Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 27th, ’24

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April 27th, 2024















F.C.C. Votes to Restore Net Neutrality Rules

Commissioners voted along party lines to revive the rules that declare broadband as a utility-like service that could be regulated like phones and water.
Cecilia Kang

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to restore regulations that expand government oversight of broadband providers and aim to protect consumer access to the internet, a move that will reignite a long-running battle over the open internet.

Known as net neutrality, the regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration and are aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube. The rules were repealed under President Donald J. Trump, and have proved to be a contentious partisan issue over the years while pitting tech giants against broadband providers.

In a 3-to-2 vote along party lines, the five-member commission appointed by President Biden revived the rules that declare broadband a utility-like service regulated like phones and water. The rules also give the F.C.C. the ability to demand broadband providers report and respond to outages, as well as expand the agency’s oversight of the providers’ security issues.

Jessica Rosenworcel, the chairwoman of the F.C.C. and a Democrat, said the rules reflected the importance of high-speed internet as the main mode of communications for many Americans.

“Every consumer deserves internet access that is fast, open and fair,” Ms. Rosenworcel said. “This is common sense.”

Broadband providers are expected to sue to try to overturn the reinstated rules.

“This is a nonissue for broadband consumers, who have enjoyed an open internet for decades,” said Jonathan Spalter, the president of a broadband lobbying group, USTelecom. The organization said it would “pursue all available options, including in the courts.”

In a letter sent to Ms. Rosenworcel this week, dozens of leading Republican lawmakers warned that regulating broadband providers like a utility would harm the growth of the telecommunications industry.

The core purpose of the regulations is to prevent internet service providers from controlling the quality of consumers’ experience when they visit websites and use services online. When the rules were established, Google, Netflix and other online services warned that broadband providers had the incentive to slow down or block access to their services. Consumer and free speech groups supported this view.

There have been few examples of blocking or slowing of sites, which proponents of net neutrality say is largely because of fear that the companies would invite scrutiny if they did so. And opponents say the rules could lead to more and unnecessary government oversight of the industry.

“The internet in America has thrived in the absence of 1930s command-and-control regulation by the government,” said Brendan Carr, a Republican commissioner.

A decade ago, the potential new regulations prompted raucous demonstrations. At the time, telecom companies were losing business to online streaming services. Sites like Facebook, Google and Amazon feared they would be forced to pay telecom companies for better delivery of their services.

During the Trump administration, the F.C.C. rolled back net neutrality. Republican lawmakers and F.C.C. commissioners have balked that the rules were unnecessary and government overreach.

Democrats have argued they are critical to consumer protection. In the vacuum of federal regulations, several states including California and Washington created their own net neutrality laws.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/t...-internet.html





Cindy Lee Might Be the Future of Music

The buzziest indie album of the moment is a folder of files you can only get from a janky Geocities website. Drake is dropping new music on something called Krakenfiles.com. Chris Black wonders if the post-streaming era will look like Web 1.0.
hris Black

Last week, a few of my trusted music sources on Twitter started whispering about a new album that was a must-listen but only available to stream on YouTube. You could also send a suggested donation (as a gift on PayPal) to receive CD-quality .wav files directly in your inbox. The Geocities website was ugly and quirky, decidedly lo-fi in a Web 1.0 way. The same week the album in question, Diamond Jubilee, by Cindy Lee, a 32-song left-of-center fever dream marathon that sounds like Velvet Underground, T. Rex, and VU, and the good Phil Spector projects combined with excellent production, synths, and feedback, received a score of 9.1 on Pitchfork, the first 9.0+ since 2020. A rock-and-roll album garnering this much attention without a record label or the support of digital-streaming platforms is unheard of. A small sect of people, presumably real music fans, were willing to pay real money to enjoy the music they love.

I like Diamond Jubilee and am happy to pay for music, but downloading files and loading them onto my iPhone feels archaic and time-consuming. Drake also “leaked” a diss song last week, firing at everyone: Kendrick Lamar, Rick Ross, The Weeknd, and J. Cole. The song was making its rounds in my group chats. When I finished lunch and went to listen, I realized the link my friend had provided was from Krakenfiles.com, a URL too good to make up. This response from Drake was hotly anticipated, and I am sure he has his reasons, but avoiding DSPs when they are your bread and butter is also an exciting choice. Visiting weird websites to listen to and download music feels crazy in 2024, a throwback to sitting in my parents’ basement on the Dell, manically downloading songs on Kazaa and Napster. I even saw a friend burn Diamond Jubilee onto CDR.

While all this was happening, Coachella weekend was taking place in Indio, California. Several stories have been written about slowing ticket sales and brands not heading to the desert this year. We reached the peak music festival long ago, and now there is something for everyone, no matter which niche tickles your fancy. But when things of this magnitude flail, it feels like a shift is coming.

Cindy Lee is the alter ego of former Women frontman Patrick Flegel, who expressed dim views of the streaming era in a 2023 interview. “I think everyone should take their music off streaming platforms. Not even strike, just take it off,” Flegel said. “They’re begging for a penny a play, and it’s pitiful.” In that same interview, Flegel acknowledged that the hardest part of putting out a project without the backing of streaming platforms or a traditional record label is “getting anybody to give a shit.”

“But where I’m at now, in my mind,” Flegel said, “you just need some regulars. Some people who’ve got your back, are into what you’re doing.”

Are there enough regulars out there to make it viable for other artists to pull a Cindy Lee? Do people want to own music, support artists they love, and go to shows that don’t come flanked by hard-seltzer-sponsored off-site parties and influencer photo shoots? Are we heading back to a simpler time? Are we curious again? Are we finally ready to discover music outside of TikTok?

I doubt it, but this is one of the first times I have really seen cracks in the façade. The days when I could go to my local Virgin Megastore on a Thursday at midnight to pick up the new releases on CD aren’t coming back, but maybe things will calm down and course correct a little bit. Streaming isn’t the best option. It is just the most convenient. If someone makes an effort to present their work differently, I think it should be discussed, whether it’s Cindy Lee or the biggest rapper in the world.
https://www.gq.com/story/pulling-wee...uture-of-music





WhatsApp to Revolutionise File Sharing; All Set to Introduce Offline Sharing Feature
Shriti Aniraj

WhatsApp is on the verge of revolutionising the way users share files, regardless of their internet connection status. Recent leaks have unveiled a groundbreaking feature in development, poised to enable seamless file sharing even when offline. This innovative functionality encompasses the exchange of photos, videos, music, and documents, marking a significant leap forward in WhatsApp's capabilities.

According to reports from WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is actively developing this feature to empower users with the ability to share various file types without reliance on an internet connection. Crucially, these shared files will benefit from encryption, ensuring robust protection against tampering or corruption.

