smartly, could renew the entire publishing industry. Yet most publishers are treating ebooks as an enfant terrible. Some publishers are delaying the release of the ebooks; others are pricing them the same as the paper books.

How could epublishing be done smarter, with more benefits to book buyers and more profit for publishers? ... P.R.E.S.S.:

1. Provide ebooks with no-DRM restrictions.
2. Release the ebooks first.
3. Enhance ebooks with features not included in the paper versions of the book.
4. Sell ebooks at a lower price than their paper brothers and sisters.
5. Save the art of reading, by teaching the personal benefits and cultural value of good books.

I have called this approach "Sustainable Ebook Publishing."

The biggest publishers, by focusing on profit only and by ignoring the potential of ebooks, have discovered a proven formula for losing readers and losing money.

Dorothy Parker became famous for her motto: "What fresh hell is this?" ... Shakespeare's Puck (pictured right), in A Midsummer Night's Dream sang a lighter-hearted view of human folly:

"Shall we their fond pageant see?
  Lord,what fools these mortals be!"

— Michael Pastore, author:

• At A Picnic in Italy, I Found Rome-Ants


• The Ithaca Manual of Style


• 50 Benefits of Ebooks

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Ebook Humor: Why the Ex-Perts Call Them E-books

Email is now officially spelled with or without the hyphen: why not ebooks?

The ebook world has plenty of technology; we can use a bit of humor and a dash of art. Here is a poetic parody that gripes about the ludricrous hyphen in the word "e-book". Written by a man who is unafraid to put his name at the bottom of a beautiful heap of nonsense.

Why the Ex-Perts Call Them E-Books

“You say e-books, and I say ebooks! Let's call the hyphen off.”
— George and Ira Gershwin

A travesty against our race!
Of every creed and sex —
The adding of the hyphen
By the pompous scholar ex-
Perts, for no other reason
Than to obfuscate the poor
And humble e-book
Which requires nothing more.

“But why not?” ask the ex-
Perts as they while away the hours
Sipping fresh-frapped Capp-
Uccinos in the slippery ivory towers.
“All these lexographic capers
Add a dash of cold romance,
Makes for more grad-student papers,
And more fedly-funded grants.”

See the superfluous hyphen
As it separates the “e” —
From the book’s beloved wife an’
Paper-viewing family.
As we who love this brave new place,
Cannot but stop and think:
O, what a waste of precious space!
O what a waste of ink!

Somewhere in the thankless cold,
A poet longs to e-
At night when all his tales are told
To deaf posterity.
With every lovely line I write —
From heart, and hope, and mind,
The “e” stands all alone at right —
The book is left behind.

—- Michael Pastore

Copyright (c) 2009. From the paperback book and ebook:

50 Benefits of Ebooks:
A Thinking Person's Introduction to the Digital Reading Revolution
Where Ebooks are Low-Cost or Free.

Forthcoming, on March 8, 2009.

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Ebooks &mdash The Next Generation

Ebooks are starting to show signs of life. The high production and shipping costs &mdash of our beloved paper-made books &mdash and new ebook reading devices (and future ones: ala the immanent 9" iPod) are fueling the ebook revolution.

The revolutionaries are storming the house of paperbooks with two opposing strategies.

The first strategy: DRM-afflicted ebooks are sold at a slightly lower price than the paperback. Now and then a "free" version is offered: you do not pay with money but with mind. Advertisements are littered throughout the book. This is an event of historic importance in the history of reading, for an entire new genre has been created: litterature.

Yesterday, I was enthusiastic about the prospect of reading a "free" ebook: it was a historical novel about Abraham Lincoln and his times, written by Gore Vidal. But I could not read very far, because this online version of the book contained a thoroughly tasteless ad. The commercial message showed a naked silouette of a woman's body, which flickered above (and below) every page of the book. Sandals of stupidity and a crown of commercial thorns on the head and feet of my hero, Honest Abe.

Does money matter so much more than the ideas that can renew our culture? ... American society is at a turning point: perhaps a breaking point. Publishing matters: publishers can help us to change the world for the better. But we will need less commerce and more truth. The publishers who thrive (meaning: survive) will be the ones who give us new ideas and a new integrity.

Advertisements have absolutely no place inside of books or ebooks. If you argue that we must have advertising to support free ebooks penned by contemporary authors, then let's see if it possible to include the ads not randomly and annoyingly, but with careful thought and relative good taste. Perhaps these advertisements could be less conspicous and more appropriate to the book? ... Or these ads might be still and frozen, instead of flash-based and distractingly in motion? ... Or one advertisement could be placed inside the book, after every 50 pages? ... Or the publisher could advise us (in the spirit of Lincoln) that the online book can be read free from ads, by using the Firefox browser with an extension called NoScript or AdBlock?

