I tho

she provided the funniest quote I’ve read in a very long time

Further details about Wattpad and how the company might adapt the Youtube business model and overcome the challenges it faces would provide the reader with even more information to answer for themselves the question posed.

The structure of the work is well laid out

It is, in fact, always an interesting time to be a pirate.

One small criticism

It would have been easy to dismiss these concerns

much as they lost power to Amazon in the early 2000s.

And we tend to be consume books more actively, highlighting, sharing, and holding on to our favourite books. I’m curious to see how subscription services will accommodate these preferences, and whether they will change the way we read.

Another interesting point

You wrote a really engaging essay on DRM and I was able to learn a lot from reading it. You did a great job in your research, and I feel as though the quotes you pulled really fit and assisted in the argument you were making.

both sides of the argument in a fair manner

But, what does this mean for p2p site owners in the long run?

the question that comes to mind is how authors

As argued in the essay, it is high time publishers free themselves from the dependence of DRM.

I believe

interesting

I totally agree

prove your arguments

What about authors and success of authors on an open platform like Wattpad, without the involvement of a traditional publisher?

’d love to see a cross-reference on how many of those followers have also read After on Wattpad.

“That Wattpad literature abounds in but fails to extend beyond fan fiction is the general refrain.”

free

Wattpad though, combines the platform with this dialogue, creating a community around the text which traditional publishers have been largely unable to do. (Authors, however, have been successful, like with JK Rowling’s Pottermore.)

convinced

and no one else

appreciate

interesting

It would have been interesting to develop points on free digital content versus paid print content and the effect of data mining on each.

I don’t think that these statements are common knowledge and you leave yourself open to objection

last sentence from paragraph four to the first paragraph, as well.

more firmly stated in the first paragraph

Any of these points could have been expanded into a standalone essay.

interesting

Some points I thought were interesting:

editorial crap

This amount of detail on AI may have been too much

you did not mention

It feels like perhaps you had your argument, but after doing research came to a different conclusion.

Aren’t they out of a job?

me with some questions

The earthquake example clearly explained what these robots or algorithms currently do. While it does appear at first that a human wrote the article on the earthquake, once you know what you are looking at you can see it is strictly data.

this essay has the potential to address the neglect of debates around the impact of digital and print technology on the three spheres mentioned above.

Besides the

am not totally convinced

Perhaps that was the writer’s intent, to leave the reader with the opportunity to form their own opinion on the impact of technology on academic learning, social interaction and health

This essay is concisely constructed to point out the three factors impacted by technology, mainly in academic, social, and health spheres.

Interesting

Other small improvements could be made in terms of voice consistency

is not clearly stated until the fifth paragraph

when they are two very different acts

I like idea of having quotes at the beginning that are short and to the point to give the reader a sense of the tone of the essay. However, I think the quotes are a bit misleading because they suggest the essay might be about the positive sides of hacking, while when you continue to read, you realize the essay is about information theft.

From a narrative perspective, your voice and style are consistent throughout the essay. The opening and closing “chicken” metaphor, while drawing the reader in from the beginning, adds coherence to the text, making it a more engaging piece.

If they are to retain that throne, they need to be faithful to their truest identity, inextricably rooted in social media.

your argument falls short.

interesting

Wattpad’s “grains.”

gave me a better

You

To suggest otherwise seems idealistic and could cause the reader to begin to question the rest of the argument.

I also agree with this essay’s conclusions

founders.

In regards to structure,

I otherwise knew little about

actually

Is there a need for governments to fund these projects if publishers aren’t willing to? Does it really even matter if publishers contribute to the canon of electronic literature

If I remember correctly

ow do platforms like Wattpad fit in this changing landscape of fiction? Is there room for publishers on this platform? And what of works like Kate Pullinger’s Inanimate Alice?

several great ideas from the likes of Michael Baskar and Liza Daly

Gabi, using Bill Gate’s

In the simplest terms possible, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing is a method of distributing and downloading files. More complexly, P2P file sharing relies on a group of internet users, known as peers, voluntarily connecting their computers to form a network that allows them to share and download files.

is pretty good

Of course

of course,

in fact

Oh, and it’s being done using polite

On the user side of things, finding a case against an individual Canadian P2P user is like finding a needle in a haystack, or harder.

