Author: Douglas McLennan

As Streaming For All Media Grows, Physical Books Are Holding Their Own

The oldest form of physical media is actually holding up quite well. According to PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2018–2022, the consumer market for physical, printed books is holding its own in an increasingly digital world (see “Print Presses On”). Between 2018 and 2022, sales of physical video games, home video, and music are expected to decline each year, in some instances by double-digit percentages. By contrast, sales of physical books are expected to grow modestly, by about 1 percent annually, every year.

Streaming Services Are Inadvertently Recreating The Cable TV Model

The digital landscape is already fragmented, and it’s continually fragmenting further, as content creators choose to become content providers. In the process, it’s beginning to resemble cable television. Each new app or content library looks like a different channel to consider, and each one is essentially a premium cable offering that requires a separate subscription to view. Services that previously acted as content aggregators are losing outside content with the launch of each new service. Instead, they are creating their own content to maintain value in a crowded marketplace.

Big Public Radio Merger

Minneapolis-based Public Radio International will merge with PRX, a Boston audio technology company, the firms said Wednesday. The combined organization will reach an audience of 28.5 million people each month in broadcast and online, and have 56 million monthly podcast downloads.

How Tate Gallery Revitalized Liverpool

“Coming from the Left, my idea of economic regeneration was to do with factories and shipyards – the idea that art could be an economic driver didn’t figure for me. But, looking back, that was out of date. I would never have guessed that tourism, looking at things and shopping could have become economic drivers, but they have. In some parts of Liverpool, you are more likely to hear Spanish than Scouse.”

Solving The Book Storage Problem

In recent years, there’s been a rejection of the stodgy old alphabet in favor of organizational principles driven by color, size and genre. I blame online shopping. Aesthetics in literature are important, but literature as aesthetics makes me nervous. When did a candle-topped pyramid of paperbacks become a symbol of depth? If you line up your novels in rainbow order but don’t Instagram them, were they ever really there?

Is Luck Just A Subjective Judgment?

Pick up any newspaper and you’ll find stories – survivors of terrible plane or automobile crashes, or patients with dread diseases who live past their predicted expiration date. Invariably they are described as hugely lucky. That’s puzzling on the face of it; you’d think that somebody really lucky wouldn’t have got cancer or been in a terrible wreck to start with. Such cases raise interesting questions about the nature of luck. Is it something real or is it purely subjective, just a matter of how we happen to feel about the things that happen?

Is Religion An Academic Construct Or Does It Arise Out Of Culture?

A vast number of traditions have existed over time that one could conceivably categorise as religions. But in order to decide one way or the other, an observer first has to formulate a definition according to which some traditions can be included and others excluded. As Jonathan Zitell Smith wrote in the introduction to Imagining Religion: ‘while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterised in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious – there is no data for religion’.