Seth Godin reports that the Apple store is refusing to carry his new book:

I just found out that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) store…

We’re heading to a world where there are just a handful of influential bookstores (Amazon, Apple, Nook…) and one by one, the principles of open access are disappearing. Apple, apparently, won’t carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.

Seth is properly nervous about imposing demands on private companies about what they will or will not carry. But he finds what I think is the right argument in this case. first, the online marketplace for books simply as a matter of fact is dominated by three players: Apple, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. This dominance imposes particular responsibilities for keeping such a crucial enabler of our culture open. Second, the vertical integration of this market — the dominate sellers of ebook hardware are also the dominant sellers of ebooks — imposes a similar cultural obligation.

Seth concludes:

I think that Amazon and Apple and B&N need to take a deep breath and make a decision on principle: what’s inside the book shouldn’t be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace. If it’s legal, they ought to let people read it if they choose to.

(PS: It is genuinely irrelevant that the example of a book Seth was linking to is Too Big to Know. Although it pleases me to be linked to by Seth :)

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Sebastian Benthall has a fervent post about the need for open networks in science, inspired by an awesome talk by the awesome Victoria Stodden.

Along the way, he offers a correction (or extension, perhaps) of a point that I make in 2b2k: the next Darwin is likely to develop her work within an open network that add values to her work. In some real sense the knowledge lives in that network. Sebastian responds:

He’s right, except maybe for one thing, which is that this digital dialectic (or pluralectic) implies that “the next Darwin” isn’t just one dude, Darwin, with his own ‘-ism’ and pernicious Social adherents. Rather, it means that the next great theory of the origin of species is going to be built by a massive collaborative effort in which lots of people will take an active part. The historical record will show their contributions not just with the clumsy granularity of conference publications and citations, but with minute granularity of thousands of traced conversations. The theory itself will probably be too complicated for any one person to understand, but that’s OK, because it will be well architected and there will be plenty of domain experts to go to if anyone has problems with any particular part of it. And it will be growing all the time and maybe competing with a few other theories.

I love the point.

(Nit: I want to clarify, however, that I wasn’t saying that this next Darwin’s web would consist only of “pernicious Social adherents.” Throughout 2b2k I try to make the point that networked knowledge has value mainly because it includes difference and disagreement. When it does not, it fulfills the nightmare of the echo chamber.)

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EconTalk has posted an hour interview with me by Russ Roberts about some of the topics in Too Big to Know that don’t come up so often.

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Buy Propecia Online

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Valids Krebs put together a map of the “people who bought this also bought that” neighborhood at Amazon for Too Big to Know:

Click to enlarge

It’s interesting to me to see the direct links to works on the same topic (e.g., Reinventing Discovery), some indirect links to works on closely related topics (e.g., The Filter Bubble), and some direct links to topics within the more general field of “about the Internet” (Consent of the Networked, Public Parts). I have no conclusions to offer. Just interest.

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The Atlantic has crystal clear photos juxtaposing Japan after the earthquake and a year later.

Business Insider has a set of satellite photos of slums around the world.

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Ethan Zuckerman asks a simple question — is there a correlation between how many outside news sources the people in a country consult and whether those people’s language is spoken mainly in their own country? — and leads us through the quantifiable maze looking for an answer.

Ethan defines “linguistic isolation” as “how well does the dominant language of your nation affect your ability to engage with information produced in other countries?” Using data from Worldmapper, and after some careful discussion of the limitations of that data (e.g., he only considers first languages, which obviously skews results for countries where many residents speak a second language, especially since one would expect (note: I am data-free!) that in many linguistically isolated countries there is a premium on learning a second, more globally popular language), he concludes:

…looking at data from 31 countries, there’s some correlation (R2=0.38) between linguistic isolation and low international readership. But there are exceptions – Argentina and Chile both have very low isolation scores, but they don’t read a lot of Mexican or Spanish news… or even each other’s news. South Africans show high linguistic isolation (languages like Zulu and Afrikaans aren’t widely spoken outside South Africa), but read a lot of international media in English, though it’s a minority language. I’m looking forward to examining a larger set of media consumption data and trying this linguistic isolation score alongside other factors, like total population (small nations might read larger nations’ news) and migrant population (the desire to read news from home.)

I’m not a quant (obviously), but I like watching people who are when they are asking fascinating questions, and when they teach as clearly as Ethan does.

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Surprisingly Free has posted its podcast interview with me, by Jerry Brito. Unsurprisingly, it’s free!

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I’m delighted to count Christopher Lydon as a friend, albeit one I don’t see often enough. He has traveled the road, as a reporter for the NY Times, as an esteemed (and controversial) talk show host on NPR, and as one of the first adventurers in the world hybrid radio and Web.

Chris and I talked last week. Here are the liners notes, so to speak, and here’s the recording.

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After a couple of years, I’ve actually published another issue of my old ‘zine. Why so long between issues? Basically, blogging ate my zine.

Here’s the table of contents. The main article is, unsurprisingly, the first one:

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