SharewareHeroes.com recreates all the fonts and cursor you'd see after dialing up a local bulletin-board system in the early 1990s. It's to promote a new book — successfully crowdfunded by 970 backers — to chronicle "a critical yet long overlooked chapter in video game history: the rise and eventual fall of the shareware model.

The book promises to explore "a hidden games publishing market" that for several years "had no powerful giants," with games instead distributed "across the nascent internet for anyone to enjoy (and, if they liked it enough, pay for)."

And the site features a free excerpt from the chapter about DOOM: It seemed there was no stopping id Software. Commander Keen had given them their freedom, and Wolfenstein 3D's mega-success had earned them the financial cushion to do anything. But all they wanted was to beat the last game — to outdo both themselves and everyone else. And at the centre of that drive was a push for ever-better technology. By the time Wolfenstein 3D's commercial prequel Spear of Destiny hit retail shelves, John Carmack had already built a new engine.

This one had texture-mapped floors and ceilings — not just walls. It supported diminished lighting, which meant things far away could recede into the shadows, disappearing into the distance. And it had variable-height rooms, allowing for elevated platforms where projectile-throwing enemies could hang out, and most exciting of all it allowed for non-orthogonal walls — which meant that rooms could be odd-shaped, with walls jutting out at any arbitrary angle from each other, rather than the traditional rectangular boxed design that had defined first-person-perspective games up until then.

It ran at half the speed of Wolfenstein 3D's engine, but they were thinking about doing a 3D Keen game next — so that wouldn't matter. At least not until they saw it in action. Everyone but Tom Hall suddenly got excited about doing another shooter, which meant Carmack would have to optimise the hell out of his engine to restore that sense of speed. Briefly they considered a proposal from 20th Century Fox to do a licensed Aliens shooter, but they didn't like the idea of giving up their creative independence, so they considered how they could follow up Wolfenstein 3D with something new. Fighting aliens in space is old hat. This time it could be about fighting demons in space. This time it could be called DOOM.
The book's title is Shareware Heroes: The Renegades Who Redefined Gaming at the Dawn of the Internet — here's a page listing the people interviewed, as well as the book's table of contents.

And this chapter culminates with what happened when the first version of DOOM was finally released. "BBSs and FTP servers around America crashed under the immense load of hundreds of thousands of people clamouring to download the game on day one.

"Worse for universities around the country, people were jumping straight into the multiplayer once they had the game — and they kept crashing the university networks..."

The stock market, real estate and cryptocurrencies did poorly in 2022, but the global luxury goods market grew 20 percent. People may have had less, but they spent more on fine arts and collectibles that serve no function except to provide pleasure. From a report: The culture is bursting with new material -- every day, thousands of new books are published and 100,000 new songs are released on Spotify -- but the old stuff offers a sweeter emotional payoff for many. It could be tapes or posters or pictures or comics or coins or sports cards or memorabilia. It might be from their childhood or the childhood they never had, or it might merely express a longing to be anywhere but 2023. The common element is this: People like to own a thing from a thing they love. For Mr. Carlson and millions like him, the nostalgia factory is working overtime.

When Mr. Carlson first began to look for sealed VHS cassettes, they were considered so much plastic trash. "Back to the Future," "The Goonies," "Blade Runner," were about $20 each on eBay. He put them on a shelf, little windows into his past, and started an Instagram account called Rare and Sealed. Then tapes began to get scarcer and much more expensive. People trapped at home had lots of money to spend during the pandemic. But it was more than that. Objects with a bit of history have an obvious attraction in a high-tech world. The current cultural tumult, with its boom in fake images, endless arguments over everything and now the debut of imperious A.I. chatbots, increases the appeal of things that can't be plugged in. At the same time, advances in technology mean it is ever easier to buy expensive things online. Bids at auctions routinely reach tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars.

Steve Jobs Archive: The official ebook edition of Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is free to read on Apple Books and from participating libraries through our partners at Libby. You can also download the book to view it on any compatible e-reader: our EPUB file works on almost all tablets, smartphones, desktop computers, and digital reading devices. From a speech in 2007: There's lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.

