I'm not sure I 100% understand this (but then it was Dr. Feynman who said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you don't)... but I read this 2002 paper by MS research that gives a method of transforming biprime factorization into an optimization problem. Optimization problems are exactly what D-Wave's quantum annealing machine can do (very well)... so doesn't this kind of break RSA? Can somebody point me to the place where I can learn that I'm wrong and can start trusting RSA PKI again?
The process right now for entrepreneurs coming to the US is reasonably straight forward, but still requires a fair amount of paperwork. I'm a Canadian entrepreneur who recently moved to the Bay Area to work on my startup and I'm in the US on an L-1A VISA. The process wasn't too hard, but it was still about about 3 weeks worth of preparing documentation for US Immigration. I documented the entire process of getting an L-1A VISA here:
https://www.startupgrind.com/b...
You are correct. While Kindle Matchbook technically has about 84,000 titles in the program the cast majority are from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and were rolling into the program by Amazon using the contract they have with KDP authors which allows them to "change the terms of this agreement from time to time by providing you [N weeks] notice".
I have nothing against self published authors. I'd love to strike a deal with Lulu or any of the other big self publishing platforms that allow authors to produce both print and digital versions of their books (because of course we need a physical copy otherwise bundling doesn't really work).
What is interesting is that serialized writing has made a return e.g. Wattpad (and various clones)... are the modern incarnations of the newspapers that Charles Dickens would publish his novels in serial format.
Legally speaking in some countries e.g. Australia you are allowed (by those who make up laws) to format shift a paper book into an ebook. However, those same people who make up laws have determined that you actually have to doing the format shifting yourself in order for it to be considered legal. That is, you aren't allowed to download an ebook copy of a physical book you own. I'm an engineer and entrepreneur, so for now I'll donate to the EFF and let Cory Doctorow argue the finer points of the insanity we enjoy and call modern copyright law.
I met Elizabeth in the UK at a book conference just before the London Book Fair. She was super enthusiastic about the idea of bundling she literally marched me over to the Granta booth at the book fair and sat me down with her publisher and explained the idea and said (to her publisher) "do this now". Honestly it was a totally amazing experience to see an author so excited about what we're doing.
The only other author who's ever been so excited about doing this has been Joe Hill (Stephan King's son). Joe found out about what we were doing on twitter after he mentioned that he thought you should get the ebook free if you buy the hardcover. Somebody tweeted back at him and he download the app on the spot and used it on Ellen Datlow's Fearful Symetries which he happened to have in his pocket (at the time the odds of a randomly selected book working in BitLit were about 1 in 10,000... so we got lucky). He got pretty excited about the idea and twisted HarperCollins' arm into letting us give away a free ebook copy of Heart-Shaped Box to everybody who owned the print version. He also went on to say some nice things about what we're doing.
No we absolutely DO NOT request (or get) access to your address book. And we absolutely DO NOT send advertising emails to your contacts. I'll say that right now and for the record.
Thanks for the feedback on the Dragon's Den episode... I'll be honest, it was a very interesting edit on the part of the CBC. We filmed the episode back in March 2014 and it aired on Oct 15 2014... I was on the sound stage for almost 90 minutes with the dragons and that got cut down to about 7 minutes on air. There were also quite a few things that the dragons said which weren't taped during my segment -- that's one of the things you sign away in going on the show: the CBC can edit anything a dragon said in another person's segment into your segment... basically the CBC is there to make dramatic TV. So I'll leave it at what got shown on TV wasn't very indicative of what actually happened on the sound stage.
Thanks so much for being an early adopter. And thanks to Tim O'Reilly (I wonder if he reads comment threads) for coming on board early with the entire O'Reilly catalog. We've also just signed with Packt Publishing and Elsevier. And we have 2 deals in the works with other very large technical publishers whom I can't name yet, but who should come online in January.
Fair play. It's not for everyone. And I'm not the kind of developer who begs and pesters people for 5 star reviews, and as such only the trolls typically bother to review the app. Haters are gonna hate (not calling you a hater, just stating in general). If somebody feels the need to give a 1-star review in the app store for a free app that they didn't read the description of before they downloaded it, I'm not going to be able to change that here.
There are a few tricks we use to stop people from using a print out of the copyright page. I won't mention all of them here... but one example is asymmetric page curvature... Copyright pages tend to be at the front or back of books as such the shot that captures the name on the copyright page shows the left / right pages with very different levels of curvature.
We've been hit by a pretty hard by the LifeHacker and CNET stories over the last few days... the shelfie processing queue is normally about 15 minutes but has been over 6 hours for much of the last 2 days. It's now back to normal as we were able to spin up enough servers to handle the load. But your point about it being faster than scanning bar codes is exactly why we designed the shelfie feature.
