Thu-Huong Ha, writing for Quartz: Amazon's power in books extends way beyond its ability to sell them super cheap and super fast. This year, a little over 40% of the print books sold in the US moved through the site, according to estimates from Bookstat, which tracks US online book retail. (NPD, which tracks 85% of US trade print sales, declined to provide data broken out by retailer.) In the US, Amazon dominates ebook sales and hosts hundreds of thousands of self-published ebooks on its platforms, many exclusively. It looms over the audiobook scene, in retail as well as production, and is one of the biggest marketplaces for used books in the US. Amazon also makes its own books -- more than 1,500 last year.

All that power comes with great data, which Amazon's publishing arm is well positioned to exploit in the interest of making books tailored exactly to what people want -- down to which page characters should meet on or how many lines of dialogue they should exchange. Though Amazon declined to comment specifically on whether it uses data to shape or determine the content of its own books, the company acknowledged that authors are recruited for their past sales (as is common in traditional publishing). "Amazon Publishing titles are thoughtfully acquired by our team -- made up of publishing-industry veterans and long-time Amazonians -- with many factors taken into consideration," says Amazon Publishing publisher Mikyla Bruder, "including the acquiring editor's enthusiasm, the strength of the story, quality of the writing, editorial fit for our list, and author backlist/comparable titles' sales track."

Amazon's Kindle e-reader, first released in 2007, is a data-collection device that doubles as reading material. Kindle knows the minutiae of how people read: what they highlight, the fonts they prefer, where in a book they lose interest, what kind of books they finish quickly, and which books gets skimmed rather than read all the way through. A year after the Kindle came out, Amazon acquired Audible. Audiobooks have been a rare bright spot in the publishing industry, with double-digit growth in total sales for the past few years. Audible now touts itself as the "world's largest seller and producer of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word entertainment," and its site has around 450,000 audio programs.

Stan Lee, who wrote and published a comic book legacy that spans from the Depression Era to the present day, who created Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk and Thor, has died. He was 95. Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber in New York City in 1922, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, and at the age of 17, he began work as an assistant at Timely Comics, the company that would become Marvel Comics. Filling inkwells and fetching lunch, Lee's career began just in time for Superman's 1930s debut in Action Comics #1, kicking off the history of superhero comics. From a report: Lee, who began in the business in 1939 and created or co-created Black Panther, Spider-Man, X-Men, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, Ant-Man and other characters, died early Monday morning in Los Angeles, a source told The Hollywood Reporter. (Joan Celia Lee, Stan's daughter, confirmed the news to TMZ.) Lee's final few years were tumultuous.

[...] On his own and through his work with frequent artist-writer collaborators Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others, Lee catapulted Marvel from a tiny venture into the world's No. 1 publisher of comic books and later a multimedia giant. In 2009, the Walt Disney Co. bought Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion, and most of the top-grossing superhero films of all time -- led by The Avengers' $1.52 billion worldwide take in 2012 -- featured Marvel characters. An exchange from one of Stan Lee's last interviews, which appeared last month: Interviewer: Do you feel like your legacy is secure?
Stan Lee: Absolutely.

Interviewer: What's on your wish list?
Stan Lee: That I leave everyone happy when I leave.
Interviewer: You won't leave anyone happy.
Stan Lee: Well, I don't mean happy that I left. Happy that I took the right path.
Interviewer: You always do, pop. It was just the people around you. It was never you. You were always the good guy, and there were just creeps around you, and it was this town. Never you.

An "extraordinary and unprecedented" global protest from antiquarian booksellers has forced the Amazon-owned secondhand marketplace AbeBooks to backtrack on its decision to pull out of several countries. From a report: AbeBooks had told bookshops in countries including Hungary, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Russia that it would no longer support them from 30 November, citing migration to a new payment service provider as the reason for the withdrawal. The move prompted almost 600 booksellers in 27 countries to pull more than 3.5m titles from Abebooks' site, putting them on "vacation" as they cited the motto of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, "Amor librorum nos unit" (love of books unites us). On Wednesday, president of ILAB Sally Burdon met AbeBooks chief executive Arkady Vitrouk to discuss the decision. It was agreed that booksellers in the four affected countries would be able to trade under current conditions until 31 December, with a solution to allow them to use the website indefinitely to follow.

