快速查题-中学教师资格证试题

       There is a certain inevitability that ebook sales have now overtaken paperback sales on Amazon’s US site. Amazon’s

Kindle 2 is so light and so cheap that it’s easy to see why people have rushed to buy it. Though I’m still not keen on the design of the Kindle, it is a vast improvement on its predecessor and certainly tolerable. Beyond the device itself, Amazon has done a great job of rolling out Kindle apps, ensuring that people like me-who have an iPad but not a Kindle can still join in the fun.

Once you’re into the Kindle ecosystem, Amazon locks you in tightly-just as Apple does with its iTunes/ iPod ecosystem. It’s so easy to buy from Amazon’s store and the books are so cheap that it’s not worth the effort of going elsewhere.

       While I remain opposed to Amazon’s DRM (数字版权管理)-indeed, I’m opposed to DRM on any ebooks-I have to admit

that the implementation is so smooth that most Kindle users won’t care at all that their ebooks can’t be moved to other

devices.

　　The ebook trend is nowhere near peaking. Over the next five years we can expect to see more and more readers move away from printed books and pick up ebooks instead. But I don’t think that will mean the death of the printed book.

　　There are some who prefer printed books. They like having shelves filled with books they’ve read and books they plan to

read; they like the feel of the book in their hands and the different weights and typefaces and layouts of different titles. In other words, they like the physical form of the book almost as much as the words it contains.

　　I can sympathize with those people. As I wrote earlier this week, my ideal situation would be for publishers to bundle

e-books with printed ones-in much the same way that film studio DVDs with digital copies of films. There’s no reason to think

that lovers of printed books will change their minds. There will undoubtedly be fewer of them as time goes by because more

people will grow up with ebooks and spend little time with printed ones. However, just as there are people who love vinyl

records(黑胶唱片), even if they were born well into the CD era, there will still be a dedicated minority who love physical books.

　　Since there are fewer of these people, that will mean fewer bookshops and higher prices for printed books but I don’t think the picture is entirely bleak. There is scope for smaller print runs of lavishly designed printed books and bookshops aimed at

book lovers, rather than the Stieg Larsson-reading masses. With mainstream readers out of the printed book market,

booklovers might even find they get a better experience.

    It would be all too easy to say that Facebook’s market meltdown is coming to an end. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s social

network burned as much as $ 50 billion of shareholders’ wealth in just a couple months. To put that in context, since its debut(初次登台) on NASDAQ in May, Facebook has lost value nearly equal to Yahoo, AOL, Zynga, Yelp, Pandora, Open Table,

Group on, LinkedIn, and Angie's List combined, plus that of the bulk of the publicly traded newspaper industry:

     As shocking as this utter failure may be to the nearly 1 billion faithful Facebook users around the world, it’s no surprise to

anyone who read the initial public offering (IPO) prospectus (首次公开募股说明书). Worse still, all the crises that emerged

when the company debuted-overpriced shares, poor corporate governance, huge challenges to the core business, and a

damaged brand-remain today. Facebook looks like a prime example of what Wall Street calls a falling knife-that is, one that

can cost investors their fingers if they try to catch it.

      Start with the valuation. To justify a stock price close to the lower end of the projected range in the IPO, say $ 28 a share, Facebook’s future growth would have needed to match that of Google seven years earlier. That would have required

increasing revenue by some 80 percent annually and maintaining high profit margins all the while.

      That’s not happening. In the first half of 2012, Facebook reported revenue of $ 2.24 billion, up 38 percent from the same

period in 2011. At the same time, the company’s costs surged to $ 2.6 billion in the six-month period.

      This so-so performance reflects the Achilles’ heel of Facebook’s business model, which the company clearly stated in a

list of risk factors associated with its IPO: it hasn’t yet figured out how to advertise effectively on mobile devices, The number

of Facebook users accessing the site on their phones surged by 67 percent to 543 million in the last quarter, or more than

half its customer base.

      Numbers are only part of the problem. The mounting pile of failure creates a negative feedback loop that threatens Facebook’s future in other ways. Indeed, the more Facebook’s disappointment in the market is catalogued, the worse Facebook’s

image becomes. Not only does that threaten to rub off on users, it’s bad for recruitment and retention of talented hackers, who are the lifeblood of Zuckerberg’s creation.

       Yet the brilliant CEO can ignore the sadness and complaints of his shareholders thanks to the super-voting stock he

holds. This arrangement also was fully disclosed at the time of the offering. It’s a pity so few investors apparently bothered to

do their homework.