The internet is a failed experiment

Journalism's future is… books?

Yesterday, I suggest that betting on eBooks was something I got wrong. Could it be that I was just a decade too early?

Books give an opportunity to monetise success of another product, as Ukrainian publisher The Village did with its hit podcast “In Simple Words” which got turned into two best-seller books. “The first book [in 2020] sold around 30,000 copies – many times higher than a typical Ukrainian-language nonfiction book. Its success enabled publication of the second part, which came out in 2022 and sold over 10,000 copies”, The Fix’s Iryna Hoiuk reported last year.
Books not only give the journalist and the publisher an option of adding a revenue stream but they also provide a playground to experiment with format, for instance turning news into graphic novels.

And it's one part of a multi-faceted revenue mix, of course.

Is Musk getting bored of Twitter?

MG Siegler thinks so:

Mainly, it feels like he’s getting bored with Xitter. Likely as the user base just continues to degrade down to lunatics and sycophants. While the ads are going... well, like this. His tweets have gone from being zany but interesting in some ways to dumb jokes to stealing memes to problematic (to say the least) to now just boring.

And then he makes an interesting prediction about what happens next…

AI is killing the planet, if crypto doesn't get there first…

Bitcoin mining now uses more energy than the entire nation of the Netherlands and as much fresh water as Switzerland. And AI is catching up fast, Elizabeth Kolbert warns. This is great news for NVIDIA stock and bad news for humanity.

Blimey.

I want to see reporters asking CEOs announcing someone AI project how they're offsetting the massive carbon emissions…