There is a smarter approach to the ebook revolution: ebooks could be &mdash and should be &mdash given away free (and advertisement-free), or sold at a very low cost.

Since 1972, Project Gutenberg has been giving away free ebooks. Other sites do the same. Promising newcomers in this effort are FeedBooks, and the reading software Stanza.

In the near future, I predict ebooks will surge when we get better and cheaper reading devices, the long-awaited "e-paper", and a new generation of ebooks for a buck.

********
Thanks to AgnosticPreachersKid for the image of the Lincoln Memorial, which is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License:



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Then I'd Be Satisfied With Life

Euphoria at the Obama victory! It's everywhere: the whole little town of Ithaca is radiant, giddy, renewed, inspired -- we are singing in the shower and we are dancing in the streets.

So this week's post is a diversion from our usual insightful commentary and deep ideas: it is simply silly.

The photo is a picture of George M. Cohan, who wrote the song's original words in 1902 (see below for the contemporary words).
Click on the video to hear the song (performed by Tiny Tim), and see a shopping cart debacle.

Chock Full Of Shopping Carts @ Yahoo! Video

Then I'd Be Satisfied with Life
(original words by George Michael Cohan)

All I want is 50 million dollars
And seal skins to protect me from the cold.
If I only knew how stocks would go in Wall Street
And were living in the mansions built of gold.
If I only owned the Pennsylvania Railroad
And if Tuesday Weld would only be my wife
Oh, Tiny!
If I could only stay sixteen forever
Then I'd know that I'd be satisfied with life.

All I want is wheatgerm for my breakfast
A Champagne fountain sizzling at my feet
While Rockefeller waited on the table
And a barrel's band playin' while I eat.
If I only owned Western Union cable
And if Tuesday Weld would only be my wife
Tiny, I love you!
if I could only stay sixteen forever and ever and ever
Then I'd know that I'd be satisfied with life.


Hello, my dear friend,
Don't run away from all this world,
It's a great big beautiful world
With fabulous happy faces around
Well, I can see this one over here, you lovely thing,
Why, it's beautiful, it's clean, and it's calm and it's modern,
If I can have them all, why, I'll tell you, I'll tell you
Then I'd know that I'd be satisfied with life.
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Ferdinand the Bull and the Running of the Nudes

Ferdinand The Bull is a classic children's story written in 1936 by Munro Leaf. The book was made into a short Disney cartoon two years later. More than a critique of bullfighting in Spain, both film and book blithely expose the folly of violence and explain the option of pacifism. As ever when authors advocate Truth and Love and Peacefulness, the book was banned by warmongering governments. But the banning could not prevent the book from being translated into more than 60 languages, and becoming an international success.

What a wonderful story! ... In refusing to fight, Ferdinand -- the happy bull -- proves to be wiser than the frenzied humans who attempt to provoke him to violence.



To protest the annual Running of the Bulls festival in Pamplona, the animal-rights group PETA has organized their own event, which they call Running of the Nudes. Attractive women and men run through the streets along the same path as the bulls will travel. PETA's event has been running yearly since 2004, but next year they will leave Pamplona, since it attracts more tourists to the bullfighting spectacles. PETA will take the nudes a-running through the world's major cities. PETA's website has more information, photos, and a video news conference, which shows nudity at the very end:
http://www.runningofthenudes.com/



Ferdinand The Bull (the book) is still in print, and easy to obtain at local libraries, at bookstores and at bookstores online.

The Disney video of Ferdinand (with the main matador drawn as a characature of Walt Disney), is viewable on the web, here:




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Reading Is Still Alive: An Open Letter to Steve Jobs

Dear Steve,

First: Happy Birthday, today, and thank you for your work in improving the world’s technology. I think that your single greatest contribution to humanity is not the fact that you’ve filled the Earth with cool gadgets. What you’ve done is to make technology simpler, friendlier, easier to use. Nowadays, the average computer-user can do things that might have seemed like wonders to his father and miracles to his grandmother -- all with a minimum of effort and a reasonable expense. And yet ...

