Brendan writes “Chapters/Indigo, the dominant book retailer in Canada, just recently launched their eBook store, thinly disguised as an independent 3rd party called ShortCovers. Both companies are children of the parent company Indigo Books & Music Inc.

The fact that they have launched an eBook program is not a problem. It’s great, in fact. I’d like to see more action in this space, and anything to help people read more is a step in the right direction. The problem I have is with how they’ve done it.

When announcing the service on Monday, the company trumpeted loudly the offer of “FREE eBook downloads!” in a mass email and on the main Chapters page. Can you guess what all the eBooks offered for free have in common? That’s right, they’re almost all public domain works. They do list the publisher as “Gutenberg” for all the PD books, but do they explain what that means? Do they inform the user that these are public domain works? Do they include a link to Gutenberg.org, where any user can download these books in plain texts to use however they want? No, of course not.

Instead, they wrap the books up in their tight little DRM package. Each page (according to their idea of a page) loads painfully in a flash frame and within the text of the book is non-selectable. And most are not available as downloads (as they are on Gutenberg).

The worst offense? That dangerous little line at the bottom of each page of each book: “(C) All Rights Reserved All copyright ownership rights relating to this content are specifically and expressly reserved by the owner thereof and are marked © by the owner of this content, 2009.” An interesting claim, to be sure. What am I to do with this book, ShortCovers?

“All Rights Reserved. You are free to make one (1) copy of this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you abide by the following:
* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
* Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
* Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights.”

I can make one (1) copy? Wow! I better use it carefully.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen bookstores DRM up and claim copyright over public domain works. The DRM stuff is dumb, but understandable, since they just want to have one system and often seem to choose an anti-consumer one. But telling people that they are only allowed to make one copy of a public domain work and putting a © sign on it is pretty ridiculous.

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We’ve recently updated how we evaluate the nuts and bolts of the forty-one Web CMS vendors we cover in our Web Content Management research. Specifically, we’ve expanded and re-organized our ratings categories. See the sample, right. To be sure, this is a supplement to our assessment of vendors’ "fit" against different business scenarios. When developing a short-list, look to scenarios first, and then these ratings.

At a high level, we keep the same four main categories:

• Technology & Management Services
• Content Production Services (contributor-facing)
• Content Delivery and Interaction Services (visitor facing)
• Vendor Intangibles

 

Then we break down services into subcategories that attempt to match up to particular team members’ concerns. For example, your system administrator might be more interested in performance than templating and integration. It’d be easy to think that all our customers read an entire 10- to 20-page chapter about a particular vendor, but you’ve told us that you wanted better segmentation of topics, especially between businesspeople keen to assess criteria like usability or e-marketing, and IT team members, who may bring different interests.

 

We’ve also added or modified several service descriptions

• Content Reuse gets addressed more directly. All vendors say they can do it; few support it as well as you might like (though you need to be careful what you wish for, since granular content re-use in particular can present serious management challenges).
• UI Accessibility became an official consideration, partly at the request of our public-sector subscribers. This refers to the accessibility of the content management interface itself, as opposed to the generated website. We had always covered this topic, but not as deeply as now, especially since vendors tend not to pay attention to it. You’ll find a lot of check-minus scores there.
• Multi-site Management refers to a spectrum of services you may want to exploit to help you manage multiple properties from the same system instance.
• Friendly Output is also new as a first-class service, although we had covered some of the key issues previously. This segment covers criteria like friendly URLs, standards-based output, and the related issue of website accessibility. Much of the responsibility here will lie with your specific implementation, but it turns out that some Web CMS offerings natively support friendlier output than others.

"Vendor Intangibles" might look like a bit of an appendage, but we actually seem to spend more and more time on this with each update. I’ll never tire of repeating: the vendor (or open source project) "fit" is at least as important as tool fit. Key factors of late include the growing importance of community-based support to help satisfy your broader support needs, as well as the breadth of any consulting partner channel for those Web CMS offerings that are more platform-like.

I hope you find this list useful as you consider your own needs and opportunities. As always, our generic ratings must be weighed against more contextual requirements. For explanations of how we arrive at those ratings, consult the narrative for each vendor evaluation.

Please feel free to share any feedback below.

Tier1 Research, the analyst firm that tracks the hosting and colocation market, will hold its Datacenter Transformation Summit – Silicon Valley (DTSSV) on December 8 at the Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, Calif.

