Silverio Venturi [2.2.1953–5.3.2020] We bought our house in the appennino bolognese in 2010 and it came with more terrain than we could manage. Fortunately most of the land was let to Andrea a friendly farmer who was happy to renew the letting, but there was still the challenge of a…

Silverio Venturi [2.2.1953–5.3.2020] Abbiamo comprato la nostra casa nell’Appennino Bolognese nel 2010 ed aveva più terreno di quello che potevamo gestire. Fortunatamente la maggior parte della terra fu coltivata da Andrea, un contadino vicino, che era contento di rinnovare l’affitto, ma c’era comunque la sfida di un grande giardino e…

STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) publishing has been an extraordinarily profitable area for the big academic publishers in the last 30 years. But this last Autumn it was dealt a potentially fatal blow. Robert-Jan Smits from the European Commission and Marc Schiltz representing Europe’s largest research founders announced Plan S…

When magazines become digital their relationship to time is profoundly altered. Paradoxically their relationship with time and our experience of time changes because the magazines themselves, even with a complete archive, are relatively unchanged; they change much less than other forms of digital media in the transition to digital. Magazines…

Luciano Floridi, an Italian Professor at Oxford, is one of the leading philosophers of information. He is also interested in libraries and archives and has recently proposed a valuable use for the concept of “semantic capital” in relation to archives. …

Marc Benioff’s purchase of the magazine Time for $190 million seems to be part of a trend: billionaires buying prestigious magazines and newspapers. The trend includes Michael Bloomberg buying Businessweek, Laurene Powell Jobs investing in the Atlantic and Jeff Bezos buying and investing in the Washington Post. So why are…

This question occurred to me when I saw a suggestion that the mooted, not yet launched, Apple magazine aggregating service will include newspaper content: Earlier this year, Apple got into the magazine business by buying a digital magazine distributor. Now it wants to add daily news to the mix. …

I follow a publishing mailing list that has this week been having a big gripe about ebooks. The main sub-gripes seem to be: (1) The market has stalled (no sales growth except in the self-published field) and the big publishers have lost interest. (2) Amazon dominates the space and it…

I have borrowed the title for this blog from the sub-title of a great book When We Are No More by Abby Smith Rumsey. And the subtitle is the critical part of her book’s message. Because we are entering an age of digital culture and digital society, the digital archives…