Sorry for the delay in looking into the compatibility of your device. When smoke started coming out of servers yesterday Marius and I ran for the (metaphorical) for extinguishers... but I haven't forgotten about checking up on your device. You are the only person who's have a device that "on paper" should work... but that isn't working. Did I already suggest that we send you the APK and you install it directly? That's certainly something we could do.
And yes, there is a way for you to check which books are in the system: http://www.bitlit.com/books/
Because it's a the perfect combination of correct-me-if-you-dare-bait and neologism-portmanteau. That, and I couldn't wipe the shit eating grin off my face for days after I thought of it for the first time. Judge me accordingly.
No this isn't something that we'll do. As a company we'll always work with the author/publisher and if they don't want to offer the bundled ebook then we won't do anything nefarious or in the nether regions of copyright law to circumvent their wishes.
The bookplate copyright page photos typically require human verification since the name recognition algorithms aren't turned to look for them... so it's a human validation. If a user suddenly claims 10 ebooks within a few hours using a bookplate, then it probably warrants me (or somebody at BitLit) sending him/her an email asking if there's something fishy going on. We haven't seen much cheating to be honest... I think if people want to get free ebooks by cheating/pirating there are much easier ways.
Thanks for being there early and supporting us. Getting more content is very much a chicken and egg problem that we've got to bootstrap... publisher don't want to waste their time signing up for platforms that don't have many readers, and readers aren't interested in platforms that don't have any content. Honestly, the more users we have who've taken shelfies, the easier it is for us (me) to walk into a big five publisher and show social proof that readers want bundling.
Hmmm... if you can run an Android simulator on your Linux box and have a good webcam and a powerful headlamp, I could send you the app APK and you could submit shelfie photos that way.
If I remember right, the designers argument was that having pagination and counts and next buttons made the design "far too utilitarian"... I guess that's a synonym for "useful". It is funny to look at a sorted list of the things visitor search for on the books page. Number 1-5 are: Harry Potter, Stephen King, Asimov, Tolkien, Neal Stephenson... We have Neal Stephenson... but I guess I know where to focus my efforts going forward.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I 100% understand this (but then it was Dr. Feynman who said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you don't)... but I read this 2002 paper by MS research that gives a method of transforming biprime factorization into an optimization problem. Optimization problems are exactly what D-Wave's quantum annealing machine can do (very well)... so doesn't this kind of break RSA? Can somebody point me to the place where I can learn that I'm wrong and can start trusting RSA PKI again?
The process right now for entrepreneurs coming to the US is reasonably straight forward, but still requires a fair amount of paperwork. I'm a Canadian entrepreneur who recently moved to the Bay Area to work on my startup and I'm in the US on an L-1A VISA. The process wasn't too hard, but it was still about about 3 weeks worth of preparing documentation for US Immigration. I documented the entire process of getting an L-1A VISA here: https://www.startupgrind.com/b...
Some books include a free / cheap digital copy: eg www.shelfie.com but that doesn't help with the art book problem.
Hmmm... I think this is a bug. I'll look into it. Sorry. It's early days, we'll get better. Thanks for letting me know about the bug!
You are correct. While Kindle Matchbook technically has about 84,000 titles in the program the cast majority are from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and were rolling into the program by Amazon using the contract they have with KDP authors which allows them to "change the terms of this agreement from time to time by providing you [N weeks] notice".
I have nothing against self published authors. I'd love to strike a deal with Lulu or any of the other big self publishing platforms that allow authors to produce both print and digital versions of their books (because of course we need a physical copy otherwise bundling doesn't really work).
What is interesting is that serialized writing has made a return e.g. Wattpad (and various clones)... are the modern incarnations of the newspapers that Charles Dickens would publish his novels in serial format.
Legally speaking in some countries e.g. Australia you are allowed (by those who make up laws) to format shift a paper book into an ebook. However, those same people who make up laws have determined that you actually have to doing the format shifting yourself in order for it to be considered legal. That is, you aren't allowed to download an ebook copy of a physical book you own. I'm an engineer and entrepreneur, so for now I'll donate to the EFF and let Cory Doctorow argue the finer points of the insanity we enjoy and call modern copyright law.
I met Elizabeth in the UK at a book conference just before the London Book Fair. She was super enthusiastic about the idea of bundling she literally marched me over to the Granta booth at the book fair and sat me down with her publisher and explained the idea and said (to her publisher) "do this now". Honestly it was a totally amazing experience to see an author so excited about what we're doing.