That’s right, Canadian ISPs are sending courtesy emails, and it does, in fact, seem to be working.

Of course, there are still those who dispute the validity of the above conditions, and it is unlikely that the government, legal, and tech communities will come to a consensus on the matter any time soon, but for now it is the Canadian government that has the final word on the matter.

common argument presented

hotly debated among members of the tech and legal communities

of course,

There are numerous conditions considered by the court when determining whether a person has in fact infringed copyright under subsection (2.3), but in broad terms, what this means is that popular peer-to-peer networks and their related services that facilitate the free sharing of content and material still under copyright (and the people who run them) could be breaking the law.

It is an infringement of copyright for a person, by means of the Internet or another digital network, to provide a service primarily for the purpose of enabling acts of copyright infringement if an actual infringement of copyright occurs by means of the Internet or another digital network as a result of the use of that service

Is it legal?

The most popular P2P file sharing protocol is known as BitTorrent, and is estimated to have anywhere from 150 to 300 million users [1].

Once a peer has downloaded a file, they then become what known as a seeder and are able to share that file with other peers within the network.

It’s up to the decisions of the big 5 to prevent ebook subscription services from becoming another huge department within the monopsony that is Amazon

however, as time goes on, this begins to look like a losing battle

they’re launching their own streaming services, which is what the big 5 should be doing to take advantage of this new revenue stream.

he addition of Macmillan to libraries that already include big 5 publishers HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster pushes Oyster’s ebook count to 1 million, and Scribd’s to half a million (Plaugic).

This paper will discuss the business models of such services, the impacts the services will have on the industry, and who exactly has the power to control how these services move forward.

we can assume means

a very similar model is used by both services

The difference between these two cases is that iTunes doesn’t hold the power behind Spotify

They

the power.

the big 5 are willingly allowing Scribd and Oyster the opportunity to completely revolutionize the book industry as they know it.

At the same time, reader experiences would also improve, and subsequently, numbers of sales.

Amazon has mass control of the online book market, and to a large degree, DRM is the tool that gave it its teeth

seem increasingly convenient,

s extremely risky and has a strong possibility of backfiring

it visibly hurt [their] sales

it can be argued that DRM on eBooks will only become less effective over time.

publishers become increasingly dependant

handful of cases that made it to court were largely unsuccessful.

Interestingly, the language used identifies the crime as “plagiarism,” rather than “piracy,” showing the different attitude towards sharing text as opposed to other media.

As Wattpad gains momentum as a platform, it will also attract pirates.

It is technically illegal

ffline, book publishing already exists in a hybrid economy.

saw

The turn of the millennium was an interesting time to be a pirate. In 1998, the Sonny Bono Act extended the American copyright term by twenty years, meaning that works slated to enter the public domain that year—most notably, the earliest Mickey Mouse movie—would stay protected until 2019.2 Meanwhile, the World Wide Web was exploding in popularity, and with it, file-sharing software such as Napster, and, later, Kazaa, Limewire, and torrents. Despite heavy DRM (digital rights management) and lawsuits from major record companies, so-called “pirates” showed no signs of slowing down. Heavier locks led to more sophisticated workarounds; new file-sharing platforms sprung up as fast as lawsuits crippled others. Media companies pushed for more restrictive copyright protection in courts, while online, people all over the world performed what Anil Dash calls “a massive act of civil disobedience”– posting videos online with the words “no infringement intended.” These words indicate that they purposely violated copyright because the law didn’t match their expectations of how they could share and reuse content.

