We’re taking a leaf out of @nglspecialcollectionsandarchives‘s book from last year and having our own @yearinreview of the best Museums, Libraries and Collections of the year:
You have no idea how much it pains us not to make this list longer, but it’s based on our Likes over the past year so it’s as scientific as it gets! All of the Tumblrs listed have gone above and beyond in terms of interesting content, fantastic GIFs and very many laughs.
So many great arts & culture Tumblrs to follow! ❤️
"Some publishers see synthetic voices as a way to tap the growing demand for audiobooks, a segment healthier than other parts of the book business. Total US book publisher revenue declined slightly between 2015 and 2020 and ebook revenue shrank, but audiobook revenue surged by 157 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Consumers have steadily grown more comfortable with the format, helped along by technical improvements to mobile apps, smart speakers, and wireless headphones. But due to the cost of a narrator and audio production, most titles never become audiobooks, particularly at smaller publishers, says Brian Carroll, rights manager at Indiana University Press."
Public libraries all over the world have robust audiobook and ebook catalogs. In order to carry this digital material, they need to do business with a digital distributor, such as Overdrive, Cloud Library, Hoopla and many others. These companies have established relationships with all of the major publishers, and they all have drastically different terms. Some have circulation limits, before the title has been purchased again, while others allow for one copy for every user. Digital content cannot be purchased for a one time fee and loaned out an infinite number of times.
More and more public libraries are opting into digital systems that offer members the ability to read, watch, and listen to media from the comfort of their own homes or devices — and for a good reason.
With physical library usage trending downwards over the past decade and tech use up, having a way to get books, research materials, and other media you typically find at your local branch into your hands quickly and easily can reduce personal costs, frustration, and shipping waste.
Hoopla, a cloud-based digital library service, aims to do just that.
By Chris Arrant
Kickstarter has closed the books on 2020, and as expected it was a record year for the comics division. A few months back, we reported that Kickstarter had already broken their year-over-year record of $16.9 million by October 2020 with $22m. Now with the dust settled, over $25 million was taken in for comics on Kickstarter.
$25,784,658 to be exact.
There were 1,758 successful comics projects on Kickstarter in 2020. The highest-grossing ones of the year are:
And it’s not just the revenue has increased, but also the percentage of successful comics Kickstarter projects has increased. 73.9% of all comics Kickstarters were successful in 2020 - up 4.9% from the previous year, and up over 15% from 2016. This success rate is emboldening, and atypical for Kickstarters as a whole - publishing Kickstarters had a 49.4% success rate in 2020, and games 57.4%.
As of February 17, 2021, Kickstarter’s ‘comics’ category has received over $137m in pledges, with 10,900 comics projects successfully funded with $128m raised from those since the company began.
Over the past few years, computer scientists have created numerous computational techniques that can automatically generate texts, images and other types of data. These models are highly advantageous, particularly for creating data or creative works that are demanding and time-consuming for humans to produce manually.
Researchers at Dalian University of Technology in China and City University of Hong Kong have recently created an innovative framework that can automatically generate manga comic books, which are typically designed by highly skilled professional artists and require extensive work. Their framework, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, creates comic books by extracting data from TV series, movies, animations or other videos.
“We propose a fully automatic system for generating comic books from videos without any human intervention,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “Given an input video along with its subtitles, our approach first extracts informative keyframes by analyzing the subtitles and stylizes keyframes into comic-style images.”
I have a very bad feeling about this…
The link between comics and cinema has been there from the very begining of both mediums. This will certainly help publisher economics but I fear it will also create more not less of the soulless photosourced art plaguing midlist comics today. ~ eP
“The plan, a first in the highly competitive book industry raises royalties from the standard ten per cent to a full forty per cent. The program is specifically designed to help the determined author to better compete in a marketplace over-burdened with titles.”
