Poor Mojo's Newswire

Will people pay for quality digital content? It’s an argument that has been on the table for quite some time, with naysayers pointing towards downloads of discographies instead of paying attention to concrete purchasing decisions. Last week, Apple released its new version of Mac OS X “Lion”, and as per usual, Ars Technica’s John Siracusa delivered a whopping 27,300 word review of it. His 19-page story, published last Wednesday is available for free online and has already received over 3 million page views. In a telling turn of events, Ars Technica also decided to sell his review as a $5 Kindle ebook. In its first 24-hours on sale, the ebook sold 3,000 copies. And at $5 a pop, that’s a cool $15,000 in revenue in just one day. Harvard’s Niemen Lab interviewed Ken Fisher, the founder and editor of Ars, who is “pleasantly surprised by the outcome”. In fact, Fisher thinks of it as “free money” and that “he underestimated the power of Amazon’s one-click experience, which makes impulsive purchases painless.” . . .

We have a voting scandal brewing here in Houston. On Friday a warehouse fire destroyed nearly all of Harris County’s 10,000 electronic voting machines. Suspicious? Absolutely. Last week came allegations from Harris County voter registrar Leo Vasquez that Houston Votes had engaged in potentially fraudulent activity, including falsifying government documents and submitting multiple voter registrations for the same people. This means that in at least one reported case, a single person was registered to vote six times. Vasquez compared the irregularities to those pinned on the ACORN group during the 2008 election cycle. “Houston Votes is the voter registration machine of the ‘Texans Together Education Fund.’ Houston Votes and Texans Together have effectively emerged as our area’s new ‘ACORN’ organization,” Vasquez reportedly said last week. Fred Lewis, the president of Texans Together, told the Houston Chronicle that the allegations were baseless and that Vasquez should be investigated for trying to suppress voter registration.

In a previous installment of the Payack saga, I wrote that the Million Word March was "a progression that he turns on and off based on his publicity needs." So I can't say I was terribly surprised to learn that April 29, 2009 just happens to be the publication date of the paperback edition of Payack's book, A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting The World. What a stupendous coincidence that Global Language Monitor's word-counting algorithm has timed itself to accord with Payack's publishing schedule!

A quick review for newcomers to the story. Payack's million-word claim first popped up on our radar in early 2006. In February of that year, Payack told The Times of London that "the one millionth word is likely to be formed this summer." Then in August 2006 he said it would happen that coming November. In early 2007 I observed that the Million Word March seemed to have gotten stalled, and speculated that it might have had something to do with the serious debunkage the claims had received from Jesse Sheidlower on Slate and our own Geoff Nunberg on NPR's "Fresh Air." As it turns out, the more likely reason for Payack's slowdown had to do with rolling out his book to cash in on the lexico-quackery.