Leaked screenshots from the latest WhatsApp beta for Android offer insights into the permissions required to facilitate this game-changing feature. Among these permissions is the capability to identify nearby devices compatible with offline file sharing. Leveraging standard system permissions on Android, this functionality enables the scanning of nearby devices via Bluetooth for local file exchange. Importantly, users will retain control, with the option to disable this access as desired.

In addition to device discovery, WhatsApp will seek permissions to access system files and the photo gallery on users' devices. Furthermore, location permission will be necessary to determine proximity to other devices available for connection. Despite these permissions, WhatsApp will uphold user privacy by masking phone numbers and encrypting shared files, ensuring the utmost security throughout the sharing process.

This forthcoming feature echoes the functionality of peer-to-peer file-sharing applications like ShareIT, which facilitated seamless file transfers between devices without the need for cellular or Wi-Fi connectivity. Given WhatsApp's status as a hub for diverse media and document sharing, this innovation promises to enhance convenience and security for users worldwide.

While WhatsApp has yet to announce an official rollout date for this feature, its current beta testing phase suggests an imminent release. With the potential to redefine file sharing dynamics, this feature represents a significant milestone for WhatsApp and its global user base.
https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news...e-verthp-feeds





A.I. Made These Movies Sharper. Critics Say It Ruined Them.

Machine-learning technologies are being used in film restoration for new home video releases. But some viewers strongly dislike the results.
Calum Marsh

In 1998, Geoff Burdick, an executive at James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, was hunched in front of a 12-inch monitor at a postproduction house, carefully preparing “Titanic” for release on LaserDisc and VHS. A state-of-the-art computer process had made it possible for Burdick and his team to scour the film frame by frame, removing tiny imperfections embedded in the original negative: little scratches, flakes of dirt, even water stains that smeared the image. The computer could erase these blemishes using a kind of copy-paste tool, concealing the defects with information from another frame.

Burdick, now a senior vice president at the company, told me that this process “seemed like freaking magic at the time.” And yet the results were not entirely well-received. “There were a lot of people who said that this was the most beautiful VHS they’d ever seen in their life, because we’d gotten rid of all that gobbledygook,” he recalled. “But there were a lot of folks who said, ‘This is not right! You’ve removed all of this stuff! If the negative is scratched, then we should see that scratch.’ People were really hard-core about it.”

In the decades since, home video formats have reached higher and higher resolutions, with VHS and LaserDisc giving way to DVD and Blu-ray, and eventually to ultra high-definition 4K discs, known as Ultra HD Blu-rays. As the picture quality has improved, restoration tools have evolved with them, making it easier than ever for filmmakers to fine-tune their work using computers. Several of Cameron’s films, including “The Abyss,” “True Lies” and “Aliens,” were recently released on Ultra HD Blu-ray in newly restored versions that are clearer and sharper than ever before — the product of painstaking attention from Lightstorm and Cameron himself. “I think they look the best they’ve ever looked,” Burdick said.

But as with the old “Titanic” home video, these restorations have proved controversial, with many viewers objecting strenuously to their pristine new look. What has caught the particular ire of critics is the fact that these versions have been restored, in part, using artificial intelligence. Park Road Post Production, the New Zealand company owned by the filmmaker Peter Jackson, helped clean up Cameron’s films using some of the same proprietary machine-learning software used on Jackson’s documentaries “The Beatles: Get Back” and “They Shall Not Grow Old.” The images in Cameron’s classic blockbusters were refined in a way that many felt looked strange and unnatural.

The level of detail is eye-popping. Water looks crystalline; colors are bright and vivid, while blacks are deep and inky. Some surfaces, however, do look a little glossy, with a buffed sheen that appears almost lacquered. It can be hard to pinpoint what is changed. But there does seem to be a difference, and depending on the viewer, it can feel slightly uncanny.

“It just looks weird, in ways that I have difficulty describing,” the journalist Chris Person said of these releases. “It’s plasticine, smooth, embossed at the edges. Skin texture doesn’t look correct. It all looks a little unreal.”

Person is among a number of viewers who are skeptical of the need to use A.I. to “enhance” the appearance of films that seemed to look fine to begin with. Although he said that there were “legitimate use cases” for A.I. in restoration, such as when a film’s original negative has been lost or badly damaged, he suspected that with something like “True Lies,” they were “using it just because they can.”

The recent Cameron releases, and particularly “True Lies,” have become the subject of intense scrutiny and fervent debate online. Home video reviewers have described it as an overly sanitized presentation, with one faulting its “routinely odd-looking images” and another arguing that it appears “almost artificial.” Web forums are teeming with complaints, often vicious, while social media posts criticizing it have spread widely.

Dan Best, the general manager at Park Road Post, acknowledged the debate around remastering movies. “The thing is, technology is changing,” he added. “People are viewing things at a lot higher resolutions at the moment. Therefore, a lot of recent films are being enhanced for these new viewing platforms.” Traditional home video releases were adequate for the days of tube TVs and 1080p video, in other words. But in the era of OLED screens and 4K smart TVs, restorations need a little more to meet increasingly high standards.

Burdick, who has been dealing with this kind of criticism since the “Titanic” days, seemed resigned to the fact that “you can’t please everybody at the end of the day,” though he accepted that the response to these Ultra HD Blu-rays was especially heated. The dissenters, he argued, were mainly just disappointed that “Aliens,” “True Lies” and “The Abyss” no longer look like they did in the VHS or DVD eras.

“People love these movies, which I think is great,” he said. “And they take that love to heart. So when the movie suddenly doesn’t look like they remember it looking, or the way they think they remember it looking, or it just doesn’t look the way they think it should, they get upset. What can you do?”

It doesn’t help that there is a stigma around the technology: Dissenters not only bristle at the appearance of these restorations — they are also unhappy that it is A.I. being used to make them appear that way.

But, Burdick said, that disapproval is based partly on misconception: “People hear, ‘Oh, they’re using A.I.,’ and they’re thinking about pirate ships and the cup of coffee,” — a reference to a recent viral video of a miniature ship sailing in a coffee mug, all generated with A.I. — “and they’re like, ‘What are you doing to it?’ But nobody is doing that to these movies,” he explained. “It’s not the same A.I., conceptually. It’s more like, this piece of negative looks kind of cruddy, and we can use some software to improve it, carefully.”

Best, at Park Road, said that this kind of A.I. upscaling was “definitely not the same” as the kind of generative A.I. used in apps like Midjourney or ChatGPT. Generative A.I. is a type of machine learning model that creates information, including images and videos, from users’ prompts. A.I. upscaling is subtler and less intrusive, using machine learning to refine an image without inventing new material from scratch. Generative A.I. could, say, add more aliens to “Aliens.” A.I. upscaling just adds more pixels, polishing the pre-existing images.

Eric Yang, the founder of the A.I. upscaling company Topaz Labs, said that one of the main differences between A.I. upscaling and generative A.I. was fidelity to the original source: With upscaling, “the enhancement that you get does not measurably change the meaning or the content of the image.” Nevertheless, he said that misunderstandings about the technology have given the whole enterprise a certain ignominy.

