TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics » Lore SjÃ¶berg

Lore Sjöberg explains the Apple subscription requirement

Chris Meadows — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:12:17 +0000

Wired’s satirist Lore Sjöberg applies his trademark sarcasm to Apple’s in-app subscription requirement and the resulting uproar.

Many publishers reacted to the announcement by saying the terms would force them out of the digital-content business and back into print publishing, which is extremely profitable and will never become obsolete.

He explains that Apple is able to get away with this because its competition is essentially ridiculous, and compares Steve Jobs to an ancient god of wealth and the underworld. Definitely hilarious.

Lore Sjöberg on how to save dying industries

Chris Meadows — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 14:15:00 +0000

Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has been paying attention to the furors over “dying” industries that have been erupting lately—including one I haven’t covered here, since it didn’t have anything to do with e-books. A proposed deal between the RIAA and the National Association of Broadcasters/musicFIRST would see cell phone manufacturers required to put an FM tuner in every cell phone they make.

Sjöberg thinks this is a great idea, but why stop there? He proposes some similar restrictions in the name of saving newspapers, mapmakers, and travel agents. (The newspaper one involves parakeets.)

Related:

DMCA exemptions that might have been

Chris Meadows — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:15:00 +0000

Never one to pass up a chance to poke fun at an easy target, Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has written a hilarious “Alt Text” column for Wired on “Library of Congress Rulings That Could Have Been”.

Other rulings give users the right to copy videogames for the purpose of researching the quality and type of security measures embedded therein — obviously the main reason people copy videogames — and the right to turn your electronic book into an electronic audio book, assuming there isn’t a legal audio book version already on the market.

I’m very excited about that last one, because at long last I can have A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates read to me to sleep at night.

Don’t miss his list of “rulings that the Library of Congress refused to make, on the grounds that nobody actually proposed them.” Perhaps Sjöberg could propose some of these himself next time around.