Ravelry

 Crafts  No Responses »
Oct 252007
 

I finally got my Ravelry invite today. I got on the wait­ing list about a month ago, so it did­n’t take long. I spent a few minutes pok­ing around, though I will have to be care­ful as it could prove to be an immense time-sink for me, with all the dis­cus­sion about knit­ting and crochet. There’s even a group for KnitML there, which I had­n’t heard of before.

It’s inter­est­ing com­par­ing Ravelry to Face­book, as well. Sur­face impres­sions: com­pletely dif­fer­ent crowd, they don’t ask for any inform­a­tion when you sign up except for an email address, user­name, and pass­word. Of course, you can add info such as birth­day or where you live to your pro­file, but it’s not needed. Lots of links to sites out­side of Ravelry, thus the site feels much more open to the rest of the world than Face­book. And maybe because it’s more focussed, it will be more appeal­ing long-term (there already seems to be quite a lot of Face­book ennui out there in the blogosphere). 

If you’re a keen knit­ter or cro­chet­er, don’t be put off by the fact you have to join a wait­ing list; it does­n’t take long to get the invite and it looks like a worth­while resource. One neat item: the yarn list­ing includes people’s destash info.

Market Choice

 Books, Rants  No Responses »
Oct 252007
 

Here’s a fas­cin­at­ing piece dis­cuss­ing how fixed prices on books in Ger­many was actu­ally push­ing prices down (con­trary to eco­nom­ic the­ory), while sup­port­ing a wide range of booksellers.

When I was last in Ger­many, apart from my usu­al beef about Ger­man book­sellers not tak­ing cred­it cards, I found no reas­on to com­plain about the range of books that was avail­able. Chil­dren’s books are more expens­ive than I’m used to here, but a lot of that is also because most chil­dren’s books are only avail­able in hard­back and thus inher­ently more expens­ive. Paper­backs seemed reas­on­ably priced in gen­er­al, and of good typo­graph­ic­al quality. 

Peter Brant­ley has some ques­tions at the end of his piece, which I think can be applied not only to books, but also tele­vi­sion, news, indeed many aspects of what is com­monly called “cul­ture”. When the mass media and mass enter­tain­ment industry are des­per­ately try­ing to increase rat­ings by cater­ing to the fads and whims of the mass mar­ket, is this a “race to the bot­tom” as has been pos­tu­lated? Is the long tail suf­fi­cient to enable people with diverse interests (and that’s all of us at some stage or anoth­er) to have those needs met, those itches scratched? How do people find those groups, if they don’t know what to look for? 

Choice is import­ant, know­ing that you have choices is even more import­ant. It’s a bit like free speech.

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