And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something's transmitted there. And it's a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what's really important to us."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Z-Library appears to be shrugging off a criminal investigation as if nothing ever happened. The site continues to develop its shadow library and, following a successful fundraiser, now plans to expand its services to the physical book market. Z-Library envisions a book 'sharing' market, where its millions of users can pick up paperbacks at dedicated "Z-Points" around the globe. [...] With more than 12 million books in its archive, Z-Library advertised itself as the largest repository of pirated books on the Internet. This success was briefly interrupted late last year when the U.S. Government seized the site's main domain names. The enforcement action also led to the arrest of two alleged Russian operators of the site, who now find themselves at the center of a criminal investigation. A crackdown of this magnitude usually marks the end of a pirate site, but Z-Library appears to be going in the opposite direction. The site has made a full comeback with a more 'censorship-resistant' setup and recently collected tens of thousands of dollars in donations.

In a new message, posted this week, Z-Library thanks its userbase for their generous contributions, noting that it secured all the necessary funds to ensure continued development. Apparently, this includes support for offline sharing. In addition to offering millions of ebooks, Z-Library says that it's working on a new service that will help users to share physical copies with each other. "Books you have read should not gather dust on your shelf -- instead, they can get a second life in the hands of new readers! This helps to preserve the literary heritage and spread the knowledge and ideas contained in books to more people," they write. "[W]e want to organize 'Z-Points' -- collection and storage points for books that will be the link between those who share their books and those who need them. Book owners who are willing to share them with other users can send books to the nearest Z-Point in their region. And those who need books stored in these points will be able to receive them for their use."

This sounds like a P2P competitor for traditional libraries. Interestingly, however, Z-Library believes that existing libraries are ideally suited to become Z-Points. People can also volunteer to run a Z-Point from their own homes. Running a book lending point will require quite a bit of storage space and organizational effort so fulfillment centers and third-party logistics services are also welcome to join in. The Z-Point idea is still in the planning phase. According to Z-Library, users will be able to send books by mail. These can then be loaned by others and/or sent by mail when requested. This proposal is quite different from the traditional pirate ebook library Z-Library offers now. And loaning a book to someone is generally not seen as copyright infringement either unless it's a copied ebook.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've ever researched anything online, you've probably used the Internet Archive (IA). The IA, founded in 1996 by librarian and engineer Brewster Kahle, describes itself as "a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more." Their annals include 37 million books, many of which are old tomes that aren't commercially available. It has classic films, plenty of podcasts and -- via its Wayback Machine -- just about every deleted webpage ever. Four corporate publishers have a big problem with this, so they've sued the Internet Archive. In Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Hachette Publishing Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Wiley have alleged that the IA is committing copyright infringement. Now a federal judge has ruled in the publishers' favor. The IA is appealing the decision.

[...] Not only is this concern-trolling disingenuous, but the ruling itself, grounded in copyright, is a smack against fair use. It brings us one step closer to perpetual copyright -- the idea that individuals should own their work forever. The IA argued that their project was covered by fair use, as the Emergency Library provides texts for educational and scholarly purposes. Even writers objected to the court's ruling. More than 300 writers signed a petition against the lawsuit, including Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein and -- get this -- Chuck Wendig. Writers lost nothing from the Emergency Library and gained everything from it. For my part, I've acquired research materials from the IA that I wouldn't have found anywhere else. The archive has scads of primary sources which otherwise might require researchers to fly across the country for access. The Internet Archive is good for literacy. It's good for the public. It's good for readers, writers and anyone who's invested in literary education. It does not harm authors, whose income is no more dented by it than any library programs. Even the Emergency Library's initial opponents have conceded this. The federal court's decision is a victory for corporations and a disaster for everyone else. If this decision isn't reversed, human beings will lose more knowledge than the Library of Alexandra ever contained. If IA's appeal fails, it will be a tragedy of historical proportions.

