An anonymous reader shares a press release: This week, O’Reilly Media stopped retailing books directly on our ecommerce store. You might say “what!?” Or you might say “what’s the big deal?” Before I explain our business strategy here, there are two important things to note: We are absolutely continuing to publish the top-quality books that are important to the communities we serve. 1. We still sell them through Amazon or your favorite retailer. 2. So why the change? It’s clear that we’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use their content. Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We’ve already seen this in our own business — the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That’s one reason for the change.

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Source: Slashdot – O’Reilly Media Has Stopped Retailing Books Directly On Its Ecommerce Store

Tony Haile, writing for Recode: Facebook has a problem. What has driven its growth for the last five years won’t drive its growth for the next five. However, the options in front of the company involve the kind of user experience compromises that have maimed platforms that preceded it. Facebook makes its money from the West. Some 30 percent of its users and 73 percent of its revenue is from North America and Europe. The monthly average revenue per user for Western users is $3.33 versus 53 cents for the rest of the world. Facebook is a global company, but a Western business. Facebook’s user growth in the West is a little over 1 percent a quarter. In North America, Facebook’s monthly active users represent 80 percent of the population above the age of 14. If Facebook wishes to grow its Western revenue at the rate its shareholders demand, a 1 percent user growth rate will not do it. Absent rapid user growth, the other lever for increasing advertising revenue is increasing the number or value of ads that are shown to existing users. However, the News Feed is close to saturation. Facebook believes that it cannot stick any more ads in the News Feed without adversely affecting user retention. This combination of slowing user growth and News Feed saturation has led Facebook to warn of a rapid deceleration in revenue growth over the next six months. For the first time in years, Facebook needs a new lever to pull.

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook May Finally Have To Compromise Its User Experience In Order To Keep Growing

An anonymous reader shares a report: Those shameless scammers that cold-call people pretending to be from Microsoft and demanding money after walking users through supposed problems with their computers? They’re going down, it seems, with four people arrested in the UK for enabling the rip-off. City of London Police and Microsoft, the real Microsoft, have been working together for two years to trace the operators of the scheme, with the four people — two from Woking and two from South Shields — arrested on suspicion of fraud. Although the calls were found to originate from India, the investigators found that the scam was allegedly being run out of the UK, with the poor overseas callers working from scripts and, presumably, not really aware they’re doing anything hugely wrong.

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Source: Slashdot – ‘Microsoft’ Scam Callers Arrested After Years of Terrorising the Technically Challenged