hackingbear writes: In the opening of China's first import-themed trade fair, President Xi Jinping promised tougher penalties for intellectual property theft, a key concern of the Trump administration, in front of leaders and executives from 3,600 companies from more than 170 countries. China has been steadily advancing intellectual property protection over the years. In addition to filing twice as many patents as the U.S. in 2017, up nearly 14 folds from 2001, it is also increasingly being selected as a key venue for patent litigation by non-Chinese companies, as litigants feel they are treated fairly as foreign plaintiffs won the majority of their patent cases in 2015 (though that likely attracts patent trolls). China's journey from piracy to protection models the journeys of the U.S. which had blatantly violated intellectual properties in building its modern industry.

An anonymous reader writes: As a student, what's the best way to bring change to an outdated college tech curriculum?

The background on this is that I have 15 years of experience in the field and a very healthy amount of industry-recognized training and certifications. I'm merely finishing up my degree to flesh out my resume -- I haven't learned much from the program that I don't already know. However, the program would have benefited me greatly 15 years ago. It's a great program, except for a biometrics class that is absolutely behind the curve. The newest publication on the syllabus is from 2009. This is simply teaching the students outdated and often wrong information.

Additionally, a lot of the material seems like it was stretched to make a full semester class in biometrics in the first place -- most of the material, honestly, could be compressed to about two hours of lecture and still be delivered at a reasonable rate.

What's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong information?

ZDNet writes: There have been three great movements shaping the information technology landscape. There is Agile, which emphasizes collaboration in software development; Lean IT, which promotes delivering software faster, better and cheaper; and DevOps, which seeks to align software development with continuous delivery...

These three movements have their own advocates, methodologies and terminology. But when you think about Agile, Lean IT and Agile, aren't these all the same thing, essentially? They all have the same goals, which is to deliver high-quality software on a continuous basis, collaboratively. Is it time to chuck the terminology and semantics and bring these three activities under the same roof?
Their article cites "advocates" -- two authors who have both written books about Lean It -- who are pushing for the concepts to all be brought together into a single mold. But it'd be interesting to get some opinions and real-world anecdotes from Slashdot's readers. So leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Are DevOps, Agile, and Lean IT the same thing?

Several readers have shared a report about publishing industry's new gamble to drive people to buy physical copies of books: making the books much tinier. From the report: As a physical object and a feat of technology, the printed book is hard to improve upon. Apart from minor cosmetic tweaks, the form has barely evolved since the codex first arose as an appealing alternative to scrolls around 2,000 years ago. So when Julie Strauss-Gabel, the president and publisher of Dutton Books for Young Readers, discovered "dwarsliggers" -- tiny, pocket-size, horizontal flipbacks that have become a wildly popular print format in the Netherlands -- it felt like a revelation. "I saw it and I was like, boom," she said. "I started a mission to figure out how we could do that here." This month, Dutton, which is part of Penguin Random House, began releasing its first batch of mini books, with four reissued novels by the best-selling young-adult novelist John Green. The tiny editions are the size of a cellphone and no thicker than your thumb, with paper as thin as onion skin. They can be read with one hand -- the text flows horizontally, and you can flip the pages upward, like swiping a smartphone. It's a bold experiment that, if successful, could reshape the publishing landscape and perhaps even change the way people read. Next year, Penguin Young Readers plans to release more minis, and if readers find the format appealing, other publishers may follow suit.

Stephen Hawking says artificial intelligence will eventually become so advanced it will "outperform humans." The renowned physicist who died in March warns of both rises in advanced artificial intelligence and genetically-enhanced "superhumans" in a book published Tuesday. Hawking also weighed in on god, and aliens. From a report: According to an excerpt of the book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions" published by the U.K.'s Sunday Times, Hawking wrote AI could prove "huge" to humanity so long as restrictions are in place to control how quickly it grows. "While primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have proved very useful, I fear the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans," Hawking wrote. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded." Hawking wrote about a need for serious research to explore what impact AI would have on humanity, from the workplace to the military, where he expressed concerns about sophisticated weapons systems "that can choose and eliminate their own targets." Hawking also wrote about advances to manipulating DNA, or what he calls "self-designed evolution. Early advances involving the gene-editing tool CRISPR include alerting DNA to create "low-fat" pigs. CNN: "There is no God. No one directs the universe," he writes in "Brief Answers to the Big Questions." "For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God," he adds. "I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature."