The online shop Book Depository is due to close at the end of April, vendors and publishing partners have been told. This comes after the bookseller's parent company Amazon announced it had decided to "eliminate" a number of positions across its Devices and Books businesses. The Guardian reports: The Gloucester-based bookseller was founded in 2004 by Stuart Felton and Andrew Crawford, a former Amazon employee, with the mantra of "selling 'less of more' rather than'more of less'". It aimed to sell 6m titles covering a wide variety of genres and topics, as opposed to focusing solely on bestsellers. While originally a rival to Amazon, it was acquired by the retail giant in 2011, causing some in the publishing industry to worry about the tightening of the American company's "stranglehold" on the UK book trade.

According to the trade magazine the Bookseller, an email sent out to vendors and publishing partners explained that Book Depository will be closing, and that the last date customers will be able to place orders is 26 April. "Over the coming weeks we will complete a winding down of the business, including discontinuing our listings as a marketplace seller and closing our website," Andy Chart, head of vendor management, wrote. "I would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you, from everyone at Book Depository and our book-loving customers, for your supportive partnership over the years in helping us to make printed books more accessible to readers around the world," he concluded.

Klaus Teuber, who 28 years ago created The Settlers of Catan, an enduringly popular board game that has spawned college intramural teams and international tournaments, been name-checked on "South Park" and "Parks and Recreation," inspired a novel and sold some 40 million copies worldwide, died on Saturday. He was 70. From a report: Catan GmbH, which publishes and licenses the game, now known simply as Catan, posted news of his death on its website. It said only that he died after a short illness and did not say where. Mr. Teuber was managing a dental lab, a job he found stressful, when he began designing games as a way to unwind. "In the beginning, these games were just for me," he told Forbes in 2016. "I always have stories in my head -- I would read a book, and if I liked it, I wanted to experience it as a game."

That was the origin of his first big success, a game called Barbarossa, which grew out of his admiration for "The Riddle-Master" trilogy, fantasy books written in the 1970s by Patricia A. McKillip. "I was sorry to see it come to an end," he told The New Yorker in 2014, "so I tried to experience this novel in a game." In 1988 that game won the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in Germany, considered the most prestigious award in the board game world, Germany being particularly enthusiastic about board games. He won that award twice more, in 1990 (for Hoity Toity) and in 1991 (for Wacky Wacky West), before scoring his biggest success with what was known in German as Die Siedler von Catan. In that game, players build settlements in a new land by collecting brick, lumber, wool, ore and grain. Trading with other players is part of the strategy, lending a social element to the game play. In 1995 the game won both the game of the year award and the Deutscher Spiele Preis, the German Games Award. It caught on, first in Germany and then, as editions in other languages became available, all over.

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post: Steve Jobs never lived to be an old wise man.

But running Apple and Pixar, tumbling and thriving, earned him a lot of wisdom in his 56 years. Now, a small group of his family, friends and former colleagues have collected it into "Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words," available free to the public online starting on April 11. Somewhere between a posthumous memoir and a scrapbook album, it is told through notes and drafts Jobs emailed to himself, excerpts of letters and speeches, oral histories and interviews, photos and mementos. (Some physical copies are being produced for Apple and Disney employees, but that format won't be for sale to the general public.)

"Imagine yourself as an old person looking back on your life," Jobs wrote in a June 2005 email to himself as he was preparing to give the Stanford commencement speech. "Your life will be a story. It will be your story, with its highs and lows, its heros and villains, its forks in the road that mean everything." The book, published by the Steve Jobs Archive, will be released on Apple Books and the Steve Jobs Archive website. The fact that it aesthetically resembles an Apple product — mostly gray and white, minimalist — is no coincidence: It was designed by LoveFrom, the firm founded by Jony Ive, Apple's former chief design officer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Late Tuesday night, the Missouri House of Representatives voted for a state operating budget with a $0 line for public libraries. While the budget still needs to work its way through the Senate and the governor's office, state funding for public libraries is very much on the chopping block in Missouri. This comes after Republican House Budget Chairman Cody Smith proposed a $4.5 million cut to public libraries' state aid last week in the initial House Budget Committee hearing, where Smith cited a lawsuit filed against Missouri by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU-MO) as the reason for the cut.