“People try not to talk about it,” he said. “Nobody likes to say that their film was A.I. upscaled or that a certain release had A.I. applied to it.”

The reluctance to admit to using A.I. is understandable given some recent controversies. In 2021, the filmmaker Morgan Neville came under fire when it was revealed that his documentary “Roadrunner” used A.I. software to create a deepfaked version of Anthony Bourdain’s voice for narration; last month, the horror film “Late Night with the Devil” was criticized for using A.I.-generated imagery, with some critics going so far as to call for the film’s boycott.

Although “Get Back” and “They Shall Not Grow Old,” which involved footage from World War I, made extensive use of the same A.I. processes, they did not receive as much criticism. That’s partly because of the condition of the source material: Both films took damaged archival images and appeared to reverse the deterioration, and in one case, to also colorize it. By contrast, the recent Cameron restorations were based on new 4K scans of the original negative, none of which needed extensive repair of that kind.

“It’s not a question of the negative being damaged,” Burdick conceded. “But back on the set, maybe you picked the shot that had the most spectacular performance, but the focus puller was a bit off, so it’s a bit soft. There could be a million reasons why it’s not perfect. So now there’s an opportunity to just go in and improve it.” The A.I. can artificially refocus an out-of-focus image, as well as make other creative tweaks. “You don’t want to crank the knob all the way because then it’ll look like garbage,” Burdick said. “But if we can make it look a little better, we might as well.”

For viewers like Person, the problem is what those minor enhancements entail: That uncanny smoothness, though perhaps more in focus, can look oddly fake. “I don’t want to sound anal, but it really is egregious,” Person said. “It’s the same thing as TV motion smoothing — they say it’s better, so you feel like you’re the one person cursed with vision who can see that it looks bad.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/m...true-lies.html





Meet QDEL, the Backlight-Less Display Tech that could Replace OLED in Premium TVs

Interested in gadgets with premium displays? QDEL should be on your radar.
Scharon Harding

What comes after OLED?

With OLED-equipped TVs, monitors, and other gadgets slowly becoming more readily available at lower prices, attention is turning to what the next landmark consumer display tech will be.

Micro LED often features in such discussions, but the tech is not expected to start hitting consumer devices until the 2030s. Display makers are also playing with other futuristic ideas, like transparent and foldable screens. But when it comes to technology that could seriously address top user concerns—like image quality, price, and longevity—quantum dots seem the most pertinent at the moment.

Quantum dots are already moving in the premium display category, particularly through QD-OLED TVs and monitors. The next step could be QDEL, short for "quantum dot electroluminescent," also known as NanoLED, screens. Not to be confused with the QLED (quantum light emitting diode) tech already available in TVs, QDEL displays don't have a backlight. Instead, the quantum dots are the light source. The expected result is displays with wider color spaces than today's QD-OLEDs (quantum dot OLEDs) that are also brighter, more affordable, and resistant to burn-in.

It seems like QDEL is being eyed as one of the most potentially influential developments for consumer displays over the next two years.

If you’re into high-end display tech, QDEL should be on your radar.

What is QDEL?

You may know QDEL as NanoLED because that's what Nanosys, a quantum dot supplier developing the technology, calls it. QDEL has gone by other names, such as QLED—before Samsung claimed that acronym for LCD-LED TVs that use quantum dots. You may also see QDEL referred to as QD-EL, QD-LED, or EL-QD. As the alphabet soup suggests, there are still some things to finalize with this tech. This article will mostly use the term QDEL, with occasional references to NanoLED.

If none of those names sound familiar, it's probably because you can't buy any QDEL products yet. Suppliers suggest that could change in the next few years; Nanosys is targeting 2026 for commercial availability.

That timeline seems pretty ambitious, though, considering the limited number of prototypes we've seen and the limitations still facing QDEL (more on that below). But even if we don't see QDEL for a while, there are reasons to keep an eye on the tech.

David Hsieh, senior research director for displays at research firm Omdia, told me via email that when it comes to consumer gadgets, he expects QDEL will most impact TVs, PC displays, and the automotive industry. If commercialized and mass-produced, QDEL can have a cost-to-performance ratio better than that of OLED, but it would still struggle to compete with LCD-LED on a cost basis.

A 2023 whitepaper (PDF) from Nanosys and manufacturing partner Sharp Display describes an inkjet printing manufacturing process that is applicable to QDEL monitors and TVs. The photolithography process is reportedly harder because quantum dots get damaged in the process, but it can expand QDEL applications to include tablets, laptops, smartphones, wearables, and AR/VR products. Jeff Yurek, Nanosys' VP of marketing, confirmed to me via email that Nanosys expects to see QDEL products made with photolithography come to market first.

The backlight-free wonder

Today's OLED screens use OLED material as their light source, with QD-OLED specifically applying quantum dots to convert the light into color. In QLED, the light source is a white backlight; QDEL displays apply electricity directly to quantum dots, which then generate light.

QDEL uses a layer of quantum dots sandwiched between an anode and cathode to facilitates the flow of electricity into the quantum dots.

QDEL displays have pixels made of a red quantum dot subpixel, green quantum dot subpixel, and—differing from today's QLED and QD-OLED displays—blue quantum dot subpixel. QDEL displays use the same quantum dot cores that QD-OLED and QLED products use, Nanosys' Yurek told me, adding, "The functionalization of the outer layer of the [quantum dots] needs to be changed to make it compatible with each display architecture, but the cores that do the heavy lifting are pretty much the same across all of these."

Because QDEL pixels make their own light and can therefore turn off completely, QDEL displays can deliver the same deep blacks and rich contrast that made OLED popular. But with the use of direct-view quantum dots, stakeholders are claiming the potential for wider color gamuts than we've seen in consumer displays before. With fewer layers and parts, there are also implications for QDEL product pricing, longevity, and even thinness.

QDEL in action

You can't buy anything with a QDEL screen right now, but companies have demonstrated prototypes over the past few years. The latest update on the anticipated technology came during the CES trade show in January, when Sharp Display demoed two prototypes to a small number of attendees. One screen was 12.3 inches and 1920×720. The other prototype represented the first time we've seen QDEL scaled to a size that would be appropriate for products like monitors. However, we don't know the resolution of that 30-inch prototype.

One of the greatest advancements of these recent prototypes compared to previously demoed QDEL examples is that they were manufactured at atmospheric pressure rather than requiring a vacuum chamber. As CNET reported, this is "a big step toward cost-effective manufacturing."

QDEL advantages

The fact that quantum dots are already being successfully applied to LCD-LED and OLED screens is encouraging for future QDEL products. QDEL stakeholders claim that the tech could bring efficiencies like lower power consumption and higher brightness than OLED. (Research using a prototype device has recorded quantum dot light-emitting diodes reaching 614,000 nits. Of course, those aren't the type of results you should expect to see in a real-life consumer product.)