"There are forms of intelligent life out there," he writes. "We need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further." And he leaves open the possibility of other phenomena. "Travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding," he says. He also predicts that "within the next hundred years we will be able to travel to anywhere in the Solar System."

Bill Gates is not giving up on saving the world, but he is helping launch a new social recommendation engine. Likewise, as the iOS and Android app is known, is designed to be a place to get trusted recommendations on everything from restaurants to books, movies and TV shows. From a report: It won't cure polio or fix the U.S. education system, but Likewise could fill a niche helping people keep track of the books and TV shows their friends recommend as well as to discover new places. The free app, which launches today, began as the brainchild of Larry Cohen, a longtime Gates aide who serves as CEO of Gates Ventures. The Microsoft co-founder is funding the Bellevue, Wash.-based company, which has been working for nearly a year and has about 20 employees. "It's not the next Office, but there's a real need here," Cohen told Axios. Cohen is chairman of Likewise, with his onetime Microsoft colleague Ian Morris serving as CEO.

Ross Goodwin, a former ghostwriter for the Obama administration, uses neural networks to generate poetry, screenplays, and, now, literary travel fiction. The Atlantic tells the story of how Goodwin used a custom machine to write a "novel" narrating its own cross-country road trip. Slashdot reader merbs shares an excerpt from the report: On March 25, 2017, a black Cadillac with a white-domed surveillance camera attached to its trunk departed Brooklyn for New Orleans. An old GPS unit was fastened atop the roof. Inside, a microphone dangled from the ceiling. Wires from all three devices fed into Ross Goodwin's Razer Blade laptop, itself hooked up to a humble receipt printer. This, Goodwin hoped, was the apparatus that was going to produce the next American road-trip novel. The aim was to use the road as a conduit for narrative experimentation, in the tradition of Kerouac, Wolfe, and Kesey, but with the vehicle itself as the artist. He chose the New York-to-NOLA route as a nod to the famous leg of Jack Kerouac's expedition in On the Road. Underneath the base of the Axis M3007 camera, Goodwin scrawled "Further."

Along the way, the four sensors would feed data into a system of neural networks Goodwin had trained on hundreds of books and Foursquare location data, and the printer would spit out the results one letter at a time. By the end of the four-day trip, receipts emblazoned with artificially intelligent prose would cover the floor of the car. They're collected in 1 the Road, a book Goodwin's publisher, Jean Boite Editions, is marketing as "the first novel written by a machine." (Though, for the record, Goodwin says he disagrees it should bear that distinction -- "That might be The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed by a program from the '80s," he tells me.) Regardless, it is a hallucinatory, oddly illuminating account of a bot's life on the interstate; the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test meets Google Street View, narrated by Siri.

Companies headquartered in California can no longer have all-male boards. From a report: That's according to a new law, enacted Sunday, which requires publicly traded firms in the state to place at least one woman on their board of directors by the end of 2019 -- or face a penalty. It also requires companies with five directors to add two women by the end of 2021, and companies with six or more directors to add at least three more women by the end of the same year. It's the first such law on the books in the United States, though similar measures are common in European countries. The measure was passed by California's state legislature last month. And it was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday, along with a trove of other bills that look to "protect and support women, children and working families," the governor's office said in a release. A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.

A visual prank exposes an Achilles' heel of computer vision systems: Unlike humans, they can't do a double take. From a report: In a new study [PDF], computer scientists found that artificial intelligence systems fail a vision test a child could accomplish with ease. "It's a clever and important study that reminds us that 'deep learning' isn't really that deep," said Gary Marcus, a neuroscientist at New York University who was not affiliated with the work. The result takes place in the field of computer vision, where artificial intelligence systems attempt to detect and categorize objects. They might try to find all the pedestrians in a street scene, or just distinguish a bird from a bicycle (which is a notoriously difficult task). The stakes are high: As computers take over critical tasks like automated surveillance and autonomous driving, we'll want their visual processing to be at least as good as the human eyes they're replacing.