ACLU-MO filed the suit on behalf of the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association (MLA) in an effort to overturn a state law passed in 2022 that bans sexually explicit material from schools. Since it was first enacted in August, librarians and other educators have faced misdemeanor charges punishable by up to a year in jail or a $2,000 fine for giving students access to books the state has deemed sexually explicit. The Missouri law defined (PDF) explicit sexual material as images "showing human masturbation, deviate sexual intercourse," "sexual intercourse, direct physical stimulation of genitals, sadomasochistic abuse," or showing human genitals. The lawsuit claims that school districts have been pulling books from their shelves.

"The house budget committee's choice to retaliate against two private, volunteer-led organizations by punishing the patrons of Missouri's public libraries is abhorrent," Tom Bastian, deputy director for communications for ACLU-MO said in a statement to Motherboard. Like in all ACLU cases, the organization is not charging the two Missouri library groups for services. Both library organizations are also run by volunteers -- every state has an equivalent of these two organizations that serve public and school libraries. In other words, a politician either lied or didn't have his facts straight, and now 160 library districts risk losing state aid in June. "State Aid helps libraries provide relevant collections, literacy based programming, and technology resources to their communities," Otter Bowman, president of the MLA told Motherboard in a statement. "Our rural libraries rely the most heavily on this funding to serve their communities, and they will be crippled by this drastic budget cut."

"A shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun," writes a New York-based children's book author in the Atlantic. But why? The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this — most American children have smartphones by the age of 11 — as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn't the whole story. A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984. I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling — and depressing — is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books....

In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early '80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost. This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: "Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language...."

[A]s several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices.... [W]e need to get to the root of the problem, which is not about book lengths but the larger educational system. We can't let tests control how teachers teach: Close reading may be easy to measure, but it's not the way to get kids to fall in love with storytelling. Teachers need to be given the freedom to teach in developmentally appropriate ways, using books they know will excite and challenge kids.
"There's a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now," librarian/public school teacher Jennifer LaGarde tells the Atlantic. And their article notes the problem doesn't end after grade school.

"By middle school, not only is there even less time for activities such as class read-alouds, but instruction also continues to center heavily on passage analysis, said LaGarde, who taught that age group."

The Verge reports: A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library. Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create "derivative works," and so would have needed authorization from the books' copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program. The Internet Archive says it will appeal.
The decision was "a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve," argued Chris Freeland, the director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive. In a blog post he argued the decision "impacts libraries across the U.S. who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.
The Verge adds that the judge rejected "fair use" arguments which had previously protected a 2014 digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust: Koetl wrote that any "alleged benefits" from the Internet Archive's library "cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers," declaring that "there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive's] copying and unauthorized lending," and that copying these books doesn't provide "criticism, commentary, or information about them." He notes that the Google Books use was found "transformative" because it created a searchable database instead of simply publishing copies of books on the internet.

Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and that it was "irrelevant" that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience. According to data obtained during the trial, the Internet Archive currently hosts around 70,000 e-book "borrows" a day.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader esme for sharing the news.

Variety has analyzed the often underappreciated process of selecting movie titles in Hollywood. As one of the most crucial aspects of a film's marketing strategy, the title serves as the first point of contact for potential audiences, shaping perceptions and driving intrigue. In a highly competitive industry, a captivating and effective title can be the difference between success and failure at the box office, the article argues.

The naming process typically involves collaboration between a diverse range of stakeholders, including studio executives, marketing teams, producers, directors, and screenwriters. The title must not only align with the film's story and themes, but also appeal to target demographics, meet legal requirements, and translate well into foreign languages. As a result, naming a film can be a complex and lengthy endeavor. Some movies adopt their titles from pre-existing source material, such as books or plays, while others rely on brainstorming sessions, market research, and even audience testing. High-profile examples of title changes include "Pretty Woman," originally named "3000," and "Scream," initially titled "Scary Movie."