Because of these expected benefits, some display enthusiasts predict that QDEL will one day replace OLED and other premium display panel technologies for high-end consumer devices.

There's also hope that QDEL could eventually last longer than OLED, especially since QDEL doesn't rely on organic materials that can cause burn-in. Currently, though, researchers are still working on ensuring that blue and green quantum dot materials can last long enough to make a viable consumer gadget without using cadmium. As it stands, QDEL displays would become noticeably dimmer more quickly than today's OLED displays.

But optimists believe QDEL display lifetimes could one day be on par with LCD-LEDs and outlast OLEDs. Nanosys believes blue quantum dot materials can be developed to last longer than blue OLEDs due to challenges in achieving high efficiency and a long lifetime with blue OLED "at the correct wavelength or color," Yurek explained.

He continued:

Short wavelength light like blue is high-energy... The energy required to produce the deep, short-wavelength blue required by video standards like DCI-P3 is high enough to damage the material used to make the light. This is one of the key reasons that blue OLED lifetimes are shorter than the other colors.

Still, quantum dot emission layer lifetime is perhaps the main bottleneck in QDEL commercialization, Hsieh said, adding:

Cadmium-free blue QDs' lifetimes have historically been substantially too short to make commercially viable displays. Nanosys-reported data in 2021 was around 10,000 hours, at least two magnitudes (100x) less than minimally required. However, QD [emission layer] material lifetimes have been improving rapidly in recent years and some leading companies will announce 'breakthrough” results soon.

Yurek said that there should be announcements on related developments at the SID Display Week conference in May.

What about Micro LED?

Micro LED has many of the benefits of OLED, including individually emissive pixels for theoretically infinite contrast. And like QDEL, Micro LED shouldn't be as susceptible to burn-in as OLED and can get brighter than OLED.

Micro LED is kind of here today. If you have six figures to spend on a TV, you can get a huge Micro LED set from the likes of Samsung or C Seed. Manufacturing challenges in scaling the tech down to common TV sizes in a reliable, affordable fashion have made it unattainable for most, though.

Yurek said that it should eventually be possible to manufacture QDEL cheaper than Micro LED, as well as OLEDs and LCD-LEDs. But until we see this in action, we'll have to take that with a grain of salt.

QDEL is purportedly manufacturable using the same machines and facilities currently used to make LED displays. Additionally, while QDEL and Micro LED both rely on crystalline inorganic semiconductor materials, those materials are processed differently when making a QDEL versus a Micro LED display, with the latter featuring distinct challenges.

We're decently far from knowing what image quality will look like in actual QDEL products and how much tech brands will end up investing to bring QDEL to favorable products. But display experts I spoke with are expecting similar image quality to Micro LEDs, plus more colors. According to Eric Virey, principal displays analyst at Yole Intelligence, QDEL should also bring enhanced "color purity" compared to OLED.

Both Micro LED and QDEL consumer products should be brighter than OLEDs, but Virey thinks the brightness advantage will ultimately go to Micro LED products since they "can be driven very hard without damaging them."

Some suspect QDEL might be more immediately impactful than Micro LED because of the delays that Micro LED has encountered in seeing adoption in a mainstream product. For example, in March, Mark Gurman cited anonymous sources in Bloomberg saying that Apple had given up on making an Apple Watch and potentially other gadgets with Micro LED due to price and complexity. This was after investing years and what Virey estimated was billions into the effort. Gurman's report said that Apple would continue relying on OLED for its smartwatches and would potentially look into new partners for going down the Micro LED road again.

By contrast, though, Samsung in September reiterated its focus on Micro LED as the future of premium TVs.

QDEL and Micro LED could coexist alongside OLED

It's feasible that after some years, QDEL, Micro LED, and OLED will all be readily available. In this scenario, Yole's Virey sees all three being potentially competitive for laptops and tablets. QDEL could beat out OLED for premium TVs, as could Micro LED if costs ever came down, Virey said, adding that TVs are probably the "priority target" for QDEL applications. But potential advancements to OLED, like those around brightness or burn-in risk, could improve the tech's competitiveness in consumer devices.

Virey thinks QDEL will have a somewhat easier path to delivering its expected image quality benefits to consumer displays at a reasonable cost than Micro LED. He expects an exciting, tight race "over the next couple of years," though.

OLED should continue to dominate smartphones, due to the need for high pixel density, which would be a challenge to achieve with QDEL because of its printing process, according to Virey. He added that this process is "good enough for TVs, possibly laptops and tablets, but it’s challenging to improve it to smartphone levels." Smartphones are "by far the most difficult application" for Micro LED due to cost restrictions, Virey said.

Interestingly, when the dust clears, Yurek thinks QDEL will be considered the new king of premium displays:

I also expect both Micro LED and NanoLED to be positioned as more premium than OLED, given higher potential brightness and durability. All three technologies deliver great experiences, though. So manufacturing and cost will be the key differences. NanoLED promises to be easier to make than either OLED or MicroLED. This is why I think NanoLED will be the ultimate display technology in the long term.

Omdia's Hsieh is less confident about shoppers having both Micro LED and QDEL as options for premium displays. "At this stage, it is still hard to say if Micro LED and QDEL will coexist or not. It will have to be justified by QDEL’s production scale and cost after it enters the commercialization stage... by 2025 to 2026," he said.

QDEL devices may be easier to make than Micro LED ones

To make Micro LED displays, Micro LED chips are grown epitaxially on semiconductor wafers. Through a pick-and-place process, thousands of Micro LED chips are transferred to a substrate. Doing this in a way that's reliable, fast, and comparably priced to the manufacturing processes of other display types has proven challenging, and these obstacles have limited Micro LED availability for years.

QDEL displays, meanwhile, could be made using the same photolithography process that facilities already use for making various electronic devices and flat-panel displays, including LCD-LEDs. That also means it should be simple enough to make QDEL displays that scale up to the largest consumer TVs available today.

Yurek explained:

QDs [quantum dots] for NanoLED are solution-processed. Being able to produce semiconductors at huge scale in chemical processing equipment enables us to fabricate precise optical emitters at extremely low-cost compared to fabs. We once calculated it would take 50 square-meters of wafer area to produce 1 gram of QDs if we used traditional semiconductor manufacturing.

Those QDs in solution can then be functionalized into inks or photoresists for patterning on displays by inkjet printing or photolithography. The goal is to be able to do this in standard atmosphere without needing to put the whole display inside a vacuum (as you must for highly sensitive OLEDs).

That said, there remain challenges in figuring out how to optimize and scale the manufacturing process for QDEL, whether it's photolithography or inkjet printing.

QDEL availability

"We are targeting 2026 for commercial readiness on the materials side in our public roadmaps. When consumers get their hands on the technology depends on the brands and specific products they want to launch," Nanosys' Yurek told me.