Tier1 Research’s summit series brings together enterprise IT executives with some of the largest hosting and colocation providers in the market today. The Silicon Valley event will address reducing capital expenditures, meeting the needs of business stakeholders and sharpening the RFP process to ensure that the most value is extracted from IT investments. DTSSV has been structured to provide IT decision-makers with a full range of data center information, including the type of data centers that are best-suited for their business, the build vs. lease decision, the brewing storm around data center regulation and the future of data center architecture.

“In bringing our Datacenter Transformation Summit to the West Coast, we were determined to provide enterprise IT executives with the invaluable resources that they would need to make more informed decisions around their infrastructure management,” said Daniel Golding, Vice President and Research Director of Tier1 Research and Conference Chair. “Given the current economic climate, we cannot stress to enterprise IT executives enough the importance of ensuring that their infrastructure is not only reliable, but that it also has minimal impact on their company.”

Scheduled speakers include:

• Mark Waddington, president of Quality Technology Services
• John Sheputis, CEO of Fortune Data Centers
• Billie Haggarad, VP, Data Centers at CoreSite
• James Kennedy, senior manager of facilities, RagingWire
• Michael Tobin, CEO, Telecity Group 

See the Datacenter Transformation Summit web site for more details.

Skype has had its most tumultuous year yet, but all the problems are finally behind it and the company can focus on growth and revenue as opposed to lawsuits. eBay has announced that it has finalized the sale it first revealed several months ago and that Skype is now a separate private company, although eBay still retains a 30 percent stake in it.

“eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) announced today that it has successfully completed the previously announced sale of its Skype communications unit in a deal valuing the business at $2.75 billion. The buyer, who will control an approximately 70 percent stake, is an investor group led by Silver Lake and includes Joltid Limited and certain affiliated parties, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz,” the company said in a statement.

Almost all of the details of the deal had been known and it is actually very close to the one initially announced except for the change in the investor lineup. Skype was valued at $2.75 billion, well above what anyone estimated a few months back when eBay announced its plans to spin off the VoIP company in an IPO. eBay will get $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. It also gets to keep about 30 percent of the company and about $50 million in debt.

The investors… (read more)

The ETF industry has sliced and diced the investment universe in every way possible.

One wonders if there might be more ETFs than stocks one day. (There are already a lot more mutual funds than stocks).

During this entrepreneurial process of industry birth and mutation, some real freaks have been let loose.

Some are just uselessly funny, but others are deceptive, and even losing people a lot of money.

So do your homework.

See The Ten Most Ridiculous ETFs >>>

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Schwab ETFs Are A Day Trader's Dream (SCH)
• We Just Added 25 More ETFs In Two Months
• SocGen: Prepare Yourself For The Worst Case Scenario!

BlackBerry themes have been a prominent topic this week. It started on Wednesday when, as we do every other week, we reviewed three premium BlackBerry themes. Two of these were created using BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, so yesterday we went over how to create your own BlackBerry theme. I kiddingly urged someone to make me a custom theme, but I think I’ve found something to keep me occupied for a bit. Via BBCool, I found out that Bplay has launched a series of themes for cities around the world. Yeah, I’m totally getting the New York one, pictured below.

(more…)

Filed under: Motorsports, Government/Legal, Earnings/Financials, UK

It’s been one heck of a rollercoaster ride for Donington Park this year. The British racing circuit hosted a Formula One race back in 1993, and was set to take over the British Grand Prix from Silverstone until the race promoter fell on hard times.

Donington Ventures Leisure Ltd signed a 150-year lease with Wheatcroft & Sons Ltd, owners of the circuit just two years ago with the aim of bringing F1 racing back to the track. But having failed to raise the capital necessary to bring the track’s facilities up to F1 standards, Autocar reports that the 17-year deal with Bernie Ecclestone’s Formula One Management fell into jeopardy.

Its prospects and finances in ruins, Donington Ventures has declared bankruptcy and entered administration. Now the lease could be up for grabs; failing that, it will revert to Wheatcroft ownership, the British Grand Prix will likely return to Silverstone for good and Donington will go back to hosting concerts, touring cars and motorbike races once again.

[Source: Autocar | Image: Pascal Rondeau/Allsport/Getty]

British GP track Donington Park declares bankruptcy originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Stuart Saft, a partner at Dewey & LeBoef, argues over at Forbes (via SquareFeet)that judges are exacerbating the pain in commercial real estate.

In the last few weeks there have been a series of court decisions that will have repercussions in the credit markets for years to come making an already cautious lending community absolutely paranoid, and restricting credit even if available.