It won't be easy. The new work accentuates the sophistication of human vision -- and the challenge of building systems that mimic it. In the study, the researchers presented a computer vision system with a living room scene. The system processed it well. It correctly identified a chair, a person, books on a shelf. Then the researchers introduced an anomalous object into the scene -- an image of an elephant. The elephant's mere presence caused the system to forget itself: Suddenly it started calling a chair a couch and the elephant a chair, while turning completely blind to other objects it had previously seen.

"There are all sorts of weird things happening that show how brittle current object detection systems are," said Amir Rosenfeld, a researcher at York University in Toronto and co-author of the study along with his York colleague John Tsotsos and Richard Zemel of the University of Toronto. Researchers are still trying to understand exactly why computer vision systems get tripped up so easily, but they have a good guess. It has to do with an ability humans have that AI lacks: the ability to understand when a scene is confusing and thus go back for a second glance.

Two separate reports are saying Apple's yet-to-be-released AirPower charger is facing overheating issues. The product, designed to simultaneously charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, was announced more than a year ago at Apple's 2017 iPhone event. Apple has yet to provide any additional information on AirPower, even during its iPhone event last week. The company even appears to have wiped all mention of it from its website. CNBC reports: Tech writer Sonny Dickson, who has a track record of accurately reporting on Apple, said over the weekend that Apple has struggled with heat management, which affects accuracy and charging speed. Dickson thinks it's unlikely Apple will make its end-of-year release deadline. Daring Fireball's John Gruber said something similar. Gruber said the charging pad, which uses a multi-coil design, is "getting too hot -- way too hot."

"There are engineers who looked at AirPower's design and said it could never work, thermally. ... I think they've either had to go completely back to the drawing board and start over with an entirely different design, or they've decided to give up and they just don't want to say so," Gruber said. Apple gave a broad timeline for AirPower's launch, saying it would go on sale in 2018. So it is still possible it can work out any issues before the end of the year.

We have not run book recommendations and book discussion posts for some time. So here it goes: What's a book -- or books -- are you reading this month? Additionally, what's a book you finished recently that you found insightful, or funny, or both. (The latter request comes from a reader.) Leave your recommendation and any additional notes in the comments section below.

A year after unveiling the AirPower all-in-one wireless charger for the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods, Apple has now erased all references to AirPower from its website. The company has yet to ship it. From a report: A year ago during the iPhone X unveiling Apple announced AirPower -- an all-in-one wireless charger for the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods. The product never shipped, and today it seems that Apple has scrubbed almost all traces of it off its website. At the time of writing this is the only reference to AirPower I can find on Apple's website. So what happened to AirPower? Well, while only Apple really knows (and at the time of writing Apple hasn't responded to a request for information), it seems like the product was vaporware and that the promise of an all-in-one charger has died. I can't think off the top of my head of another product that Apple has announced at a major event and then failed to deliver, which suggests that some things are beyond the reach of even a company as powerful as Apple.

Zorro shares a report from BloombergQuint: The Great Crypto Crash of 2018 looks more and more like one for the record books. As virtual currencies plumbed new depths on Wednesday, the MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 10 Index extended its collapse from a January high to 80 percent. The tumble has now surpassed the Nasdaq Composite Index's 78 percent peak-to-trough decline after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. Like their predecessors during the Internet-stock boom almost two decades ago, cryptocurrency investors who bet big on a seemingly revolutionary technology are suffering a painful reality check, particularly those in many secondary tokens, so-called alt-coins.