That's encouraging, but it doesn't give a firm timeline for when one might actually be able to buy a QDEL TV, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the commercial readiness date pushed back. Even if Nanosys were ready to sell to other brands, there are a lot of other pieces that have to fall into place before people can buy a product with direct-view quantum dots. And early products may not meet expectations, as is sometimes the case with emerging tech.

So what comes after OLED? There are several ideas—including just more and better OLED. But the jury, which includes researchers and commercial firms in R&D, tech brands, and ultimately users, is still out. And it will be years before a decision is reached.

While we wait, it's easy for those of us interested in exceptional image quality at more attainable prices to root for QDEL.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024...n-premium-tvs/





Ex-Amazon Exec Claims She was Asked to Ignore Copyright Law in Race to AI

High-flying AI scientist claims unfair dismissal following pregnancy leave
Lindsay Clark

A lawsuit is alleging Amazon was so desperate to keep up with the competition in generative AI it was willing to breach its own copyright rules.

The allegation emerges from a complaint [PDF] accusing the tech and retail mega-corp of demoting, and then dismissing, a former high-flying AI scientist after it discovered she was pregnant.

The lawsuit was filed last week in a Los Angeles state court by Dr Viviane Ghaderi, an AI researcher who says she worked successfully in Amazon's Alexa and LLM teams, and achieved a string of promotions, but claims she was later suddenly demoted and fired following her return to work after giving birth. She is alleging discrimination, retaliation, harassment and wrongful termination, among other claims.

Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said of the suit: "We do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or retaliation in our workplace. We investigate any reports of such conduct and take appropriate action against anyone found to have violated our policies."

As well as alleging sexism and discrimination against her, Ghaderi also accuses the tech giant of singling her out because she complained when Amazon allegedly breached its own rules against copyright infringement when it came to AI research.

According to Ghaderi's account in the complaint, she returned to work after giving birth in January 2023, inheriting a large language model project. Part of her role was flagging violations of Amazon's internal copyright policies and escalating these concerns to the in-house legal team. In March 2023, the filing claims, her team director, Andrey Styskin, challenged Ghaderi to understand why Amazon was not meeting its goals on Alexa search quality.

The filing alleges she met with a representative from the legal department to explain her concerns and the tension they posed with the "direction she had received from upper management, which advised her to violate the direction from legal."

According to the complaint, Styskin rejected Ghaderi's concerns, allegedly telling her to ignore copyright policies to improve the results. Referring to rival AI companies, the filing alleges he said: "Everyone else is doing it."

The allegations come at a difficult time for developers of AI models in relation to copyright infringement in training data. A string of legal cases have been launched concerning the consumption and reproduction of copyrighted text by generative AI. Novelists Paul Tremblay, Christopher Golden, Richard Kadrey, and comedian Sarah Silverman accused OpenAI of unlawfully scraping their work last year, while the New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming the duo infringed on the newspaper's copyright by using its articles without permission.

A German-born doctor of electrical engineering, Ghaderi also made a series of allegations relating to her treatment by Amazon following the disclosure of her pregnancy.

According to the complaint, she joined the technology giant as a program manager in 2018 and received glowing appraisals. Although she left to join a startup in February 2021, Ghaderi was rehired by Amazon "based on her strong performance and relationships with colleagues."

Ghaderi was offered a new role with the opportunity to become an applied science manager. She rejoined as a engineering manager at the top of a salary band, leading a team of one scientist and two engineers. For the first five months of her return she received positive feedback from supervisors and direct reports, her filing claims.

In September 2022, Amazon put together a new science team looking at data quality and compliance in the Alexa organization. Ghaderi says in her complaint that she moved up a level of management to lead the team, and reported to the department director Daniel Marcu, on a higher grade than her previous manager.

On her first meeting with Marcu, she disclosed she was pregnant, information she had already shared with her previous manager. "Marcu, taken aback, responded by informing Ghaderi that she would be 'temporarily' transferred to report to a different employee, Mahesh Krishnakumar. Marcu admitted to Ghaderi that he was changing her reporting structure 'temporar[ily]' so he would not have to 'worry' about managing her team during her leave," the court documents allege.

Ghaderi claims Krishnakumar later pressured her into delaying the start of her maternity leave from the planned date of November 7. Agreeing to the request, she worked until November 15, 2022, "the day she was forced to undergo an emergency C-section," according to the filing.

Two weeks later, the launch of OpenAI's GPT-4 caused "panic" within Amazon, the complaint adds.

Ghaderi is also alleging a retaliation charge against Amazon "based on her complaints of violations of copyright law and policy" as well as on the basis of alleged violations of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.

After she returned to work in January 2023, Ghaderi claims she was told by colleagues that Krishnakumar had not been present for most of her absence, and when he was there he contributed little, resulting in a backlog of work. While managing Ghaderi, the documents allege Krishnakumar made "numerous discriminatory and harassing comments" such as "Take it easy, I have young daughters, so I know it's hard to be a woman with a newborn," or "You should spend time with your daughter," or "You should just enjoy being a new mother."

Ghaderi made repeated requests to be reinstated to her promised career path, according to the complaint, which goes on to allege that Marcu denied this request and said she should continue reporting to Krishnakumar. After Styskin joined the organization as a director, Ghaderi's complaint claims, Marcu said the decision was now his and she was never reinstated.

She goes on to allege that in a performance review, Amazon did not consider evidence from before her maternity leave. While she met the "high bar" expected by the company she needed to improve on "earning trust" and "delivering results," the review said. When she asked Krishnakumar for evidence to support this claim, he could not provide any, according to the complaint.

In March 2023, she complained to HR about the review, and the failure to reinstate her in the role she had been promised. After a meeting with Styskin and Krishnakumar, she again complained to HR that the "work context/dynamic ha[d] completely shifted from just 4.5 months ago when I had been moved… to work under [Marcu] before my maternity leave."

Shortly after the HR meeting, the complaint alleges Styskin told the AI exec she would be stripped of her team and demoted. He then asked her how she felt about the decision. When she asked for clarification, he allegedly responded: "You know, feelings, or are you saying, 'Oh, I'm from Germany so I don't have feelings'?"

Ghaderi then made a formal complaint to HR, alleging her demotion related to discrimination and retaliation relating to her pregnancy. The filing alleges she also mentioned Styskin's comment about her not having feelings owing to her nationality. Although HR did find the latter remark had fallen below Amazon's standards of conduct, it did not uphold the two other complaints.

In May 2023, Ghaderi took more protected leave, to return in August 2023, after which she was placed on Amazon's informal "Focus" performance review plan and her role was diminished again. The complaint claims she was then given another negative performance appraisal and told the career path available to her prior to her maternity leave was no longer on the table.

The filing continues that she subsequently requested to be moved to another team, but, allegedly, her line manager said because she was on the Focus plan she was ineligible for a transfer. After that, she was placed on the formal "Pivot" plan, which means leaving or complying with performance targets.

The complaint argues the plan was designed to ensure Ghaderi's failure.

