Theatre Breaks – your questions answered http://theatrebreaksmag.co.uk/theatre-breaks-your-questions-answered/
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Theatre Breaks – your questions answered http theatrebreaksmag…
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March 12 2012, 6:13am | Comments »
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http astore amazon co uk londontheatrebreaks 21 Theatre…
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http://astore.amazon.co.uk/londontheatrebreaks-21 Theatre Breaks Magazine merchandise, DVDs CDs cast recordings
February 27 2012, 7:20am | Comments »
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Bob Dylan posts web message about China shows
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/14/bob-dylan-posts-web-message-about-china-shows
Bob Dylan on his own websites claims the authorities did not censor his setlist for the recent China concerts.
This article titled “Bob Dylan posts web message about China shows” was written by Caspar Llewellyn Smith, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 13th May 2011 18.12 UTC Confounding seasoned Bob Dylan fans, the 69-year old song and dance man has posted a message on his official website addressing the controversy surrounding his concerts in China in April. Dylan has never previously communicated with his followers in this way, but he has now refuted the suggestion that he allowed the Chinese government to censor his setlist. Several critics – if not all – questioned his motivation, including New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote that Dylan “sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.” In response to such accusations, Dylan wrote on bobdylan.com that the Chinese authorities had not refused him permission to play there, and while “according to Mojo magazine the concerts were attended mostly by ex-pats”, there were not many empty seats and this was not true. “If anybody wants to check with any of the concert-goers they will see that it was mostly Chinese young people that came,” he continued. Dylan added: “The Chinese press did tout me as a 60s icon, however, and posted my picture all over the place with Joan Baez, Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The concert attendees probably wouldn’t have known about any of those people. Regardless, they responded enthusiastically to the songs on my last four or five records. Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn’t have known my early songs anyway.” In respect to the idea that the Chinese government vetted the setlist, Dylan wrote: “We played all the songs that we intended to play”. The singer turns 70 on 24 May, and with an oblique reference to the happy occasion, the sometime author and radio show host concluded this novel missive: “Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.”
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May 14 2011, 3:20pm | Comments »
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EU raids ebook publishers in price fixing investigation
Big companies trying to maximise profits by setting up price fixing cartels? Whatever next. EU story about ebook publishing
This article titled “EU raids ebook publishers in price fixing investigation” was written by Benedicte Page and Leigh Phillips in Brussels, for The Guardian on Friday 4th March 2011 19.36 UTC The European commission has launched morning raids on several publishing houses suspected of fixing the prices of ebooks, as a huge battle for the future of the sector is fought within the publishing and technology industries. Officials in Brussels have refused to say how many or which publishers were targeted although a spokesman for Hachette, famed for its dictionaries, confirmed that it was among them. The inquiry is understood to be focused on French companies. In a statement, the commission said that it “has reason to believe that the companies concerned may have violated EU anti-trust rules that prohibit cartels and other restrictive business practices”. The EU competition spokeswoman, Amelia Torres, said: “We have suspicions of collusion to keep prices high. But if our suspicions prove to be founded, this would have an impact across the EU because ebooks are sold across borders.” She added that the firms involved face fines if the commission finds “hard evidence”. The development comes on the heels of an investigation in January by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading into whether arrangements between certain publishers and retailers over the sale of ebooks “may breach competition law”. Investigation teams have asked many of the biggest London publishing houses, including HarperCollins, Hachette and Penguin, for all records and documents relating to ebook sales. The OFT said the investigation was “at an early stage”, stressing: “It should not be assumed that the parties involved have breached competition law.” It is thought the investigation could last a year. The focus for the price-fixing investigation is understood to be what is called the agency model, which has been adopted by almost all the biggest publishers for their ebook sales. This is distinct from the traditional wholesale model, in which retailers buy the books from the publisher and can then do what they wish with them. Under the agency model, the retailer acts as an agent of the publisher, which itself sets the retail price of the ebooks, with the retailer taking a commission. Publishers see the agency model as crucial because it allows them to trade with Apple, which was already using it for iTunes, and also to control the price at which their ebooks are sold. Until the agency model was imposed, Amazon had been setting a $9.99 (£6) standard price for new bestsellers in the US and discounting the Kindle editions of some of last autumn’s UK bestsellers by as much as 72%. Amazon, the ebook pioneer that makes the Kindle reading platform, unsurprisingly dislikes the agency model. The OFT said it had received “significant” complaints but did not name the sources. Ronald Blunden, Hachette’s head of communications, denied that the company engaged in price fixing. “Emphatically no,” he said. “We are dealing with distributors who have considerable clout. “We found that in the US, electronic retailers began to apply large discounts on ebooks, driving the cost down. Steadily the spread between the price of a printed book and an ebook became so substantial that we felt it was just unacceptable.” “It’s important for the publisher to control the retail price,” Blunden continued. “We don’t want the items sold below cost, as the perceived value of books becomes damaged. Once this happens, can we expect online retailers to absorb the cost of financing the editing and publishing of books?” John Makinson, the Penguin group chief executive, argued that the “very important” agency model contributes to a competitive ebooks marketplace. “To have vibrant competitive markets, it’s important that Apple and the other digital vendors have a place in that market. The agency model made it possible to have that choice,” he said. Makinson added that he saw “a certain irony” in an OFT investigation designed to ensure competition and consumer choice. “That in our view is what the agency agreement has provided,” he said. Novelist Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World, agreed. “If the agency model is really a problem under EU law, the law is the problem, not the industry,” he said. “Otherwise you fall back into a situation where Amazon controls the market. This is not to demonise Amazon, but they are a massive portion of the physical market and if their wholesale model also dominates the digital book market, it becomes much harder to negotiate with them.” Philip Jones, deputy editor of the trade magazine The Bookseller, said control over pricing was the most single important issue facing publishers. “I don’t think they can convince consumers that ebooks themselves are worth the same as print books, therefore they effectively have to strong-arm them,” he said. “If you allow the market to decide, ebooks will become too cheap and you won’t be able to pay authors, editors, or all the infrastructure that sustains the industry.”