"It just shows what a massive, speculative bubble the whole crypto thing was -- as many of us at the time warned," said Neil Wilson, chief market analyst in London for Markets.com, a foreign-exchange trading platform. "It's a very likely a winner takes all market -- Bitcoin currently most likely." Wednesday's losses were led by Ether, the second-largest virtual currency. It fell 6 percent to $171.15 at 7:50 a.m. in New York, extending this month's retreat to 40 percent. Bitcoin was little changed, while the MVIS CryptoCompare index fell 3.8 percent. The value of all virtual currencies tracked by CoinMarketCap.com sank to $187 billion, a 10-month low. "Crypto bulls dismiss negative comparisons to the dot-com era by pointing to the Nasdaq Composite's recovery to fresh highs 15 years later, and to the internet's enormous impact on society," reports BloombergQuint. "They also note that Bitcoin has rebounded from past crashes of similar magnitude. But even if the optimists prove right and cryptocurrencies eventually transform the world, this year's selloff has underscored that progress is unlikely to be smooth."

The Wikimedia Foundation has sounded a stark warning against a copyright reform proposal in Europe that's due to be voted on by the European Parliament next week. From a report: In the post, also emailed to TechCrunch, Maria Sefidari Huici, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, writes: "Next week, the European Parliament will decide how information online is shared in a vote that will significantly affect how we interact in our increasingly connected, digital world. We are in the last few moments of what could be our last opportunity to define what the Internet looks like in the future. The next wave of proposed rules under consideration by the European Parliament will either permit more innovation and growth, or stifle the vibrant free web that has allowed creativity, innovation, and collaboration to thrive. This is significant because copyright does not only affect books and music, it profoundly shapes how people communicate and create on the internet for years to come."

Backers of the reform proposals argue they will help European creatives be fairly recompensed for their work. But critics argue the proposals are not balanced and will chill the creative freedoms of web users to share and comment on content online.

An anonymous reader quotes CNET: J.R.R. Tolkien fans can get their hands on what might be the late author's final work. The Fall of Gondolin was published August 30 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US and HarperCollins in the UK. J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, but since his death, his son Christopher, now 93, has edited a number of his father's works, including this one. The book tells of the founding of the Elven city of Gondolin, and is considered one of Tolkien's Lost Tales... The Fall of Gondolin follows another posthumously published Lost Tale, The Tale of Beren and Luthien, which came out in 2017. At the time, many expected that book to be J.R.R. Tolkien's final published work. Christopher Tolkien even wrote in its preface that it was "(presumptively) my last book in the long series of my father's writings." But now, Entertainment Weekly reports, Christopher Tolkien has written that "The Fall of Gondolin is indubitably the last."

The book is illustrated by Alan Lee, who has illustrated numerous Tolkien books, and along with Grant Major and Dan Hennah won an Oscar for best art direction for the 2003 film, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
The Washington Post includes the book's description of a "hideous mechanical army" deployed in battle against Gondolin, and summarizes the book's plot. "In short, the evil overlord Morgoth -- called Melko here -- seeks to dominate the entire world, but the hidden elvish city of Gondolin remains out of his grasp."

"We are reminded that Tolkien first drafted this story while in the hospital recuperating from the Battle of the Somme."

David L. Ulin, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the California Book Award, shares an excerpt from his book "The Lost Art of Reading", to The Paris Review: This is the conundrum, the gorilla in the midst of any conversation about literature in contemporary culture, the question of dilution and refraction, of whether and how books matter, of the impact they can have. We talk about the need to read, about reading at risk, about reluctant readers, but we seem unwilling to confront the fallout of one simple observation: literature doesn't, can't, have the influence it once did. For Kurt Vonnegut, the writer who made me want to be a writer, the culprit was television. "When I started out," he recalled in 1997, "it was possible to make a living as a freelance writer of fiction, and live out of your mailbox, because it was still the golden age of magazines, and it looked as though that could go on forever ... Then television, with no malice whatsoever -- just a better buy for advertisers -- knocked the magazines out of business."

For new media reactionaries such as Lee Siegel and Andrew Keen, the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyperlinked, multi-networked world. What this argument overlooks, of course, is that literary culture as we know it was the product of a technological revolution, one that began with Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. We take books and mass literacy for granted, but in reality, they are a recent iteration, going back not even a millennium. Less than four hundred years ago -- barely a century and a half after Gutenberg -- John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind.