🍝 Pasta’s future is in good shape

Ebooks have exploded. In 2020, online distributor OverDrive processed 430m digital checkouts, up 33% YoY.

But how we access them is the subject of a lawsuit pitting four book publishers against the Internet Archive (IA), a nonprofit that offers free access to software, media, and its Wayback Machine.

So far, the publishers are winning — a federal judge decided that IA can (for now) be held liable for copyright infringement, per Vice.

How it works

Most libraries pay a fee for each “copy” of a digital book, which one patron can check out at a time, just like a physical book. These fees have gotten increasingly unaffordable.

IA buys or receives books via donation, scans them, and puts them in its Open Library. Open Library usually employs a “controlled digital lending” system (CDL), meaning, again, only one patron per copy.

But in March 2020…

… as libraries and schools shut down, IA’s National Emergency Library decided to temporarily provide immediate access — no waitlists.

Publishers Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins sued, alleging piracy.

• The Authors Guild also accused IA of harming authors, who it claimed earn a median income of $20.3k/yr.

IA shuttered the program early.

The judgment

IA’s defense is fair use, which relies on factors such as how and how much of a work is used, and its impact on market value.

But Judge John G. Koeltl disagreed, writing that IA benefitted from new members and donations, while publishers faced potential harm to licensing revenue, per Ars Technica.

For now, Open Library director Chris Freeland wrote that IA will appeal while continuing to perform some library services, but future judgments could dramatically impact what Open Library offers.

Let’s be real — most of us don’t like having our camera on for virtual meetings. Who isn’t just waiting for that one brave soul to turn theirs off so everyone can follow suit without feeling guilty?

Video fatigue — often called Zoom fatigue — is partly attributed to the idea that most of us aren’t built to stare at faces, including our own, for hours on end. Research shows this feeling is exacerbated by having your camera turned on.

Zoom rival Microsoft knows this, but it also knows that a blank screen isn’t exactly a great option, either.

Drumroll, please…

Introducing Avatars for Microsoft Teams! (*Cue cricket sounds*)

Among the features introduced yesterday, Teams will launch a feature that lets users create 3D avatars — customizable and reactive characters that animate based on your voice — to use in meetings in place of being on camera.

Whether you woke up with a horrific hairdo, or just need a camera break, you can probably imagine the use cases here.

Will any of Teams’ 280m users choose to go this route and deliver quarterly results while looking like a slightly advanced Nintendo Wii character, we wonder? Time will tell.

BTW: Yesterday, Microsoft also announced that Teams has been redesigned with a sleek new interface, and updated to be 2x as fast and use half as much memory.

The company also recently debuted premium features powered by OpenAI… As did Slack, earlier this month… As did Zoom, just yesterday.

Macaroni. Spaghetti. Vermicelli. If you were to take the US government’s word for it, the list of official pasta shapes ends there.

Enter the National Pasta Association, leading trade org for the American pasta industry. (And yes, they accept applications from those “with an interest in the development of the pasta industry,” which yum and check.)

When the group gathered in Florida last week, leaders relayed progress in their efforts to rewrite the federal definition of pasta, locked in place for decades.

Establishing a noodle world order

In 1939, the FDA started maintaining rigorous definitions of many food products, from cheese to peanut butter to canned fruit. And yes, pasta.

These hard-to-edit regulations — called SOI (standards of identity) — protect consumer expectations, ensuring the safety and uniformity of foods’ ingredients and production processes.

Decades later, the agency is revisiting hundreds of SOI; the pasta enthusiasts of NPA were more than ready for the moment.

Their wish list includes: updates around enriched foods, changing the limits of vitamin and mineral content, and more clarification on what is — and isn’t — officially a “noodle.”

• Also: Shapes. The NPA recognizes 600+ pasta shapes, a far cry from the three established in the FDR era.

The results can yield a pretty penne

There’s far more than semantics on the line. Per NPA, a changed SOI will foster innovation for pasta manufacturers.

This would be a boon for the continually growing US pasta segment, estimated to bring in $8.91B in revenue this year.

BTW: This process takes time. It took more than a year for the FDA to accept the Association for Dressings and Sauces’ petition to scrap the SOI for French dressing; frozen cherry pie standards have spent over two years in purgatory.