The only other author who's ever been so excited about doing this has been Joe Hill (Stephan King's son). Joe found out about what we were doing on twitter after he mentioned that he thought you should get the ebook free if you buy the hardcover. Somebody tweeted back at him and he download the app on the spot and used it on Ellen Datlow's Fearful Symetries which he happened to have in his pocket (at the time the odds of a randomly selected book working in BitLit were about 1 in 10,000... so we got lucky). He got pretty excited about the idea and twisted HarperCollins' arm into letting us give away a free ebook copy of Heart-Shaped Box to everybody who owned the print version. He also went on to say some nice things about what we're doing.
No we absolutely DO NOT request (or get) access to your address book. And we absolutely DO NOT send advertising emails to your contacts. I'll say that right now and for the record.
Thanks for the feedback on the Dragon's Den episode... I'll be honest, it was a very interesting edit on the part of the CBC. We filmed the episode back in March 2014 and it aired on Oct 15 2014... I was on the sound stage for almost 90 minutes with the dragons and that got cut down to about 7 minutes on air. There were also quite a few things that the dragons said which weren't taped during my segment -- that's one of the things you sign away in going on the show: the CBC can edit anything a dragon said in another person's segment into your segment... basically the CBC is there to make dramatic TV. So I'll leave it at what got shown on TV wasn't very indicative of what actually happened on the sound stage.
Thanks so much for being an early adopter. And thanks to Tim O'Reilly (I wonder if he reads comment threads) for coming on board early with the entire O'Reilly catalog. We've also just signed with Packt Publishing and Elsevier. And we have 2 deals in the works with other very large technical publishers whom I can't name yet, but who should come online in January.
Yup I agree... and for good measure:
http://xkcd.com/488/
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/g...
Fair play. It's not for everyone. And I'm not the kind of developer who begs and pesters people for 5 star reviews, and as such only the trolls typically bother to review the app. Haters are gonna hate (not calling you a hater, just stating in general). If somebody feels the need to give a 1-star review in the app store for a free app that they didn't read the description of before they downloaded it, I'm not going to be able to change that here.
There are a few tricks we use to stop people from using a print out of the copyright page. I won't mention all of them here... but one example is asymmetric page curvature... Copyright pages tend to be at the front or back of books as such the shot that captures the name on the copyright page shows the left / right pages with very different levels of curvature.
We've been hit by a pretty hard by the LifeHacker and CNET stories over the last few days... the shelfie processing queue is normally about 15 minutes but has been over 6 hours for much of the last 2 days. It's now back to normal as we were able to spin up enough servers to handle the load. But your point about it being faster than scanning bar codes is exactly why we designed the shelfie feature.
Sorry for the delay in looking into the compatibility of your device. When smoke started coming out of servers yesterday Marius and I ran for the (metaphorical) for extinguishers... but I haven't forgotten about checking up on your device. You are the only person who's have a device that "on paper" should work... but that isn't working. Did I already suggest that we send you the APK and you install it directly? That's certainly something we could do. And yes, there is a way for you to check which books are in the system: http://www.bitlit.com/books/
Because it's a the perfect combination of correct-me-if-you-dare-bait and neologism-portmanteau. That, and I couldn't wipe the shit eating grin off my face for days after I thought of it for the first time. Judge me accordingly.
sounds good... just email me on the info@ account which actually goes to everybody in the company.
No this isn't something that we'll do. As a company we'll always work with the author/publisher and if they don't want to offer the bundled ebook then we won't do anything nefarious or in the nether regions of copyright law to circumvent their wishes.
The bookplate copyright page photos typically require human verification since the name recognition algorithms aren't turned to look for them... so it's a human validation. If a user suddenly claims 10 ebooks within a few hours using a bookplate, then it probably warrants me (or somebody at BitLit) sending him/her an email asking if there's something fishy going on. We haven't seen much cheating to be honest... I think if people want to get free ebooks by cheating/pirating there are much easier ways.
Thanks for being there early and supporting us. Getting more content is very much a chicken and egg problem that we've got to bootstrap... publisher don't want to waste their time signing up for platforms that don't have many readers, and readers aren't interested in platforms that don't have any content. Honestly, the more users we have who've taken shelfies, the easier it is for us (me) to walk into a big five publisher and show social proof that readers want bundling.
Yes, they also make BitTorrent clients...
Hmmm... if you can run an Android simulator on your Linux box and have a good webcam and a powerful headlamp, I could send you the app APK and you could submit shelfie photos that way.
If I remember right, the designers argument was that having pagination and counts and next buttons made the design "far too utilitarian"... I guess that's a synonym for "useful". It is funny to look at a sorted list of the things visitor search for on the books page. Number 1-5 are: Harry Potter, Stephen King, Asimov, Tolkien, Neal Stephenson... We have Neal Stephenson... but I guess I know where to focus my efforts going forward.
Quite right... I don't exist. Much like my glass of scotch no longer exists :)