In Syracuse, N.Y., a state court refused to allow Citigroup to foreclose a mortgage on what was to be the second largest mall in the country even though it had no tenants. In a recent decision in the General Growth Properties bankruptcy, the court held that the special purpose entities structure was not bankruptcy-proof. The court also ignored the fact that General Properties fired the independent directors of the special purpose entities and appointed new ones without telling anyone, including the fired directors, for seven weeks. Finally, last week in the Tousa bankruptcy in Florida, the bankruptcy set aside the subsidiary’s obligations and grants of security and ignored the savings clause in the loan documents to reverse a legitimate transaction meant to save the company.

This harkens back to all the sturm und drang over judges’ forced-modification of home loans, and the fears that that would be the end of mortgage lending in America.

We think there’s something to what Saft is saying, though he then goes onto make the case for a bunch of new bailouts for a commercial real estate, including a new Fed lending facility and all kinds of favorable tax treatment.

Read the whole thing >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Sam Zell Slams Wilbur Ross, Calls Him A Commercial Real Estate Wannabe
• Michael Panzner: Commercial Real Estate Is A "Tsunami Unfolding"
• The Commercial Real Estate Crash Debunks The Myth Of Predatory Lending

Modern Warfare 2 does not live up to the hype that surrounded it before the release date and to the standard set by its predecessor, which was released in late 2007. It ticks all the points on the list: there are better graphics, there’s a bigger “What the Hell?” moment, there are tougher characters, bigger firefights and more controversies. It’s a fun, quick, at times tough shooter that satisfies the urge to redeem by wielding a firearm and has superb level design.

But the soul of the experience seems not to be there anymore. Activision, a company led by someone who stated that one of his goals was taking the fun out of (making) videogames, seems to have left a print on Modern Warfare 2, a game, which might actually sell millions of copies, making videogaming one of the most active segments of entertainment, but which forgot its heart somewhere in 2007.

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[/col] [col]Don’t fight the darkside
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Story

The original Modern Warfare was so successful because of two things: the complex multiplayer element, which is still being played by gamers all over the world, and the finely tuned single player campaign, which delivers a lot of corridor solid shooting intertwined with off beat sequences li… (read more)

Filed under: Auctions, Porsche

Times are tough for the Porsche family. Amidst the merger with Volkswagen, their company just suffered a $6.6 billion loss. But we didn’t think things were this bad for the descendants of Ferdinand Porsche until Bonhams announced they would be liquidating that family’s watch collection to the highest bidder.

Okay, we’re exaggerating just a bit. The Porsche family stands to make a lot of money out of the Volkswagen merger, and the collection is being auctioned off for charity. And while we have no idea what charity that is, we have to assume it’s not the Porsche family themselves.

As it turns out, the family’s interests extend beyond the automobile. Not only does their Porsche Design Group have its own range of watches, but some fourteen years ago they bought Eterna, one of the largest independent watchmakers in Switzerland. Eterna fabricates Porsche Design watches as well as their own brand, and several of the rarest examples will be included along with others among the 49 watches crossing the auction block on December 2 in London.

Among those pieces Bonhams is highlight are included a rare 18kt gold Porsche Design prototype and an Eterna presented to family scion Ferdinand Oliver Porsche on his 40th birthday, along with rare timepieces from Rolex and Omega as well as Panerai (which makes watches for arch-rival Ferrari), Jaeger LeCoultre (which partners with Aston Martin) and Breitling (in league with Bentley). Follow the jump for further details, and check out the images in the gallery below.

[Source: Bonhams]

Continue reading Porsche family auctioning off watch collection

Porsche family auctioning off watch collection originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Testing the BlackBerry Bold 9700 battery has been an interesting experience. I always thought consumer electronics manufacturers embellished their battery life expectancies in order to impress the buyer. In this case, RIM has actually slightly under-stated the Bold 9700’s battery life, and really proved themselves to be an honest company when it comes to their battery life marketing. Could we say the same for Apple? I challenge TIPB to do the same with the iPhone, and see if it can play 39 hours of music off radio and last 29 hours with heavy usage. Speaking of Apple…the BlackBerry Bold 9700 lasts longer than the best iPod.

Just look for yourself, the BlackBerry Bold 9700’s battery, lasts longer than that of the best iPod available.