A federal judge on Monday will weigh pleas by four major book publishers to stop an online lending library from freely offering digital copies of books, in a case that raises novel questions about digital-library rights and the reach of copyright law that protects the work of writers and publishers. From a report: Nonprofit organization Internet Archive created the digital books, building its collection by scanning physical book copies in its possession. It lends the digital versions to readers worldwide, with more than three million digitized books on offer. Titles range from Stephen King's scary bestseller "It" to Kristin Hannah's historical novel "The Nightingale." The archive expanded its digital lending during the Covid-19 pandemic, temporarily lifting limits on how many people could check out a book at one time. The move helped prompt the publishers' copyright infringement lawsuit in 2020, which is pending before U.S. District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan.

The plaintiffs are Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, John Wiley and Sons, Bertelsmann SE's Penguin Random House, and HarperCollins Publishers, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp. They argue the Internet Archive book platform "constitutes willful digital piracy on an industrial scale" and hurts writers and publishers who rely on consumers buying their products. William Adams, general counsel for HarperCollins Publishers, said the archive's approach has no basis in law. "What they're doing is supplanting what authors and publishers do with libraries and have been doing for a long time," he said. The Internet Archive says its lending practices are a fair and legal use of the books, in the same way that traditional bricks-and-mortar libraries have a right to share their collections with the public.

InfoWorld interviews Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research (who is also a pioneer in design patterns, agile methods, and one of the creators of UML).

Here's some of the highlights: Q: Let me begin by asking something "of the moment." There has been an almost cultural war between object-oriented programming and functional programming. What is your take on this?

Booch: I had the opportunity to conduct an oral history with John Backus — one of the pioneers of functional programming — in 2006 on behalf of the Computer History Museum. I asked John why functional programming didn't enter the mainstream, and his answer was perfect: "Functional programming makes it easy to do hard things" he said, "but functional programming makes it very difficult to do easy things...."


Q: Would you talk a bit about cryptography and Web3?

Booch: Web3 is a flaming pile of feces orbiting a giant dripping hairball. Cryptocurrencies — ones not backed by the full faith and credit of stable nation states — have only a few meaningful use cases, particularly if you are a corrupt dictator of a nation with a broken economic system, or a fraud and scammer who wants to grow their wealth at the expense of greater fools. I was one of the original signatories of a letter to Congress in 2022 for a very good reason: these technologies are inherently dangerous, they are architecturally flawed, and they introduce an attack surface that threatens economies....


Q: What do you make of transhumanism?

Booch: It's a nice word that has little utility for me other than as something people use to sell books and to write clickbait articles....


Q: Do you think we'll ever see conscious machines? Or, perhaps, something that compels us to accept them as such?

Booch: My experience tells me that the mind is computable. Hence, yes, I have reason to believe that we will see synthetic minds. But not in my lifetime; or yours; or your children; or your children's children. Remember, also, that this will likely happen incrementally, not with a bang, and as such, we will co-evolve with these new species.

"Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race," reports the British newspaper the Times. Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer's books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle. Dahl's biographer Matthew Dennison last night accused the publisher of "strong-arming readers into accepting a new orthodoxy in which Dahl himself has played no part."
Meanwhile...

• Dahl's publisher earlier announced they'd also resume publishing original versions of Dahl's novels "before the end of the year," reports the BBC.

• The Telegraph notes that when he was alive, Dahl himself "threatened to never write another word if his publishers ever changed his language, promising to send his 'Enormous Crocodile' to gobble them up if they did so."

• A New York Times opinion writer adds that "the changes to Dahl's texts first began to appear more than a year ago without attracting any significant attention until now."

• Children's book author Frank Cottrell-Boyce admits in the Guardian that "as a child I disliked Dahl intensely. I felt that his snobbery was directed at people like me and that his addiction to revenge was not good. But that was fine — I just moved along."

But Cottrell-Boyce's larger point is "The key to reading for pleasure is having a choice about what you read" — and that childhood readers faces greater threats. "The outgoing children's laureate Cressida Cowell has spent the last few years fighting for her Life-changing Libraries campaign. It's making a huge difference but it would have a been a lot easier if our media showed a fraction of the interest they showed in Roald Dahl's vocabulary in our children."