For example, the first goal required her to create a plan to reduce data storage costs across the entire AmazonBot web crawling organization by 75 percent in just eight workdays.

Ms. Ghaderi asked several senior, high-performing engineers about this goal, and they confirmed that they did not believe it was possible within the given timeframe. Even if it were possible, Ms. Ghaderi had not been responsible for data storage until the week she was placed on the Pivot plan, meaning that she had no time to understand the existing storage architecture.

The filing adds that after she requested guidance on the task she was told she "should be able to do this with no help."

Ghaderi complained again to HR about pregnancy discrimination and being given impossible performance tasks, after which she alleges she was fired.

Her lawyers have demanded a jury trial and named Amazon.com Services, Andrey Styskin, and Mahesh Krishnakumar as defendants. They also cite other unnamed defendants. The lawsuit includes seven causes including violation of employment law against sex discrimination, pregnancy leave law, harassment, protection against retaliation. It also includes failure to take steps to prevent discrimination and protect whistleblowers, as well as wrongful termination of employment.

A case management conference has been set [PDF] for August 14.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/...deri_v_amazon/





No One Buys Books

Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.
Elle Griffin

In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly.

The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

But let’s dig into everything they said in detail.

Did you know that 96% of books sell less than 1,000 copies? That’s why I write here instead
Bestsellers are rare

In my essay “Writing books isn’t a good idea” I wrote that, in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.

Q. Do you know approximately how many authors there are across the industry with 500,000 units or more during this four-year period?

A. My understanding is that it was about 50.

Q. 50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four-year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year?

A. Yes.

— Madeline Mcintosh
, CEO, Penguin Random House US

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

In my essay “No one will read your book,” I said that publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest.

Turns out, they agree!

Every year, in thousands of ideas and dreams, only a few make it to the top. So I call it the Silicon Valley of media. We are angel investors of our authors and their dreams, their stories. That’s how I call my editors and publishers: angels… It’s rather this idea of Silicon Valley, you see 35 percent are profitable; 50 on a contribution basis. So every book has that same likelihood of succeeding.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House

Those unicorns happen every five to 10 years or so.

We’re very hit driven. When a book is successful, it can be wildly successful. There are books that sell millions and millions of copies, and those are financial gushes for the publishers of that book, sometimes for years to come… A gusher is once in a decade or something. For instance, I don’t know if you know the Twilight series of books? Hachette published the Twilight series of books, and those made hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of time.

Right now the novels of Colleen Hoover are topping the bestseller lists in really, really huge numbers and the publishers of those books are making a lot of money. You probably remember The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo… Or the Fifty Shades of Grey series. So once every five years, ten years, those come along for the whole industry and become the industry driver that’s drawing people into bookstores because there is such a commotion about them.

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

Big advances go to celebrities

They spent a lot of the trial talking about books that made an advance of more than $250,000—they called these “anticipated top-sellers.” According to Nicholas Hill, a partner at Bates White Economic Consulting, 2 percent of all titles earn an advance over $250,000.

Publisher’s Marketplace says it’s even lower.

Top-selling authors were defined as those receiving advances (i.e., guaranteed money) in excess of $250,000. Far fewer than 1 percent of authors receive advances over that mark; Publishers Marketplace, which tracks these things, recorded 233 such deals in all of 2022.

— ken whyte
, Publisher at Sutherland House

Hill says titles that earn advances over $250,000 account for 70 percent of advance spending by publishing houses. At Penguin Random House, it’s even more. The bulk of their advance spending goes to deals worth $1 million or more, and there are about 200 of those deals a year. Of the roughly $370 million they say PRH accounts for, $200 million of that goes to advance deals worth $1 million or more.
This chart shows that as advances go up, more of them come from Penguin Random House which has the deepest pockets.

Most of those are deals with celebrities. And Penguin gets most of them.

Books by the Obamas sold so many copies they had to be removed from the charts as statistical anomalies.

There are giant celebrities Michelle Obama where you know it’s going to be a top seller.

— Jennifer Rudolph Walsch, Literary Agent

Because they are so lucrative, Gallery Books Group focuses its efforts on trying to get celebrities to write books.

75 percent [of our] acquisitions come from approaching celebrities, politicians, athletes, the “celebrity adjacent,” etc. That way, we can control the content…. We are approaching authors and celebrities and politicians and athletes for ideas. So it’s really we are on the look out. We are scouts in a lot of ways…

— Jennifer Bergstrom, SVP, Gallery Books Group

Bergstrom said her biggest celebrity sale was Amy Schumer who received millions of dollars for her advance.

We’ve had a lot of success publishing musicians, I mentioned Bruce Springsteen. We’ve also published Bob Dylan and Linda Ronstadt, a lot of entertainers through the years… There was a political writer, Ben Shapiro, who has a very popular podcast and a large following. We also competed with HarperCollins for that.

— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster

Penguin Random House US has guidelines for who gets what advance:

Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up

Advance: $500,000 and up

Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000-75,000 units

Advance: $150,000-$500,000

Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000-25,000 units

Advance: $50,000- $150,000

Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units

Advance: $50,000 or less

Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that…..
Franchise authors are the other big category

Franchise authors are the other big category. Walsch says James Patterson and John Grisham get advances in the “many millions.” Putnam makes most of its money from repeat authors like John Sandford, Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Lisa Scottoline, and others.

Q. Putnam typically publihses about 60 books a year. Correct?

A. 60, 65, sort of on naverage… I will say of those 65, though, a good portion of those are repeat authors… franchise authors that we regularly publish every year, sometimes twice a year.

— Sally Kim, SVP and Publisher, Putnam

Publishing houses want a built-in audience

The advantage of publishing celebrity books is that they have a built-in audience.

In some of the cases, the reason they are paying big money is because the person has a big platform. And if that platform is there for the advertising, then the spend might be lower.

— Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, former Agent

Macmillan agrees.

Q. Would you agree that those type of authors, meaning the ones with the built-in audience, are also authors who would command a high advance if they went to a traditional publisher like Macmillan or PRH?

A. That’s a broad brush. But, yes…

Q. And you’re willing to pay more if they have a significant following?

A. Yes.

— Donald Weisberg, CEO, Macmillan Publishers

They give some examples:

The Butcher and the Wren… this particular author has a big following, and with a single post on Instagram, she presold over 40,000 books. So, I mean, that’s just staggering from a per copy perspective, and it pretty much guarantees a number one spot on the New York [Times] best seller list when it’s published in September.

— Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, former Agent

A big audience means publishing houses don’t have to spend money on marketing

These big advances, the authors have quite a bit of their own infrastructure with them. They have their own publicists. They have their own social media people. They have their own newsletters. So they actually are able—we are able to offload a good amount of the work, not all the time, but that is actually a factor in why we sometimes pay these big advances, because the authors are actually capable of helping us a lot.

— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster

For example:

Q. Who is the best selling Simon & Schuster author currently?
A. Right now it’s Colleen Hoover.
Q. Does she have the highest marketing budget that Simon & Schuster pays?
A. No.
Q. Why is that?
A. She’s the queen of TikTok, and so she has a huge following on TikTok.

— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster

Related:

[One author wrote] paranormal, so it’s sexy vampires. This book was probably her 21st book. So she’s what I would call a franchise author. She’s very established. Though we spent $1.2 million on the book, we spent about $62,000 on the marketing and publicity because she had such an established fan base…

[Another author is] a celebrity-adjacent author, but also her platform was on social media. So we paid $450,000 for her book, and we spent $36,000 on the marketing and publicity. We didn’t need to spend more than that because she already booked at that point on Good Morning America, The Today Show. So publicity drove that, and that didn’t cost us.

— Jennifer Bergstrom, SVP, Gallery Books Group

Just goes to show that the main thing an author gets from a publishing house is an advance!
Publishing houses pay for Amazon placement

Every second book in America, ballpark, is being sold via e-commerce…Amazon.com has 50 million books available. A bookstore, a good independent bookstore, has around 50,000 different books available… an algorithm decides what is being presented and made visible and discoverable for an end consumer online. It makes a huge difference.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House

Publishing houses try to game the algorithm and even pay to get ahead of it.

Q. Penguin Random House has hired data scientists to try and figure out these algorithms so that its books get better presented on Amazon than its competitors’ books?

A. One of the many efforts that we pursue, correct.

Q. And Penguin Random House pays Amazon to improve its search results?

A. There is something that is available to our publishers, it’s called Amazon Marketing Services, AMS, and all publishers can spend money and give it to Amazon to have hopefully better search results.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House

But even celebrity books don’t sell…

Ayesha Pande, president of Ayesha Pande Literary, says that 20 percent of her authors earn out their advance—if she’s being generous.

The single most important contract term is the advance…Because in a large number of cases, it may be the only compensation that the author will receive for their work.

— Ayesha Pande, President, Ayesha Pande Literary

Even celebrity books flop.

There are plenty of books that we spend $1 million on the advance and published them last year and they did not even make the top 1,000 on BookScan… Less than 45 percent of those books [that we spend a million dollars on] end up on that thousand best seller list.

— Madeline Mcintosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US

Just because the publisher pays $250,000 or $500,000 or $1 million for a book does not guarantee that a single person is going to buy it. A lot of what we do is unknowable and based on inspiration and optimism.”

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

Even celebrities, though sometimes you think it’s going to be a big best seller, it flops. It happens… I mean, Andrew Cuomo’s book was sold at the height of his being America’s governor during the COVID crisis. I mean, that book was sold for $5 million, I believe. I don’t know for a fact. But by the time it came out, the nursing home scandal had happened, the Me Too issues, and the book didn’t do any business.

Sometimes it’s just a timing issue, like Marie Kondo. She did a book about Joy at Work, about making your office sparked with joy because it’s not cluttered. It published in March of 2020.

— Jennifer Rudolph Walsch, Literary Agent

Having a lot of social media followers or fame doesn’t guarantee it will sell. The singer Billie Eilish, despite her 97 million Instagram followers and 6 million Twitter followers, sold only 64,000 copies within eight months of publishing her book. The singer Justin Timberlake sold only 100,000 copies in the three years after he published his book. Snoop Dog’s cookbook saw a boost during the pandemic, but he still only sold 205,000 copies in 2020.

Here’s a few more:

Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, is no global pop star, but she has a significant social-media presence, with 3 million Twitter followers and another 1.3 million on Instagram. Yet her book, This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, which was published in May 2020, has sold just 26,000 copies across print, audio and e-book formats, according to her publisher.

Tamika D. Mallory, a social activist with over a million Instagram followers, was paid over $1 million for a two-book deal. But her first book, State of Emergency, has sold just 26,000 print copies since it was published in May, according to BookScan.

The journalist and media personality Piers Morgan had a weaker showing in the United States. Despite his followers on Twitter (8 million) and Instagram (1.8 million), Wake Up: Why the World Has Gone Nuts has sold just 5,650 U.S. print copies since it was published a year ago, according to BookScan.

—The New York Times

It’s pretty common.

The worst day of a life of an agent and an author is when they’ve gotten a large advance and you go on BookScan and you see their first few months’ of sales and it says 4,000 copies or something like that. It happens. It happens more than any of us would like.

— Gail Ross, Literary Agent

Books don’t make money

If I look at the top 10 percent of books… that 10 percent level gets you to about 300,000 copies sold in that year. And if you told me I’m definitely going to sell 300,000 copies in a year, I would spend many millions of dollars to get that book.

— Madeline Mcintosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US

Publishing houses pay millions of dollars for a book that sells only 300,000 copies??? Well, because books don’t sell a lot of copies, they don’t make a lot of money. According to Hill, 85 percent of the books with advances of $250,000 and up never earn out their advance. (Meaning the royalties earned never covered the cost of the advance.)

Very, very frequently, the winning bid in our calculation is a money loser.

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House, says the top 4 percent of titles drive 60 percent of the profitability. That goes for the rest of them too:

It would be just a couple of books in every hundred are driving that degree of profit… twoish books account for the lion’s share of profitability.

— Madeline Mcintosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US

Around half the books we publish make a profit of some kind.

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

About half of the books we publish make money, and a much lower percentage of them earn back the advance we pay.

— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster

Many publishers have realized that maybe those big advances aren’t worth it.

We have a report that we colloquially call ‘The Ones That Got Away.’ And it’s a report on the books where we bid $500,000 or more as an advance and did not succeed in acquiring the book… this report stands as a kind of caution against the high risk of big advances because the lesson we take away again and again is: Thank goodness we stopped bidding when we did because even at the advance we offered, we would have lost money… Very frequently, the winning bid in our calculation is a money loser.

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

It’s all about the backlist

If new books typically don’t sell well, well that’s why publishing houses make their revenue from their backlist.

I would actually expect a book that is selling 300,000 units in a year is probably going to sell at least 400,000 or 500,000 over its life once you get backlist in there too.

Our backlist brings in about a third of our annual revenues, so $300 million a year roughly, a little less.

— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette

The backlist includes all of the books that have ever come out. Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins, points out that their backlist includes bibles (an $80 million business), coloring books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, magic trick books, calendars, puzzles, and SAT study guides. It also includes perennial bestsellers like Don Quijote, Steven King’s Carrie, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—these books continue to sell year after year.

Popular children’s books are cash cows selling huge amounts of copies year after year and generation after generation.

Sometimes children’s books will be three generations, people have been buying them over and over again, and so that backlist catalog is really, really important to pay for the overhead of your publishing teams and then also to take the risks on the new books. So without a backlist I think it’s very hard to compete with these big books.

— Brian Murray, CEO, HarperCollins

For instance, Penguin Random House owns Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar intellectual property. The book has been on Publisher Weekly’s bestseller list every week for 19 years.

