Tag Archives: Hi-Tech

1 Percent?

April 20, 2012 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Hustle (Hoax), Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

That’s right. E-books only account for 1 percent of all book sales in Germany.

Why is this? Let us count the ways…

Germans believe they cannot read as well on digital reading devices. This is because they have never held a digital reading device in their hands, much less tried to read from one, but still.

Germans are convinced that they are “better” at reading from paper (I don’t make this stuff up, people).

Like savages who believe that a camera captures your soul, Germans believe that an e-book reader captures the souls of the books it, uh, holds captive (OK, that part I did make up).

But the biggest reason of all Germans don’t like e-books and e-book readers is that Germans don’t like technology. Technology that isn’t German, I mean.

“In Germany we’re still at 1 percent, but that’s already an increase of 77 percent from the previous year.”

PS: Of course low e-book sales in Germany might also have to do with the fact that German book prices are set by the German culture mafia (by the publishers!? = you pay the same artificially high price everywhere) so they get to set the e-book prices, too (you can pay up to $25 for one). And although printed books are exempt from Germany’s 19 percent value added tax, e-books aren’t. Not that the system is rigged or anything. I’m just saying.

Just Say No

March 21, 2012 By in Habitudes, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As usual, I mean. Berliners in Kreuzberg (or at least that active, left-wing kind) aren’t interested in finding new solutions for urban living, thank you. And they’ll even threaten you with violence if you try to establish “temporary cultural space” to attempt to do so (go ask BMW Guggenheim Lab). Kreuzbergers don’t do culture. Temporary or otherwise.

And speaking of resistence… The rest of the country is pretty much Kreuzberg all over again (only on a much larger scale) when it comes to saying no to the Internet (some call it the Internetz).

This isn’t really a news item or anything, but now certain German businessmen types are actually starting to get worried about their country “sleeping through the Internet” age like it does.

They have come to discover that their fellow Germans provide “too few qualified professionals, suffer way too much from risk aversion and are caught up in a tightly structured regulation frenzy.” Like I said, this isn’t anything new. But the real question is: What are you going to be able to do about that? Not a damned thing, of course.

Das Internet ist ein globaler Treiber für die Wirtschaft. Doch in Deutschland bremsen Fachkräftemangel und hohe Anforderungen an den Datenschutz die Firmen aus.