“More than 200 companies have joined a boycott of (Glenn) Beck’s program,” reports the Washington Post. “A handful of advertisers, such as (IPhone owner) Apple, have abandoned Fox altogether.”

We can only assume this Apple “boycott” was prompted by what CBS’s Katie Couric (quoting the Fox commentator’s critics) describes as Beck’s “inflammatory, unfair, despicable, hateful rhetoric.”

This same hyper-sensitive-to-hate-speech Apple, by the way, has just launched an IPhone application featuring Che Guevara’s quotes.  Yes!  “Now you can carry around Che Guevara’s quotes on your IPhone!”

Alas, many of us, though not customers of this unquestionably hip product, suspect that most of Che Guevara’s hippest quotes are missing from this hippest of IPhone apps. Among those we fear were overlooked by the hyper-sensitive-to-hate-speech, Apple are: (more…)

Apple has announced its new iPad tablet computer, marking the dawn of a new kind of device that bridges the gap between phone and laptop. Last November I wrote about the possibilities of this device for the print world over at Big Hollywood. In short, the potential is there to revolutionize the way we read print, from newspapers, books, magazines and comics?

The cost of paper, shipping and distribution are a problem for publishers. So is making their products easily available to consumers. Stores only have limited space and money to carry books. The internet has been a great boon in that regard in terms of sales, but reading on a computer screen can be an unappealing prospect to most people. The iPad is designed to change all that: a hand-held, touch-screen device that is high resolution and extremely light (about a pound and 1/2). It’s not only lighter than a book, you can carry hundreds of books and magazines in it and read them anywhere you’d take a book.

The print business is salivating over this device, seeing it as a platform that will do for print that iTunes did for music. Except iTunes has sold a lot of songs, but it has also impacted the music business in ways few could have foreseen. Industry insiders think it destroyed the album as people started buying songs separately.  Moving their content to digital it could have similar effects on publishers and the press, but the fact is, times are changing and print has gotten very expensive. (more…)