Well, it's not that simple. From what I remember reading of this (which, granted, was at least five years ago, so perhaps...HOPEFULLY...some of this has changed), the recording industry is set up to shaft recording artists upon entry.

Let me put it this way - I am an agented author. So, when I deal with the publishers, I have an agent on my side who will play hardball if she sees the need. My agent works for me - she gets a cut of what I receive, so it is in her best interest to ensure that I get the best possible deal. This is how it is supposed to work.

In the recording industry (around five years ago, and hopefully not today) many of the lawyers involved in the contract negotiation on the artist side are in cahoots with the labels. So, a bunch of stuff that should get caught and removed from the contract isn't. And, there's a trick that often gets used where the initial offer is a contract in disguise - a "letter of understanding" - locking in the recording artist before a proper negotiation can even take place.

To cut a long story short (I know, too late), it's not a situation of read the contract offer, negotiate to take out the bad stuff, and walk away from it if the other side isn't reasonable. It's often receive the offer, take it to an entertainment lawyer who is secretly working against your interests, and later find out that you've agreed to terms that leave you going platinum while making less than you would if you were working at a Macdonald's.

(At least, that's how it was when I was reading about it around five years ago.)

Okay - somebody has to defend the arts degrees here, and I guess I'll do it. A lot of people are looking at this in terms of technology work (hardly surprising, as this is a technology site), but a liberal arts degree is far from useless.

Take me, for example. I just finished a Master of Arts in War Studies with a history concentration. Prior to that, I got a B.A. in English literature, and prior to that, a B.A. in Medieval Studies. Where did this lead me? Contract defence research. The work I do will hopefully help my country (Canada) avoid a debacle like the United States had in Iraq between 2003-2005. No new graduate with a B.Sc. could do what I do.

Will a B.A. immediately lead to a job paying $80,000 per year? Probably not. But, it does tell an employer three very important things: you can finish what you start, you can work under pressure (depending on the reputation of the school), and you can think critically. All of these are attributes that are looked for in the senior positions. So, you may be making $30,000, or possibly less, right out the door, but you will be on the path to a much better senior position as you get more experience.

And, if you want to get ahead outside of the technology field, the liberal arts are important. Want to work in politics? A liberal arts degree will take you farther. Same with defence research, or working in developing countries. Or social work.

So, a liberal arts degree is not useless. It just doesn't lead into a technology field right after graduation.

Okay, yes, that changes matters. The way you initially described it, it sounded like time tables and sources of delays were written into the fine print, and the company had over-booked itself.

Many apologies - I see your point now.

I'm sorry, but I can't really side with the pool company here, and I'm a small business owner.

In the initial negotiations, it is up to the contractor to set reasonable expectations and timeframes. If there's a good possibility that the pool won't be ready when the customer wants it, this must be made clear up-front.

If you have told your customer that you can have the pool installed by July 4th and you do not deliver on that, it is your fault. If you have over-extended yourself by taking on too many contracts for the season, that is your fault. Whether the customer can read his or her contract with you is irrelevant.

If you have created an expectation with your customer that you then cannot meet, you have earned a bad review. The fault does not lie with the customer.

Are you referring to the frame rate or the 3D looking less real?

I'm sorry, but I doubt that frame rate is the problem here. A TV signal broadcasts at just under 30 fps (29 point-something), and a movie is shown at 24 fps. It's brought up to 60 fps (or 60 Hz) by doubling up frames.

So, as long as you've got at least 30 fps, the frame rate will look right.

Wow - that reminds me of what got me starting my own publishing company. A book that my collaborator and I had worked for some time on ended up in contract negotiation hell. The contract added the publisher's personal name to the copyright in the first clause, and went downhill from there. Finally, I was hungering to get my own company started anyway, so I decided to publish the book myself, and Legacy Books Press was born.

The good news is that all publishers are not like that. But, unfortunately, some are. Sometimes, knowing when to say "no" to a bad contract is half the battle.

I'm sorry, but we're not talking about food, or a necessity like running clean water. This is entertainment - there is no requirement for you to obtain it, and if a DVD or blu-ray isn't available in your region, then the mature thing to do is to have some perspective and do without until it becomes available. To skip "I guess I'll have to wait until it's out" and go directly to "it's time to pirate" is like going to a furniture store, finding that they don't have the chair you want, and then coming to the conclusion that you have no other choice than to break into their warehouse.

Now, that said, has it ever occurred to you to just write to the studio and ask them to release the movies you want on DVD/BD in your region?

The reason I ask that is because studios ARE responsive to requests like that. Every time they get letter asking "could you please release X on home video," they don't assume that it's just one person wanting to buy it. They assume that behind that one person writing there are anywhere from ten to hundreds of people - perhaps even thousands - who want the same thing but are too shy to ask for it. If they get enough requests for a title, then it establishes the presence of a market for that title. And since blu-ray releases of older movies, no matter how successful they were originally, tend to sell very poorly compared to new releases (which is one of the reasons that the first three Indiana Jones movies are taking so long to get to blu-ray), a few letters asking for that title can go a long way towards getting that movie released.

So, rather than hitting the Pirate Bay while declaring that you have no other choice, perhaps you should write a letter to the studio, or get an online petition going. Demonstrate that there is a market for the movies you want on blu-ray. Not only are you likely to have an impact, but you'll also be helping all those other people who want the movie too, but are too shy to ask.