In Part 1 of the BlackBerry Bold 9700 battery stress test, we threw RIM a bone and checked out the music playback with the wireless connections off. For the second part, it was important to test how long the battery would last given very heavy usage. During the 29 hours that the BlackBerry was on, it went through the following:

• About an hour of voice over 8 phone calls.
• 10 SMS messages received, 7 sent.
• 13 Tweets from UberTwitter, 9 of which contained a pic.
• Google Maps running the whole time and updating Latitude.
• About 8 hours of music streaming and playing via Bluetooth.
• Received about 30 emails and replied to around 15.
• The remaining time spent with all connections on and pulling data.

This is the first BlackBerry that I have been able to run more than 1 full day of usage without charging. There are definitely updates and optimizations made to the OS that make music playback more efficient, as well as general improvements to the device that make the battery last longer than any other BlackBerry. If you’re interested, I could do similar experiments with other BlackBerry smartphones. Anyone want to know about the Storm2 battery?

This BlackBerry test proves that the Bold 9700 has a killer battery.

Special thanks goes out to Slacker for white listing my account so it can be played in Canada. Now if only the lazy bureaucrats can get their act together, Canadians would have an awesome music device.

© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2009

Elecite have a new theme out called Sentient. It looks pretty cool and features an animated shield with 6 customizable icons. It’s easy to use and the navigation is pretty user friendly. As with most Elecite themes, the icons could do with a little work.

Sentient is $6.99 and available for the Storm, 8900, 9700, Bold & 9600 (OS 4.7 & 5.0).

© Matt Cameron aka W4LNUT for BlackBerry Cool, 2009

As long as Americans perceive the economy to be weak, Obama will keep getting poll readings below 50%. It’s as simple as that.

Nate Silver:

What we have is a comparison of Barack Obama’s approval ratings on the economy to his approval ratings overall. It includes all polls in the Pollster.com database that asked about both approval of Obama on the economy and his overall job performance — a total of 109 polls dating back to the start of his term. I’ve then drawn in some LOESS curves to illustrate the trend.

The two lines track each other uncannily well. From the very start of Obama’s term, there’s been about a 5-6 point gap between approval of his performance on the economy and his performance overall, with the latter figure consistently being somewhat higher. Although Obama’s approval has declined in both departments (particularly during period between about April 1 and August 1; it may not be declining any further now), the magnitude of the gap has been exceptionally steady over time.

This is why a second stimulus is basically a sure thing. As a politician — actually, we suspect this applies to all Democratic politicians — there’s just no good reason for Obama not to try every measure avilable to pull demand forward and stimulate things right now.

It’s the reality of our system, that there’s no good reason to think long-term if you’re a politician that’s always running for re-election in some manner or other.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• The Second Stimulus Is Now A Done Deal
• Obama’s Approval Rating Dips Below 50%
• Obama Trying To Figure Out How To Extend Bank Bailout Without Triggering More Public Outrage

Personally, I’ve never read an entire book on my BlackBerry, but I might just give it a try. Viigo is a part of my daily reading habits and if the font size were right, and the interface was clean, I could see myself going through a full eBook on my BlackBerry.

If you want to try it out, or you’re looking for another book, Fictionwise are offering BlackBerry Cool readers 25% off with the coupon code “blackberrycool25″ (sans quotes). The coupon is good until the 30th of November.

Some instructions from Fictionwise:

For Fictionwise.com customers, every MultiFormat (unencrypted) eBook and every Secure eReader eBook will work on your BlackBerry. When you log in to your Fictionwise.com account from your BlackBerry, note that you will only see listed those eBooks that work with eReader for BlackBerry. You will not be shown eBooks that don’t work, such as Secure Microsoft Reader eBooks, etc. If you see it on your BlackBerry, you can download and read it.

© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2009

Location services are becoming increasingly popular and, with the right devices and tools to take advantage of, they’re also becoming more useful. Twitter has been working on location features for a couple of months now and the microblogging service has finally enabled them, but for now, only for third-party developers, meaning there are no changes to Twitter.com.

“In August we announced that we were working on a new API that would provide developers with the ability to geotag tweets. Today, the Geotagging API is officially available,” Twitter Platform Director Ryan Sarver wrote.

“This release is unique in that it’s API-only which means you won’t see any changes on twitter.com, yet. Instead, Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others are already supporting this new functionality (go try them out now!) in interesting ways that include geotagging your tweets and displaying the location from where a tweet was posted,” he added.