The road to hell is paved with good inventions. Our passionate focus on technology -- yours, mine, and virtually everyone’s -- has perhaps distracted us from other essential things. In 1976, Apple Corporation’s logo showed Isaac Newton, sitting under an apple tree, reading a book. In 1984, the company seemed remarkably aware of the dangers of Orwellian governments; and your famous superbowl commercial that year concluded with the words: “And you'll see why 1984 [the year] will not be like [the novel] 1984.”

That novel warned us about government propaganda, where “WAR IS PEACE ... FREEDOM IS SLAVERY ... IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH,” and “... the world is in a state of constant war, no one is free, and everyone is ignorant.” In the pathetic society depicted in Orwell’s novel, conformity has conquered individuality; and reading worthy books is not only impossible, but the value of reading is lost in the sauce of a ceaseless patter of propaganda.

At this point I must freely admit to being an anachronism: I love books, I revere genuine authors, I believe, perhaps naively so, that reading matters, and that reading is still alive. Your recent comments about reading succeeded in getting my attention. (The ‘product’ mentioned is Amazon’s ebook reader, called ‘Kindle’.).

"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

Last week, my favorite local bookstore went out of business.

And nobody can deny the facts that libraries are struggling for financial survival, the entire publishing industry is floundering, and American adults and children are reading less. When you see this kind of problem -- be it the decline of reading, the onslaught of global warming, or the needless growth of world poverty -- do you shut your eyes and say “That’s the way it’s going, that’s the way it must be?” ... Or do you raise your voice and work to make a change? If you know Mr. Dickens, and his story == A Christmas Carol ==, then you can never forget the desperate words of Scrooge, pleading for one chance to transform his selfish world. After he is shown London’s future, and -- most terrifying of all -- his own, the miser shouts:

“Spirit ! Are these the shadows of things that MUST be, or the shadows of things that MAY be, only ? Tell me, Spirit!”

If reading matters to you, then you might “think different” about your response to fact of reading’s decline. Between your dazzling presentations about the world’s thinnest notebooks, and the latest improvements to Leopard and the iPod touch, you might toss in a few words -- enhanced by the Keynote software -- about how and why reading makes a difference. How reading helps to create educated and thinking persons, individuals are immune to fanaticism and prejudice, people who love creativity, and people, and peace.

Still not convinced? ... I'd like to send you a copy of my essay, "The Monster Reads!" (in the anthology, The Ithaca Manual of Style). If I don't hear from you, I'll post the essay on the Web, and upload a free audio version to iTunes.

Steve, I wish you the very best with your important work. And I hope you will enthusiastically join the campaign to dust off the great books, read them with your whole heart and mind, and then bring these books into every school and every home.


Michael Pastore
10 February 2008
Ithaca, New York

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Snapfish Snaps: ... "Not One Penny For Tribute!"

Imagine, opening your email Inbox — that sanctuary of friendly communications — and receiving the following message:

**SECOND & FINAL NOTICE**

Hi Zorba,

A few weeks ago, we sent you an email about preserving your online photos at Snapfish. TO AVOID DELETION, YOU MUST VISIT SNAPFISH AND MAKE AN ONLINE PURCHASE WITHIN THE NEXT 10 DAYS.*

HOW TO RE-ACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT
To re-activate your account and preserve your online photos, please visit Snapfish and order prints, photo CDs, photo gifts, photo books, 4x8" photo cards, or download high-resolution photos within the next 10 days. Even buying a single 12¢ print will re-activate your account. Your account will be re-activated for 12 months with each purchase you make.
...

IF YOU DO NOT RE-ACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT BY DEC 20, 2007, YOUR ONLINE PHOTOS WILL BE DELETED.

My first thought: This is a new Nigerian email scam, attempting to persuade me to click a link and enter my passwords. ... On second look, the message did appear real — or, surreal — coming from a company that I've purchased many a product from. Legitimate businesses and organizations should never send threatening, spam-like emails. Rather than wasting time investigating the genuineness of this genre of "do-it-or-else" emails, I prefer to send them to my trash folder immediately.

“Legitimate businesses and organizations should never send threatening, spam-like emails.”

The last time I looked, there were dozens of online places to store photos. Photobucket is superb; as is ImageShack. The photo-service Shutterfly says that they have "never deleted a photo." Flickr is popular. Mediafire and Box.net offer free storage for not just photos, but all varieties of files.

Snapfish should have titled their email message: "How to Lose A Customer". I could continue my Snapfish account by buying a photo for 12 cents. But this kind of bullying must be discouraged. I will remember the words of Robert Goodloe Harper (shown above): "Not one penny for tribute!" — and let my Snapfish account expire.

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