Tech Weekly: The iPad analysed and Amazon’s ebook war

There's an iPad flavour to most of this week's progamme as we deconstruct the most anticipated launch of 2010. Was the launch of Apple's iPad a whole lot of hot air or the next evolution in gadgetry? The debate begins as author and technology commentator Nick Carr joins us to debate the highs and the lows of the next must-have gadget, and Bobbie Johnson describes getting his hands on the iPad. The studio is also buzzing with the escalating row between publishing house Macmillan and Amazon . Did the virtual bookseller drawn a line in the sand by removing all of Macmillan's books from its shelves at the weekend? Was the launch of the iPad a contributing factor

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Tech Weekly: The iPad analysed and Amazon's ebook war

Editor quits after accepting bogus science article

Science journal fails to spot hoax despite heavy hints from authors The editor-in-chief of an academic journal has resigned after his publication accepted a hoax article. The Open Information Science Journal failed to spot that the incomprehensible computer-generated paper was a fake. This was despite heavy hints from its authors, who claimed they were from the Centre for Research in Applied Phrenology – which forms the acronym Crap. The journal, which claims to subject every paper to the scrutiny of other academics, so-called "peer review", accepted the paper. Philip Davis, a graduate student at the University of Ithaca in New York, who was behind the hoax, said he wanted to test the editorial standards of the journal's publisher, Bentham Science Publishers. Davis had received unsolicited emails from Bentham asking him to submit papers to some of its 200+ journals that cover a wide range of subject matter from neuroscience to engineering. If their papers are accepted, academics pay a fee in return for Bentham publishing the papers online. They can then be viewed by other academics for free. Davis, with the help of Kent Anderson, a member of the publishing team at the New England Journal of Medicine, created the hoax computer science paper. The pair submitted their paper, Deconstructing Access Points, under false names. Four months later, they were told it had been accepted and the fee to have it published was $800 (almost £500). Davis then withdrew the paper and revealed it as a hoax. Bambang Parmanto has since stepped down as editor-in-chief of the Open Information Science Journal. Mahmood Alam, Bentham's director of publications, told New Scientist: "In this particular case, we were aware that the article submitted was a hoax and we tried to find out the identity of the individual by pretending the article had been accepted for publication when in fact it was not." Davis told the magazine that he had not been directly contacted. The hoax has triggered a debate about "open access" journals, which charge academics fees to publish their papers

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Editor quits after accepting bogus science article

We must make e-books pirate-proof | Seth Freedman

Publishers must learn from the mistakes of the music industry and protect e-book copyrighted content from thieves On Monday, I said the traveller's prayer when getting on the bus, as I do every time I go on a journey out of Tel Aviv. Rather than carrying a prayer book with me, I have an e-siddur installed on my phone for just such occasions, allowing me instant access to the necessary text. Likewise, I don't bother buying a paper anymore, preferring to sit and read the news via my phone's LCD screen; over the space of the 40-minute bus ride, I'd devoured articles and op-ed columns from a plethora of publications with the greatest of ease. By using my phone in this way, I play my part in contributing to the slow death of both the media and publishing industries , not to mention all the related trades which suffer in the wake of their decline. Publishers of prayer books miss out on the revenue from potential purchasers who opt instead for free online versions; likewise, newspapers have lost control of their own content, and are paying a heavy price for their incapacity. As far as newspapers are concerned, there appears little that can be done to stop the rot, save for desperately trying to salvage some scraps of revenue from online advertising and subscription. For the publishing world, however, there is still time to address the potential catastrophe awaiting the industry, if only those at the helm of the flotilla are willing to chart a course out of earshot of the e-book sirens' song. It is no secret that the moment the music business sold its soul to the compact disc devil, the industry was in serious trouble. CDs, followed by MP3s, meant that the listening public now had access to high quality files of their favourite music, and could pirate copies at will, should their desire to save money prove more compelling than their sense of ethics. The music industry went into near-terminal decline in the Napster years, thanks to an inability to keep control over, or make money from, the copyrighted material for which the record companies had paid through the nose. The lure of forcing consumers to "upgrade" from vinyl to CD, then from CD to MP3, was financially expedient in the short term, but in the long term was a modern-day equivalent of Dorian Gray's fateful pact. The publishing world is teetering on the brink of a similarly suicidal drop today. With the advent of the Kindle , along with all manner of related new royalty systems and e-publishing deals, the industry is being lured into a trap from which it might never escape – and it's easy to see why they're tempted. Borders' latest financial results showed a 12% decline in revenue at its bookshops, largely due to the impact of the credit crisis, and in a climate where the public has less disposal money to spend, low-cost models such as e-book publications are seen as a natural way for publishers to ride out the economic storm. With resistance weakening towards the concept of e-books, Amazon reported a 24% increase in earnings in the first quarter of this year, driven in no small parts by sales of its Kindle e-reader

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We must make e-books pirate-proof | Seth Freedman