Amazon is problematic, in fact, because among other things, they don't release their actual sales figures. This means that their claims are very difficult, if not impossible to verify. According to the trade book publishers themselves, as of October 2010, e-book sales represented 8.7% of their net for 2010 (up from 3.31% in 2009 - the full figures for 2010 aren't out yet, though).

As far as what is going on in the actual e-book market vs. the print book market, it is important to note that while the product is books, the mediums are different, and there is every sign that the markets are different too (for example, e-book sales figures are not impacted by any of the peaks and valleys in the printed book market). I've been tracking these markets for a while using the data from the publishers (you can find it at publishers.org), which strike me as far more reliable than Amazon, as they actually give you numbers to crunch. Everything I've seen suggests that e-books are a brand new and growing market, with very little overlap with the printed book market. Yes, the e-book market is growing, but at the same time, it is NOT cannibalizing the print book market (with the notable exception of tech manuals and a large part of the reference market, where an e-book version is far more useful due to the ability to do word searches).

This makes a great deal of sense. The e-book is an inherently technological product, while the printed book is not. The printed book is a self-contained and simple object, while the e-book requires a technological reading device. And, it would not surprise me in the slightest if it turned out that the e-book market has its links and associations with cell phones and the cell phone app market. In fact, I would credit the increased adoption of cell phones by the public with raising the e-book market up.

Now, this leads to two main questions. Question #1 is how far up can the e-book market go? If the printed book market is only tangentially related to the e-book market at best, then the printed book market tells us very little about what is likely to happen to e-books. They could reach very high, or they could be about to plateau.

Question #2 is how badly will the e-book market be impacted by the piracy wave? This is also a question of longevity - if the e-books are representing less than 10% of trade sales, then publishers are not likely to fight to keep the market alive if piracy makes major in-roads. They are more likely to cut their losses and leave the market. So, if the piracy wave is too great, the e-book market may not survive the next five years.

(And, I would point out, a lot of major console game production companies started off in the PC game market - when the piracy became endemic in the PC game market, they voted with their feet. So, such a move by publishers would not be unprecedented.)

And, I don't have any answers to these questions. I wish I did - I'm trying to formulate an e-book strategy for my own little publishing company. Among other things, I can't find any figures for the cell phone app market, to see if they do track with the e-book market, and give a sense of what will happen next.

But, no matter what, it is vitally important for people to keep in mind that the e-book market is not necessarily part of the book market, and therefore e-book sales from online retailers tells us a great deal about e-books, but relatively little about print books.

Actually, that's what Amazon wants you to believe about it. The reality was somewhat different.

The thing you have to understand is that for a major publisher, the actual production cost of a book is a very minor cost. Most of the cost of getting that book ready is editing, typesetting (even for an e-book), cover design (also even for an e-book) and marketing. And, e-books represent around 10% of trade fiction sales, give or take, so they bring in less money overall.

What Amazon was doing was trying to force publishers into a contract wherein they had to offer Amazon the lowest list price, and lock them into an agreement where nobody (including the publisher's own website) could sell the e-books at a lower price than Amazon. And, to make matters worse, Amazon was trying to monopolize this market while offering the e-books at loss, essentially forcing everybody with a representative price (one that would actually put the e-books into the black) out of the market.

The publishers rebelled, and Amazon backed down.

But, Amazon was never doing it to protect consumers from the greedy publishers. Amazon was doing it to knock its competition out of business while ensuring that publishers couldn't do a thing about it.

If this is the future of academic journal publishing, I'll take the past, please. I don't mind accessibility, and I don't mind creative commons, but I do mind it when the journal reaches a point of being a parasite. I'm talking about author fees.

As far as I know, most journals pay for their publications via subscriptions from university libraries. They don't do it using a vanity press model, where they take money from the authors for publication. Both of the online journals mentioned here - PLoS and Scientific Reports, are charging scientists over a thousand dollars for publication.

I'm sorry, but speaking as an author, a researcher (who has co-written a peer reviewed journal article waiting for publication in a Classics journal), and a publisher, this is just wrong. It's taking advantage of academics who are desperate to publish in a "publish or perish" environment, and relieving them of their money. And, because the journal article authors are paying for publication, it will likely carry a taint that may undermine the legitimacy of any peer review the article passed.

Frankly, if this sort of parasitic business model is the projected future of academic publishing, I think it's best if it's skipped. The old model was better.

Actually, that was more the e-book publisher's response to Amazon. Amazon spun the dispute as the publishers wanting to be able to raise prices and gouge customers, but that wasn't it at all. Amazon was trying to create the same poison pill for other e-book retailers as they are right now with their app store. Now, e-books may be more expensive as a result, but Amazon is not in a position to shut down their competitors, and that is a net win for everybody.

The contract you sign with Amazon. If you did what you've just suggested, they'd hammer you for breach of contract.

You're missing the point - the target of this policy is not the app developers. It's the other app stores. Amazon is forcing a situation where they can provide discounts of up to 80% off without taking a loss, while forcing other stores to deal with an artificially high MSRP, and throughout this Amazon will always be guaranteed to have the lowest price. In short, it is weaponizing the app developers to wipe out retail competition, and force other app stores out of the market.

I'm sorry, but I don't think that's it at all. Amazon isn't gambling that it will sell 3.5 times the volume to compete with Google's Android Marketplace - it's trying to force you to overprice your app to put Google's Android Marketplace out of business. As far as they're concerned, so long as the sales go through Amazon instead of somebody else, it's a win, and ensuring that you can offer it for far lower than anybody else can is one very effective way to make that happen.