Children’s books comprised 27 percent of PRH’s sales in 2021. That’s about $725 million—so roughly double the size of Scholastic’s trade division, and more or less equal on its own to all of Macmillan or HBG. Christian books accounted for 2 percent.

—The Trial

Backlist titles like The Bible and Very Hungry Caterpillar and Lord of the Rings make up a disproportionately large percentage of the publishing industry.
Amazon is the biggest threat to the industry

Q. Are you concerned that Amazon will favor Penguin Random House Simon & Schuster in terms of promotion and distribution and discoverability?

A. Yes.

— Donald Weisberg, CEO, Macmillan Publishers

With Amazon’s data, they could immediately beat out all the publishing houses if they wanted to.

I think Amazon as a publisher of books is underestimated. They have about 50 editors… Obviously, given the number of people searching on Amazon for products, that gives them a huge advantage because when people go onto Amazon, they—if the book isn’t there for what they are searching for, they could create that book. That’s one theory I have. But even if that doesn’t happen, they know what people are buying and they have access to that data. Their bestseller list, in my view, is more important than The New York Times best seller list because it’s in realtime. It’s hourly. And I look at that Amazon best seller list regularly, every day.

— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster

A “Netflix of Books” would put publishing houses out of business

Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want? Just like you get all the movies you want from Netflix? Or all the music you want from Spotify?

Technically, it does exist. Kindle Unlimited is the largest, followed by Scribd. Audible isn’t quite all-access, but then Spotify got into audiobooks and made them so. But none of these players have quite taken off the way Netflix or Spotify has. That’s for one reason: The Big Five publishing houses refuse to let their authors participate.

Q. No books are found on Kindle Unlimited? Because you think that’ll be had for the industry?”

A. We think it’s going to destroy the publishing industry.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House

He’s right. No one would purchase a book again.

We all know about Netflix, we all know about Spotify and other media categories, and we also know what it has done to some industries… The music industry has lost, in the digital transformation, approximately 50 percent of its overall revenue pool.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House

There’s one reason.

Around 20 to 25 percent of the readers, the heavy readers, account for 80 percent of the revenue pool of the industry of what consumers spend on books. It’s the really dedicated readers. If they got all-access, the revenue pool of the industry is going to be very small. Physical retail will be gone—see music—within two to three years. And we will be dependent on a few Silicon Valley or Swedish internet companies that will actually provide all-access.

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House

The publishing industry would die, that’s for sure. But I’d be willing to bet writers would get their books read way more.

And I think it’s on its way. Spotify has already started publishing audiobooks, and my money is on Substack for eventually publishing written books!
Authors are getting more independent

If publishing houses make minimal investment in marketing their authors and focus largely on celebrity books and their backlist, authors who can’t snag a large advance might have better luck building their own audience and publishing elsewhere.

I think really from the advent of online—really, once the internet became popular, you know, we heard the phrase disintermediation. And I don’t understand why that wouldn’t be a possible prospect for any best selling author, to just disintermediate, to go straight to the internet and sell directly if you have a following… Colleen Hoover has published with both Amazon and Simon & Schuster. And her Amazon book was on the independent book sellers’ best seller list. So what that says to me is that a Rubicon has been crossed.

— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster

The romance category has already gone independent.

Many of those heavy readers of romance novels at that time switched to self-published stories. A very different price point. 99 cents, $1.99, away from what we call mass-market trade paperbacks… The mass-market trade paperback is the sort of small-format mass-market book, like it is a trade paperback, but a smaller format. It has been declining for the last 25 years. But we had a step change around ’14, ‘15, with this trend that so many consumers went away from mass-market books into electronic ebooks in particular and self-published books.”

— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House

Gallery author Anna Todd
moved to self-publishing (though Todd began her career writing on Wattpad, and recently returned to set up an imprint at Wattpad Books).

— Jennifer Bergstrom, SVP, Gallery Books Group

And of course, we have to talk about Kickstarter MVP Brandon Sanderson.

There is a New York Times best selling author in the science fiction and fantasy category. His name is Brandon Sanderson. I believe he’s published by both Macmillan and Penguin Random House. He went onto Kickstarter and announced that he would be offering four of his novels to anybody who wanted them if they wanted to donate to Kickstarter. And he raised over $42 million…

I have subsequently become aware of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, which is a series of books. It’s now actually become a whole company. And these are stories to give young girls confidence. And it’s been very successful, and it’s actually resulted in an entire company.

— Jonathan Karp, CEO, Simon & Schuster

Another publishing house bites the dust

After the Judge denied the merger, Penguin went through a massive round of layoffs and Simon & Schuster was sold to a private equity company instead.

Private equity tends to have one game plan: buy a company, load it with debt, wring out costs to improve its financials, sell at a profit. Dealing Simon & Schuster to private equity, The New Republic warned at the time with some slight hyperbole of its own, would mean “absolute devastation and wholesale job loss.”

— ken whyte

The publishing houses may live to see another day, but I don’t think their model is long for this world. Unless you are a celebrity or franchise author, the publishing model won’t provide a whole lot more than a tiny advance and a dozen readers. If you are a celebrity, you’ll still have a much bigger reach on Instagram than you will with your book!

Personally, I could not be more grateful to skip the publishing houses altogether and write directly for my readers here, being supported by those who read this newsletter rather than by a publishing advance that won’t ultimately translate to people reading my work.

But I’d love to know your thoughts
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books





Spotify Swings to Profit Amid Boost in Paid Subscribers

• Subscribers to paid Spotify tiers grew 14% to 239 million
• Audio-streaming firm swings to profit in first quarter

Ashley Carman

Spotify Technology SA, the audio-streaming giant, swung to profit in the first quarter, as the company boosted subscribers and added new features. The shares jumped more than 8% in premarket trading.

Paid subscribers rose 14% year over year to 239 million, the company said Tuesday in a statement, in line with analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Total active users, including those plans with advertising, grew to 615 million, compared with the 617.9 million forecast by analysts.

The Sweden-based company raised prices last year and is again planning to charge more for its service. It is also designing new plans, such as one that will omit audiobooks for a lower monthly price. Total revenue grew 20% to €3.6 billion ($3.8 billion), also in line with expectations. The company’s adjusted operating profit was €168 million, compared to a loss a year ago and beating analysts’ estimates.

Spotify introduced audiobooks to subscription plans last year and has since expanded into six markets. The company said 25% of users with access to the offering had pressed play at least once.

The company cut back on its podcast staff and programming, though it renewed its distribution deal with comedian Joe Rogan in February and began publishing his show more broadly on YouTube and Apple Podcasts.

Spotify forecasts 631 million active users for the second quarter, including 245 million premium subscribers, missing analysts’ projections of 637.1 million. Management anticipates sales of €3.8 billion, compared with the €3.76 billion average estimate. The company forecasts €250 million in operating income, above analysts’ estimates of €175.3 million.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ting-estimates
















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