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March 5 2011, 4:16am | Comments »
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Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/20/apples-slice-makes-the-ipad-a-bad-deal-for-newspapers
Well you’d think they’d be glad of 70% of something rather than 100% of nothing? This article titled “Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers” was written by Peter Preston, for The Observer on Sunday 20th February 2011 00.05 UTC It’s a straightforward transaction. You produce your newspaper priced at £1. Distributing and selling it – via wholesalers and retailers – takes maybe 33p of that. There’s only 67p a time left to pay for the newsprint and ink you need, plus staff wages, heat, light and the usual stuff. And there’s one added burden. Unless readers are signed up to buy their copies by subscription, you don’t know who they are. You can’t sell holidays or books to them. You can’t market lists of true believers. Conventional news-vending is fatally blind. Now see a digital nirvana on the horizon. Here’s Apple selling 40m iPads this year. Put your paper on an app at an iTunes store and you can hope, gradually, to leave all the problems of print behind. Except that, as of last week, Apple has imposed a new regime for selling from its tuneful store: it wants 30% of everything. Worse, it will only allow subscribers to sign on for marketing purposes – and most, inevitably, won’t. Compared with print, then, distributing and selling your iPad version of a £1 paper will cost only 3p or so less a copy – and you still won’t know the names of those who are buying and reading you. Only Apple will be able to pluck fruit from that particular tree. Good dead, bad deal? Lousy deal on first sight. Whereupon Google promptly launched its own One Pass pricing system for publishers – taking only 10p in the pound and leaving papers and magazines in control of readership lists. A pretty effective response, you’d think: a riposte to make Apple crumble. There’s certainly bargaining leverage here – but don’t get carried away. Some papers, like the Mail, have signed up for possible One Pass use already. But nobody will be able to put together comprehensive, overall figures for advertisers citing a single incontrovertible system while the iPad keeps user dominance over competitors such as Google’s Android system, with its different apps. It’s Godzilla versus King Kong in cyberspace. The sum of all fears – Apple moving from a 30% to 50% cut, for instance – is stark. But rather less terrifying versions don’t exactly bring much cheer, either. You need to produce print papers, website and smartphone versions, an iPad app and an Android app. All work, cost and cash. You need to market your paper in an online environment where hundreds of news sources are struggling for a foothold: more big bucks. And what have you got when you add up the figures at the end of a long, sweaty day? Not profits restored by the wonders of hi-tech. Just another puddle of red ink.
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February 20 2011, 9:31am | Comments »
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Theatre Breaks by Coach
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/10/26/theatre-breaks-by-coach
I tend to bang on about rail travel as preferable to driving, but theatre breaks by coach offer a different kind of experience altogether. People over a certain age may well have bad memories of coach journeys back in the bad old days when there were no onboard facilities, long uncomfortable journeys around bendy trunk roads with groups of badly behaved people and children. I know I do. But modern coaches have air conditioning, plush comfortable seating, traffic news by radio and sat nav, personal entertainment and are a fast and relaxing way to travel hundreds of miles from city centre to city centre. When you arrive in London on a theatre break by coach, you are not left to yourself to find the hotel and the theatre because you are part of a coach party who are all going to the same show and you usually get picked up outside the theatre by the coach which then drives you all directly to the hotel after the show. That can make the whole stopover a lot more manageable for some people. Theatre Breaks by Coach - Theatre Breaks Magazine Another thing I’m really excited about being able to offer now that we have Coach Theatre Breaks available through the Magazine Readers Offers is the opportunity to book a theatre break for one. Yes, there is a single room supplement to cover the extra hotel costs, but it’s a lot better than being confronted with a booking form that asks you to select the number of tickets required starting at two! And if you go on a coach trip to London’s West End as a single person then you have the perfect choice as to whether you want to keep yourself to yourself or socialise a bit with other people who are coming from the same town as yourself and will be around at the hotel and on the coach journey home again after having seen the same show.
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October 26 2010, 5:55am | Comments »
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Theatre Breaks Magazine
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/07/27/theatre-breaks-magazine
Theatre Breaks Magazine A couple of months ago Linda and I quietly launched the Theatre Breaks Magazine to supplement the London Theatre Breaks blog. The idea is to have a place where there’s less of the news about individual theatre shows, extension dates and cast changes, but much more of the general information for people thinking about going on theatre breaks to London. Using the magazine metaphor with a Wordpress magazine styled blog theme, we can distinguish between the more timely news orientated short posts on the blog, and the longer lasting, more in-depth advice and tips we are able to explore on the magazine. Underneath it’s still the industry standard WordPress platform of course, just being used for a slightly different purpose.
So far we’ve covered subjects such as how to get get hold of your tickets, internet security, issues concerning motorists, theatre breaks with children, and a wide variety of things to do in London. Further answers to legitimate questions are building up into a Theatre Breaks FAQ.
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July 27 2009, 5:24am | Comments »
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