Canada marked a milestone Monday: Marc Garneau blasted into space as the country's first astronaut 25 years ago to the day.Industry Minister Tony Clement, who is also minister responsible for the Canadian Space Agency, presented Mr. Garneau with a pin to mark the occasion at a ceremony on Parliament Hill.
“Today's anniversary celebrates the efforts and accomplishments not only of our astronauts but also of our engineers, our scientists, our astronomers and many others,” Mr. Clement said.
“All Canadians can take pride in the remarkable advances in space technology and space robotics that our country has made over the past quarter century.”
The anniversary coincided with another first – Guy Laliberte as Canada's first space tourist.The Quebec billionaire paid $35-million to spend nine days on the International Space Station. He is also visiting Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk, whose six-month stay on the space lab ends Nov. 23.
Mr. Garneau, now a Montreal Liberal MP, said he could never have anticipated how far space tourism or co-operation with the Russians would have come in just 25 years.
The astronaut-politician points out that originally there was uncertainty about the future of Canada's space program.No Canadian Space Agency even existed at the time. It only came into existence in 1989, five years after Mr. Garneau's initial trip.
Mr. Garneau says the country's future in space appeared to be assured only when Canada signed on in 1986 as one of the partners in the International Space Station.
According to his publisher, Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown’s latest book, The Lost Symbol, sold more copies in its first 36 hours than any other adult hardback sold in total. (A certain boy wizard is excluded by the artful qualifier, “adult”.) The sales of Brown’s book were given a boost by an unprecedented price war. According to The Bookseller, an industry magazine, Waterstone’s offered a mere 50 per cent discount – £9.49 instead of £18.99. Tesco asked £7 and Asda £5. Asda’s book buyer celebrated “fantastic” sales, despite the fact that the store is thought to be losing £4 a copy. The old joke is made real: losing money on every sale, but making it up on volume.
As I've said in the past, the price structure of the commercial ebook market is broken — for a variety of tedious reasons, publishers try to sell ebooks for not less than 80% of the price of the cheapest dead tree edition currently in print. (And then for different but equally tedious reasons they expect us to accept DRM on top.) This is a deeply annoying situation and it has stunted the growth of the ebook sector for a decade or more. Today, even a top-selling ebook edition is lucky to make 10% of the sales volume of a mass market paperback edition of the same book.
When Amazon came along, with the Kindle, a device to which my first reaction was highly unfavourable. My initial fears have been borne out; while Amazon fixed the Kindle's aesthetic problems efficiently, their behaviour towards customers has not been good — as witness the 1984 scandal. Mind you, that pales into insignificance compared to their behaviour towards authors: the gay deranking scandal may have been hastily denounced as an accident, but it shows that they've created a frighteningly efficient machine for imposing ideological censorship, should they choose to do so. What's even worse is that they seem to be close to achieving iPod status in the field of ebook readers. The dangers of a monopsony arising in ebook distribution can't be overemphasized, and should be obvious.
While consumers in places like Botswana, Sri Lanka, and Mongolia are now able to order the thin white tablet, however, Canadians are—again—left twisting in the breeze.
Canada is notorious for being tardy to the technological party, for a variety of reasons ranging from convoluted broadcast contracts to patent issues to domestic business practices. Probably the most notorious example of this involves Apple's lustfully coveted products: we were a year late for the iPhone and the iTunes Music Store, Skype was available on the iPhone in every country except ours (until last month), and we still can't buy high-definition movies on iTunes. As for television, it's taken decades of negotiation to finally get HBO and Nickelodeon channels in Canada, although the "Canadianized" versions are merely brand licences and don't always include identical content to their American counterparts.
[. . .]
For now, Amazon is remaining mum on why Canada has been shut out of the international launch. A message on Amazon's Kindle page states, "We are currently unable to ship Kindles or offer Kindle content in Canada. We are working to make Kindle available to our Canadian customers as soon as possible."
The delay could be due to publishing contracts, although that seems unlikely since e-books are already available domestically. Because the Kindle uses GSM networks to download its product internationally, Amazon could also still be in negotiations with Rogers. It's not necessarily a matter of retail inventory either, since Kindles aren't destined for the Best Buys of the world (international customers have to order directly from Amazon and have the e-readers shipped from the United States).
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