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George Perec’s W, and the tyranny of the Olympic Ideal, by James Bridle.

The Frenchman Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, believed that the Olympic games could be a force for peace in the world, creating a new religion “adhering to an ideal of a higher life, to strive for perfection”, as well an an elite “whose origins are completely egalitarian”. But they had a darker, parallel root: Coubertin had seen his nation humiliated in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and blamed its failure on the dissoluteness of its youth. Only through strenuous physical exercise…

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Flickr, everyone’s favourite photo site, just added video, and not everyone is happy about it. But Flickr has been very clever – their video offering is not designed to rival YouTube or the rest as a repository for short films, comedy clips and old adverts. Instead, they’ve limited the videos to 90 seconds to create a new niche: the long moment.

The idea has been around for a while – see the ‘long pose’ meme on YouTube for an example – but Flickr’s smarts are in seeing the gradual amalgamation of digital video and still photography…

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If you’ve not been keeping up, Amazon is making a massive and highly controversial land-grab for POD and the long tail of publishing. More info here. As this is a very big issue indeed, and no worthy body on this side of the pond seems to be making a fuss, I’m only too happy to reprint this statement and appeal from the US Authors’ Guild. Don’t think it won’t happen here.

Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house…

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