Longtime Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck shares a report from CBS News: A 2012 trip to a Fayetteville, Arkansas, Walmart to pick up some milk turned out to be one for the history books. A giant bug that stopped a scientist in his tracks as he walked into the store and he ended up taking home turned out to be a rare Jurassic-era flying insect. Michael Skvarla, director of Penn State University's Insect Identification Lab, found the mysterious bug -- an experience that he says he remembers "vividly."

"I was walking into Walmart to get milk and I saw this huge insect on the side of the building," he said in a press release from Penn State. "I thought it looked interesting, so I put it in my hand and did the rest of my shopping with it between my fingers. I got home, mounted it, and promptly forgot about it for almost a decade."

[I]n the fall of 2020 when he was teaching an online course on insect biodiversity and evolution, Skvarla was showing students the bug and suddenly realized it wasn't what he originally thought. He and his students then figured out what it might be -- live on a Zoom call. "We were watching what Dr. Skvarla saw under his microscope and he's talking about the features and then just kinda stops," one of his students Codey Mathis said. "We all realized together that the insect was not what it was labeled and was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing." A clear indicator of this identification was the bug's wingspan. It was about 50 millimeters -- nearly 2 inches -- a span that the team said made it clear the insect was not an antlion. His team's molecular analysis on the bug has been published in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington.

theshowmecanuck captioned: "To be fair, he said he didn't know what it was so [he] just collected it and took it home, and then figured it out later. My thought that I added to the title was because of this quote in the story (which tickled my cynicism in humanity): "It could have been 100 years since it was even in this area -- and it's been years since it's been spotted anywhere near it..."

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Lenovo demoed a laptop and smartphone with rollable screens that "can gradually expand to offer more screen real-estate, rather than needing to be completely unfolded like books," writes Jon Porter from The Verge. These are early proof of concept devices that don't have any public release dates as of yet. From the report: Before we get into the concept laptop's signature feature, it's worth pointing out just how unassuming the device looks before its screen unrolls. Lenovo had the device sitting alongside its other laptops in a conference suite, and not a single one of the dozen-or-so journalists in attendance clocked that it was anything other than a standard ThinkPad. In its unextended form, it's got a regular looking 12.7-inch display with a 4:3 aspect ratio. That all changes with a flip of a small switch on the right of the chassis, at which point you can hear some motors whirring and the screen extends upwards. That switch causes a couple of motors in the laptop to spring into action, pulling the screen out from underneath the laptop's keyboard to hoist it up more or less vertically in front of you. It's an admittedly slow process on this concept device (from our footage it seems to take a little over ten seconds to fully extend) but eventually you're left with an almost square 15.3-inch display with an 8:9 aspect ratio. The device brings to mind LG's fancy (and eye-wateringly expensive) rollable TV that's designed to roll away when you're not using it. Only in Lenovo's case the screen is rolling down into the laptop's keyboard rather than a small box, and it also can't roll away entirely. Once fully extended, Lenovo's laptop screen has a small crease where its screen originally bent underneath the keyboard. But again -- it's a prototype.

Lenovo's other rollable device it's demoing at MWC is a Motorola smartphone. We've seen numerous companies including Samsung Display, Oppo, TCL, and even LG (RIP) show off rollable concept devices in various stages of development over the years, but we're yet to see the technology break through in a consumer device. Like a foldable, the idea is that a rollable smartphone can be small when you need it to be portable, and big when you need more screen to get the job at hand done. Lenovo's phone -- which it's calling the Motorola rollable smartphone concept -- is all about taking a small square of a display and making it longer. It's almost like a foldable flip phone, but without a secondary cover display because it's the same screen the entire time. When all neatly rolled up, Lenovo's Motorola rollable offers a 5-inch display with a 15:9 aspect ratio. Then, with a small double tap of a side button, the screen unfurls to give you a remarkably tall 6.5-inch display with a 22:9 aspect ratio. [...] "In 2019, it seemed like foldable phones were about to become the next big thing in the world of smartphones," writes Porter, in closing. "But four years later, it feels like we're still waiting for this future to become a mainstream reality. Lenovo would be the first to admit that its rollable concept devices are far from ready for prime time, but they offer a compelling argument for an alternative, rollable future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Several independent publishers have had their books removed from Kindle Unlimited because they breached an exclusivity agreement with Amazon. The actions of the book giant are covered by the mutually agreed terms. However, in many cases, it's not the authors who breached the agreement, but pirate sites who copied them, as pirates do. [...] Over the past few weeks, several authors complained that Amazon had removed their books from Kindle Unlimited because they violated their agreement. The piracy angle is front and center, raising plenty of questions and uncertainty.

