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Posts tagged as “eff”

GIMP Leaves SourceForge, EFF Tackles NSA & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Bookstores say “no” to Kindle

Amazon Kindle ereaderWhat a surprise! Bookstores don’t want to sell Kindles.

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It seems that Amazon has come up with a scheme, called Amazon Source, to let independent bookstores sell Kindle e-book readers and get a small commission on e-book sales to those readers for two years. This innitiave is being pushed in the U.S. first and might be offered in other countries at a later date. When announcing the initiative last week, Amazon said, “With Amazon Source, customers don’t have to choose between e-books and their favourite neighbourhood bookstore – they can have both.”

This led Dustin Kurtz, marketing manager with the New York publishing firm Melville House, to proclaim on the company’s website, “Amazon did a good thing on Wednesday: they made me and indie booksellers around the country laugh.”

Changing of the Guard Brings Copyleft Under Attack

It’s been said that desperate times call for desperate actions, and the last decade or so has certainly been an era of desperation for the old guard in the music biz. Indeed, the havoc the Internet has wrought on the recording industry would’ve been unthinkable back in the mid to late sixties when Jefferson Airplane and other “San Francisco Sound” groups were struggling to wrest control away from the major music labels to bring “free music” to the people.

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Record labels become more irrelevant every day. Don’t believe me? Quick, what label releases Lady Gaga’s music? Back in the sixties, every teenager in America could tell you that the Beatles were on Capitol, Dylan and The Byrds were on Columbia, the Airplane on RCA and Sonny and Cher on Atco. Now an artist’s label hardly matters. When all is said and done, all music is on iTunes.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux