Here's an interesting story from one of my favorite financial writers, Gail Vaz-Oxlade. The Beloved and I are devotees of her 'jar' system for budgeting, and my diligence at applying her simple financial planning 'rules' helped me pay off my student loan and simultaneously save over $10,000 in my retirement account in four years. She also has several popular TV shows that are quite entertaining. But, as Gail explains in this blog post, most of her books have only thus far been available in Canada; her American publisher was concerned that her new book, Money Rules, needed a different 'spin' as a...

Good e-Reader ran an interesting post earlier today about Oklahoma’s Metropolitan Library System, which took the unprecedented step back in December 2012 of advertising its e-book lending services on broadcast television. According to the post, the 60-second spot was developed by the library system's own IT department. It ran for about two weeks on the area's Fox and CW affiliate stations, and for roughly a month on local cable channels. And as the library system's marketing director, Kim Terry, explained, "over 1,700 new customers began using our eMedia site since the commercial started running, which was a 22 percent increase over the previous month.” Perhaps not surprisingly,...

“You may not be able to tell the difference,” says the advertisement’s narrator, as both the iPad and the Kindle Fire HD sit side-by-side displaying the same images. “But your wallet definitely can.” Amazon’s new 30-second ad draws the comparison in screen resolution between the iPad and the (new, larger) Fire HD 8.9-inch screen. Visually, the Fire looks awesome. Actually, both tablet screens do. I feel that strictly based on just screen clarity, sure, either would be a sufficient choice for new tablet owners. But the Kindle Fire HD's $299 price tag sure does appear as the ‘nice price’ alongside Apple’s $499...

On Posterous, blogger Diego Basch writes about how the Amazon Kindle has changed his reading habits. It’s an interesting testimonial on how e-readers can change the way we interact with our books. As a result of having plenty of unread books on his Kindle, Basch now finds he doesn’t watch TV anymore—there isn’t ever a time when he no “next” book to keep him from watching something on the tube. He also finds that he goes through books a lot faster than he used to because he can also read them on the Kindle app on his computer or...

The Technology and Games section of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website has published a fairly long article called “The case for piracy.” In this article, Nick Ross looks at some of the reasons people feel driven to pirate. The article doesn’t actually touch on e-books per se—the majority of it seems to be about how badly Australian TV mangles imported TV shows and does not show international sports events live, though there are a couple of sections about the music and movie industries too—but the sort of media producer indifference (or even, as the article puts it, “contempt”)...

Little changes have unintended consequences. I’m reminded of this every day at my tech support job, where I take calls supporting a prominent retailer’s store brand of HDTVs, Blu-Ray players, Bluetooth equipment, and wireless routers. Most of my work has to do with helping people set up their TVs, and one of the questions I’m most commonly asked is, “How do I get rid of those black bars to the left and right of the picture?” The black bars are, of course, an artifact of the change in aspect ratios. As TVs got wider, older programming has to...

On his GigaOm blog, Om Malik takes on the old media vs. new media dichotomy that has been showing up in so many places over the last few years. The main example he cites is the recent case of television broadcasters blocking Google TV from accessing their content (in much the same way Hulu’s TV network sources forced it to block Boxee last year), but he also mentions the music industry’s problems and the “death of newspapers”. When I look at these industries and the failure — or impending failure — of these institutions,...

UPDATE: Subsequent articles, such as this Tech Trader Daily posting, note that the date is going to be September 1, not September 7th. Buried within a Bloomberg article on Apple pressuring media companies to offer 99 cent TV rentals is this little tidbit: Apple plans to hold a San Francisco event Sept. 7, two weeks ahead of the start of the new prime-time TV season, to unveil the [TV episode rental] service and an updated line of entertainment products, two people said. The article goes on to suggest that Apple...

Intellectual property lawyer and scholar Mark Lemley has released a draft paper looking at the history of the content industry’s claims that disruptive new technologies were going to lead to the “death” of the industry. Starting with painters decrying photography, and moving on through recorded music, broadcast radio, cable TV, and beyond, Lemley highlights the industry’s repeated alarms that the sky was falling. Lemley writes: The content industry, it seems, has a Chicken Little problem. It may, in fact, be the case that the sky is falling. But, if you...

Over at Nieman Reports, assistant editor Jan Gardner has an interview with V. Michael Bove, Jr., a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Bove discusses interaction, user participation, and collaboration as components of the future of storytelling. The first part of the interview involves an idea for adding more interactivity to televised events by allowing user access to alternate camera feeds using a handheld device. For instance, being able to get a camera shot of the audience at a football game by holding up his iPhone and turning around. While an interesting idea, I couldn’t help being...

I just walked back in my door after the bus ride back from Kansas City. I had a great time at the convention over the weekend. I taped interviews with Pete Abrams and George R.R. Martin, which I will try to sit down and transcribe over the next few days. I attended panels relating to the coming age of e-books, and to the effects of new technology on our daily lives. I met and had dinner with occasional TeleRead contributor Moriah Jovan and her family. And I had the chance to put together some impressions....

Last week, writer and consultant Mark McLaughlin had a great article in the Huffington Post about the current attempts of newspapers and others to get audiences to pay for on-line content. McLaughlin points out that audiences usually don’t pay for content, but rather for distribution. It is the advertisers who pay for content. McLaughlin cites the old print newspaper delivery system as an example: newspaper readers didn’t pay for the content in the paper, but for having the paper delivered to their door every day regardless of whether they read a single article in it or not. Advertisers...