JEP piece by Waldfogel. Abstract: "Digitization is disrupting a number of copyright-protected media industries, including books, music, radio, television, and movies. Once information is transformed into digital form, it can be copied and distributed at near-zero marginal costs. This change has facilitated piracy in some industries, which in turn has made it difficult for commercial sellers to continue generating the same levels of revenue for bringing products to market in the traditional ways. Yet despite the sharp revenue reductions for recorded music, as well as threats to revenue in some other traditional media industries, other aspects of digitization have had the offsetting effects of reducing the costs of bringing new products to market in music, movies, books, and television. On balance, digitization has increased the number of new products that are created and made available to consumers. Moreover, given the unpredictable nature of product quality, growth in new products has given rise to substantial increases in the quality of the best products. Although there were concerns that consumer welfare from media products would fall, the opposite scenario has emerged—a golden age for consumers who wish to consume media products. ..."

Comments about Bowker's monopoly on ISBNs in the USA.

Why demand for low-quality products remains (very) high. Abstract: "Between 1810 and 1939, real per capita spending on patent medicines grew by a factor of 114; real per capita GDP by a factor of 5. The long-term growth and survival this industry is puzzling when juxtaposed with standard historical accounts, which typically portray patent medicines as quack medicines. This paper argues that patent medicines were distinguished from other products by an unusually low elasticity of demand with respect to product failure. While consumers in other markets stopped searching for a viable product after a few failed attempts, consumers of patent medicines kept trying different products, irrespective of the number of failed medicines they observed. The market expanded as the stock of people buying potential cures accumulated over time. Because no one was ever cured and consumers possessed a highly inelastic demand with respect to product failures, demand was unrelenting. In short, patent medicines flourished not despite their dubious medicinal qualities, but because of them. There is also evidence that genuine medical advances, such as the rise of the germ theory of disease and new therapeutic interventions, helped expand the market for quack medicines."

Interesting take on the Dan Mallory fraud.

Description of an April 2019 event on plain-language literature at Literaturhaus Frankfurt.

Kruschke on ordinal probit for analyzing 5-star reviews.

Brief article about a digital (only?) e-book from Bloomberg. Like Kindle Singles, I think.

Basic recommendations for book design.

Ulf Hermjakob et al., “Translating a Language You Don’t Know in the Chinese Room,” in Proceedings of ACL 2018, System Demonstrations, 2018, 62–67.

Chad M. Topaz et al., “Diversity of Artists in Major U.S. Museums,” PLOS ONE 14, no. 3 (March 20, 2019): e0212852, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0212852. Abstract: The U.S. art museum sector is grappling with diversity. While previous work has investigated the demographic diversity of museum staffs and visitors, the diversity of artists in their collections has remained unreported. We conduct the first large-scale study of artist diversity in museums. By scraping the public online catalogs of 18 major U.S. museums, deploying a sample of 10,000 artist records comprising over 9,000 unique artists to crowdsourcing, and analyzing 45,000 responses, we infer artist genders, ethnicities, geographic origins, and birth decades. Our results are threefold. First, we provide estimates of gender and ethnic diversity at each museum, and overall, we find that 85% of artists are white and 87% are men. Second, we identify museums that are outliers, having significantly higher or lower representation of certain demographic groups than the rest of the pool. Third, we find that the relationship between museum collection mission and artist diversity is weak, suggesting that a museum wishing to increase diversity might do so without changing its emphases on specific time periods and regions. Our methodology can be used to broadly and efficiently assess diversity in other fields.

Steps towards playing arbitrary text-based games. From the first paragraph: "Text-based games are complex, interactive simulations in which text describes the game state and players make progress by entering text actions. They can be seen as sequential decision making tasks where accomplishing certain goals earns rewards (points). Solving these games requires both Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques."

Interesting project. Seems to have a pay-to-access data download available.

Great reporting. Firm evidence that Apple is not genuinely committed to user privacy. Contradicts Apple's public-facing marketing and PR. Apple dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices at the request of the FBI. '“They decided they weren’t going to poke the bear anymore,” the person said, referring to Apple’s court battle with the FBI in 2016 over access to an iPhone ...'

"Less-educated Americans born in the 1960s fare much worse than those born 20 years earlier due to wage changes, shorter life expectancy, and higher medical costs"

Lewis estate refuses to license intellectual monopoly rights. Spufford prints 75 and gives them to friends.