With geolocation, Twitter can attach location information to any tweet, information which could be used in any number of ways, like searching for tweets which are nearby or focusing on the information coming from an event location. The limit is really what the developers can come up with and already a… (read more)

When Glenn Beck started discussing the dollar carry trade, we figured that this seemingly-wonky notion had gone completely mainstream.

Here’s proof: Google Trends, via Pazzomundo, confirms that everyone wants to know what the hell it is. Amazing. (via @mickwe)

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Asian Nations Threaten To Kill The Dollar Carry Trade
• Now Even Glenn Beck Is Freaking Out About The Dollar Carry Trade
• Bernanke Teams With Asian Banks To Rescue The Cratering Dollar

As various folks in the news business (and outside of it) continue to fret about how it could be possible to ever fund the production of news, some are taking more positive looks at the space. Jay Rosen has listed out 18 different sources of subsidies for funding journalism (or journalism-like) work. Some of them are better than others, but it’s a useful list to get you a thinking. Full disclosure: a part of our own business model is on the list. Along those lines, since people have been saying nice stuff about our business model, Jesse Hirsh has a way-too-nice writeup about our CwF+RtB experiment, which I still think is a bit short of a full business model, but is getting closer. Based on our experiences with it, we’re getting more and more ideas on how to fund not just journalism, but all sorts of content creation.

And, really, that’s the idea. There are lots of different ideas and experiments going on — and many of them are showing early signs of success, and I’m sure more will come along at a later date that are even more successful. Really, the only ones complaining and demanding changes to the law are those who represent the old way of doing things, and don’t want to change. They talk up all sorts of horror stories and moral panics about how “journalism” or “music” or “movies” are going to go away — despite the fact that we actually have more of all three of those things happening today than at any time in history. Based on that faulty reasoning, they demand special protection not for “journalism” “music” or “movies” but for the old business models and old institutions that produced all three.

Eventually, as these new business models and new institutions work themselves out, it’ll suddenly seem “obvious” what the right answers were, and people will forget the hundreds if not thousands of different experiments — both good and bad — that went into developing the new model. It’s a time of upheaval, for sure, but there’s no indication that there’s any real risk to the production of content. Just a few businesses that got big and don’t want to change with the times.

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Here are 5 “best of Craigslist” posts that have at least something to do with cars. Some important points before we continue:

1. There will not be any apologies for offensive language. If you read from this point forward and click on the links, you WILL see something offensive. Such is the beast.
2. None of the holier-than-thou “I ride a bicycle and I’m better than you” rants that are so popular on Craigslist made it on our list. Sorry. (OK, not really sorry. Screw those people.)
3. Keep the conversation going. Feel free to post a link to a best of Craigslist post that’s automotive in nature in the comments

Number 1: One BAD Personalized Plate

How can one person get 50 parking tickets, each one for a different car…the answer? They have a personalized plate that’s simply “NV.”

Number 2: Rant For Anyone Who Works In The Auto Business

If you work at a dealership, repair shop, or any sort of retail repair type business, this rant from an oven repairman will make you bust a gut. Best part:

We get 50 or more broken oven calls in the few days leading up to turkey day and santa day. We get one or two any other week. Ovens don’t collectively go on strike. Most people just admit their sh*t has been broken since the Clinton administration, but some of you think you can bullsh*t me.

Read it – seriously.

Number 3: Traffic Rants

There are dozens of rants about traffic, but a couple stand out. First, we have an introduction to rush hour traffic – “definitions and how to for beginners.” It’s profane, but it’s a nice warm up for the guide to driving in Phoenix (that’s FEE-NICKS).

Number 4: Cool Story About Redemption

Next time you think you’re having a bad day, read this story about a homeless guy getting back on his feet after a dealership took a chance on him and hired him to be a detailer.

Number 5: People Who Hate Annoying Car Ads

Craigslist is chock-full of classified ads for cars, and some of them are hilariously ridiculous. This list of the most irritating car ads hits a home run with this line:

3. The Detached-From-Reality Dipsh*t. “One owner 1986 Corolla. 234K miles. Needs a front bumper and headliner droops. Radiator leaks and needs alignment. $2300 FIRM.” Hey meatstick, one owner or 10 owners, your sh*t is old, worn-out, and worth $300.

Nice.

Finally, if you’re posting an ad on Craigslist trying to sell your car, give this list of classified car ad tips a gander (and remember a tacometer is a Mexican dish, not a gauge).

Any best of craigs ads we missed?

Read user reviews of Tundra Accessories.