We at ProfHacker like books. Apparently so do many of you. The New York Times ran an article earlier this week about the “Allure of the print book.” Esquire followed with “The Revenge of the Printed Book.” Newsweek, which ended print circulation last year in favor of pure digital circulation, has announced that it will resume hard copy in February 2014.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Prime Air this week that consumers may begin to receive their purchases via drone as early and June 2015. Not to be outdone, UPS announced that they too are working on entering the drone delivery market. The New York Times reports that Google is also getting into the robot game. Slate claims that the drone-delievery idea is “hot air,” perhaps akin to those jetpacks we were promised in my youth . . . In a separate article, Slate takes a rather different tack by claiming, “Birds will attack delivery drones.”
We also love libraries: big libraries and small libraries, old libraries and new libraries, university or college libraries and public libraries, central libraries and branch libraries . . . I could go on, but you get the idea. It turns out that we aren’t alone in our love. The Atlantic features “The Evolution of the College Library.” The photo gallery focuses more on European than American libraries, but it does include a stunning image of one of my favorites: the Beinecke library of Yale University, which will undergo a major renovation in 2015.
In other media news, ars technica examines Spotify’s payment protocols for its artists. Business Insider ran a similar article “Here Is The Fantastically Tiny Amount Of Money Artists Get When Spotify Plays Their Songs.” The latter has since been reprinted in Slate.
In the world of social media, Twitter announced the appointment of Marjorie Scardino, its first female board member. Aljazeera America reported that 2 million passwords have been stolen and made public (h/t to ProfHacker colleague Adeline Koh for this story). Sites affected include Google, Facebook, ADP, and Yahoo!.
On a more somber note, The New York Times and other major media outlets reported on Thursday evening that the former President of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nelson Mandela has passed away at the age of 95. The Times also posted a piece on various tributes to Mandela around the world.
Our video of the week is titled, “Because Who is Perfect? Get Closer” and comes from Pro Infirmis, a German organization that has reconfigured a series of mannequins to match disabled bodies.
[Creative Commons licensed image by Flickr user Dan Coulter].