The vast majority choose to make money. Some earn a six-figure income from YouTube views, and the program has made over a billion dollars for the media industry since it was launched.

famously

differentiate between an article written by a person, and one written by a computer

relatively unable

plugging in the data to a template of pre-written text

An

News publications can learn to use the robots in conjunction with their journalists without hurting the quality of their publications, but only if the technology is embraced and understood, otherwise the risk to jobs will rise and news will lack its human touches.

argued

Working for an increasing number of news publications, computers have become journalists and are writing the news, accurately and quickly.

Technology with all of its positive contributions, has been feared just as long as it has been celebrated.

Sources: “Print-measurement-bureau-canada.” LinkedIn.com. Linked In, n.d. Web. “PMB Print Measurement Bureau – PMB 2013 Fall Study Overview.” PMB Print Measurement Bureau – PMB 2013 Fall Study Overview. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2015. Peck, Don. “They’re Watching You at Work.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 20 Nov. 2013. Web. 29 Jan. 2015. Andrews, Lori. “Facebook Is Using You.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 04 Feb. 2012. Web. 29 Jan. 2015. Gierasimczuk, Tom. “Vice Age.” Marketing Magazine Vice Age Comments. Marketing Magazine, 08 Feb. 2012. Web. 29 Jan. 2015.

The CEO is excited when he hits this part of the sermon: the revelation that Vice’s predilection for “making shit” has become his company’s main revenue source.” (marketingmag.ca)

““

the content is shit.

Completely ironically, the previous quote was sourced from an online magazine – marketingmag.com – and the article about Vice is promoting its business model.

Believe it or not 50% is actually quite a high percentage of editorial content – many magazines are up to 70% advertisements and advertorial.

It is now expected and accepted for magazines to have 50% editorial content and 50% advertisements and advertorial

People have been conditioned over many years to implicitly trust print

They are limiting people as to what they read.

“Data aggregation has social implications as well. When young people in poor neighborhoods are bombarded with advertisements for trade schools, will they be more likely than others their age to forgo college? And when women are shown articles about celebrities rather than stock market trends, will they be less likely to develop financial savvy? Advertisers are drawing new redlines, limiting people to the roles society expects them to play.”

This means that they unknowingly also trust what advertisements are chosen for the magazines.

People tend to trust what is in print over other forms of media. T

not to encourage critical thought.

If magazines no longer publish with this in mind, they cannot help but publish tired material simply because they know it will interest their readers in some way.

Publishers have long been thought of and expected to be cultural gatekeepers.

produces advertorial,

“by one estimate, more than 98 percent of the world’s information is now stored digitally, and the volume of that data has quadrupled since 2007. Ordinary people at work and at home generate much of this data, by sending e-mails, browsing the Internet, using social media, working on crowd-sourced projects, and more.” (theatlantic.com).

While this sounds impressive, it is nowhere near what publishers collect now.

The Print Measurement Bureau (PMB)

The readers have inadvertently become the content creators.

Publishers no longer think in terms of the best content selling their magazines, but rather the content best tailored to their audience to sell the most magazines

they negatively affect magazine publishing by determining the entire content of a magazine from editorial to advertisements to advertorial

metrics are used too much

Of course they had their readers in mind, but they weren’t slaves to data endlessly counting how many “likes” their Facebook page received or how many times their tweet was favourited.

own a dog or a cat or a ferret or a rabbit,

Even self-published authors have seen their sales jump [16] after uploading their books on Wattled.

With its users scattered across 200 countries and its active cultivation of users from the developing world, Wattpad is more Facebook than Kobo and having received successive infusions of venture capital worth $17.3 million in 2012 and $46 million in 2014, it is more a cash-rich company than a start-up experiment [14].

Philippines than in North America. Next to the United States, Wattpad’s largest user base resides in the Philippines.

Fan-made book trailers

Commons-based peer production

shafts directed against Wattpad

These concerns are not without substance.

That Wattpad literature abounds in but fails to extend beyond fan fiction is the general refrain.