Raven Kennedy, known for The Plated Prisoner Series, took her frustration to Instagram earlier this month. The author accused Amazon of sending repeated "threats". This eventually resulted in the removal of her books from Kindle Unlimited, ostensibly because these were listed on pirate sites. "Copyright infringement is outside of my control. Even though I pay a lot of money to a company to file takedown notices on my behalf, and am constantly checking the web for pirated versions, I can't keep up with all the intellectual theft. "And rather than support and help their authors, Amazon threatens me. The ironic thing is, these pirates are getting the files FROM Amazon," Kennedy added. A similar experience was shared by Carissa Broadbent, author of The War of Lost Hearts Trilogy. Again, Amazon removed a book from Kindle Unlimited for an issue that the author can't do much about. "A few hours ago, I got a stomach-dropping email from [Amazon] that Children of Fallen Gods had been removed from the Kindle store with zero warning, because of content 'freely available on the web' -- IE, piracy that I do not have any control over," Broadbent noted.

These and other authors received broad support from their readers, and sympathy from the general public. A Change.org petition launched in response has collected nearly 35,000 signatures to date, with new ones still coming in. Author Marlow Locker started the petition to send a wake-up call to Amazon. According to her, Amazon should stand behind its authors instead of punishing them for the fact that complete strangers have decided to pirate their books. Most authors will gladly comply with the exclusivity requirements, but only as far as this lies within their control. Piracy clearly isn't, especially when it happens on an almost industrial scale. "Currently, many automated systems use Amazon as a place to copy the e-files that they use for their free websites. It's completely absurd that the same company turns around and punishes an author by removing their book from KDP Select," the petition reads. From the commentary seen online, several authors have been able to resolve their issues with Amazon. And indeed, the books of Broadbent and Kennedy appear to be back online. That said, the exclusivity policy remains in place. Amazon notes that the books removed from Kindle Unlimited still remain for sale on Amazon's regular store. They also stress that authors are issued a warning with an extended timeline to try and resolve the issue before any action is taken.

"The problem is, of course, that individual authors can't stop piracy," adds TorrentFreak. "If it was that easy, most authors would be happy to do so. However, if billion-dollar publishing companies and the U.S. Government can't stop it, Amazon can't expect independent authors to 'resolve' the matter either."

Warner Bros. Pictures is revamping the "Lord of the Rings" film franchise. Variety reports: On a Thursday earnings call, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced that newly-installed studio leaders Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy have brokered a deal to make "multiple" films based on the beloved J. R. R. Tolkien books. The projects will be developed through WB label New Line Cinema. The first "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, helmed by Peter Jackson, grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide; Jackson's follow-up trilogy based on Tolkien's "The Hobbit" matched those grosses.

No filmmakers have been attached to the projects as yet, but in a statement to Variety, Jackson and his main "Lord of the Rings" collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens said Warner Bros. and Embracer "have kept us in the loop every step of the way." "We look forward to speaking with them further to hear their vision for the franchise moving forward," Jackson, Walsh and Boyens said.

The rise of AI-powered chatbots is wreaking havoc on the literary world. Sci-fi publication Clarkesworld Magazine is temporarily suspending short story submissions, citing a surge in people using AI chatbots to "plagiarize" their writing. From a report: The magazine announced the suspension days after Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke warned about AI-written works posing a threat to the entire short-story ecosystem. At the end of last year, the sci-fi publication encountered a rise in plagiarism as AI-powered chatbots gained the public's attention, Clarke wrote in a blog post. Since then, Clarkesworld has seen a massive spike in short story submissions, but much of the writing appears to come from humans relying on AI tools to pump out the text.