Perhaps,

In this paper, I will try to examine how Wattpad, an online reading platform, has built a global community of over 30 million readers

Consider the curious case of Anna Todd. In March, 2014, twenty five year old Todd uploaded one of the last few chapters of After, her Wattpad novel which would soon turn her into the cynosure of the publishing world. Within 13 seconds of the upload, comments started pouring in. In the next 24 hours, Anna received close to 10,000 notifications. According to Wattpad’s metrics, After has been read over 299 million times [1] by just under 10 million unique readers [2]. Some weeks later, she signed a six figure contract with Simon & Schuster who published it in paperback [3]. Later, Paramount Pictures acquired screen rights [4] for the book.

There are two things, among others, to take away from this brief anecdote. The first being Wattpad’s astonishing ability to forge such a massive readership and the second—the serialization of the story as opposed to uploading it in its entirety.

It is my firm belief

might actually promote sales by amplifying the power of personal recommendations through online channels.

I am arguing in favour of the open web and the free access, use and exchange of information

off-putting inconvenience for legitimate book buyers

This is yet another (big) reason for publishers to free themselves from the enslavement of DRM.

There is a wealth of online resources and tools that allow you to strip DRM from your ebooks without much effort. For instance, just to mention a few examples, Gizmodo has published a video tutorial on how to remove DRM from your Kindle ebooks, and Apprentice Alf’s blog offers you a complete guide on ebook DRM removal. Even the well-respected magazine Wired devoted an entire article to the topic. In addition, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology enables anyone to extract text from scanned images of printed pages, thus making it virtually impossible to prevent pirated copies from being made (and circulated

Here is the lesson the die-hard DRM defenders must learn: locking your readers in to a single platform/device and supplier will only result in frustrating them and, in the worst case scenario, spurring them to seek other, unorthodox ways to get their books.

CITATIONS

DRM: Debunking Resilient Myths

[1],

rather than reducing piracy, DRM has hurt legitimate consumers by restricting their freedom to access and use purchased digital goods however, whenever and wherever they wish.

respects.

publishers and e-book distributors should abandon DRM altogether precisely because intellectual property matters and needs to be protected in a way that these systems fail to do

both platforms have their positive and negative consequences on academic learning and social interaction

has a negative impact on a person’s health, alertness, and the circadian clock which synchronizes the daily rhythm of sleep

proves

In the earlier days, friends and family met to discuss a particular book and even attempted to answer some confusing questions. This made academic discussions more effective through the sharing of thoughts and ideas. B

Undeniable of the fact that

Paper tends to speak more to our emotions and intellect than the screen does. Are we at risk for being exposed to these electronic devices?

prove

proved

academic learning, social interaction and human health, based on current research findings.

the promise of the app is far greater than the promise of fixed layout ePubs.

middle-child who never found his potential

customers expect to pay for content in the iBooks store

The elimination of the Single Edition option is a big blow to small independent publishers who are not willing or able to sign onto Adobe’s more expensive Digital Publisher options,”

When Adobe rolled out Single Edition in 2011, launching a single app came with the price tag of $395—expensive, but manageable. Then, in 2012, Adobe rolled Single Edition in with their $50 per month Creative Cloud subscriptions targeting small to mid-size publishers. This subscription provided access to Adobe apps and by extension to DPS Single Edition. Subscribers were able to build an unlimited number of apps for the Apple App Store through this subscription level with certain limitations, one being that these apps were published as standalone apps without subscription capabilities, meaning that they weren’t able to become part of the Newsstand. This was an obvious disadvantage, but again, manageable.

For the purposes of this piece, Single Edition is the point of focus.

The near unanimous adoption of Adobe’s DPS can be linked to the ubiquity of inDesign.

as a codeless app creator

design

theft

WikiHow

take control of their own data.

When one speaks about a system’s design, one is actually referring to system design.

piracy

online

Publishers

move their business models online

Hacking and piracy are forms of intellectual property theft, which is described as, “theft of material that is copyrighted, the theft of trade secrets, and trademark violations. A copyright is the legal right of an author, publisher, composer, or other person who creates a work to exclusively print, publish, distribute, or perform the work in public.[4]”

Although this scenario is hypothetical, publishers need to understand hacking and its implications.