5 ms·
We're pausing Asimov Press
- asimovDev 7mo agoMaybe I am living under the rock but I never seen a .press TLD before
- em-bee 7mo agonew TLDs are no longer newsworthy. there are to many of them now.
- vrganj 7mo agoIt feels like a quick intro on what Asimov Press was in the first place would've been a good idea.
- dewey 7mo agoIt's there, just a few paragraphs in and also on https://www.asimov.press/about https://www.asimov.press/about, it's not that hard to find if you are really curious.
- simoncion 7mo agoYeah. I get the impression that if you're uninterested in either reading enough of the press release to get to the parts where they mention what they did, or navigating to the top-level index for the blog, where what they write about is made very plain, then you're not the type of person who would give any shits about what they write about.
- Angostura 7mo agoNo, it was just a poorly structured announcement
- simoncion 7mo agoThat's, like, your opinion, man.
- Macha 7mo agoIt’s an announcement published for their followers and distributed through their own channels to those people. That it doesn’t make sense when detached from that context and put on HN to people with no knowledge of who they are seems very much irrelevant to the goals of writing the post?
- jon-wood 7mo agoIf you don't know what Asimov Press is then you're probably not the target audience for a post about Asimov Press not publishing for a while.
- bcjdjsndon 7mo agoThis is an employee posting it to hackernews, which lets be honest is glad for any content that isn't a repost from 15+ years ago. Most people won't have heard of this vanity publication. And if this is news then il go elsewhere
- OJFord 7mo agoIts posts were fairly frequently shared & discussed here, I immediately recognised the name, even though I'm not even sure I ever read one. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=asimov.press https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=asimov.press
- IAmBroom 7mo agoOh no!
- dang 7mo agoJoe is a great submitter and I don't believe he's an employee of Asimov Press... unless he got bored with being a retired anesthesiologist?
- dang 7mo agoAlthough I appreciate that your comment reminded me of a classic Elvis Costello line (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptnXM6rsxSY#t=21s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptnXM6rsxSY#t=21s), please don't post like this to Hacker News. It comes across as a putdown. Much better and just was easy is to share some of what you know with others (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22share%20some%22%20know%20learn%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
- ipsum2 7mo agoI just started reading Asimov press. It has a weird name, I thought they were a sci-fi publishing company at first. It had a unique blend of popular science writing that was sorely missing from the internet. Alas I hardly knew thee.
- vidarh 7mo agoIsaac Asimov vote a huge amount of popular science book as well. They just have a shorter shelf life.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoI enjoyed his “science for the layman” books, a lot more than his sci-fi stuff. He was really good at explaining very complex stuff, in a simple, approachable manner.
- arethuza 7mo agoMy mother bought me "The Planet that Wasn't" when I was a kid - excellent book that I re-read many times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planet_That_Wasn%27t https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planet_That_Wasn%27t
- bookofjoe 7mo agoThis is why I read HN's comments. I get MANY recommendations for books/movies/shows/topics I knew nothing about etc. here. Just ordered this book for my 10-year-old grandson.
- arethuza 7mo agoMaybe I should have mentioned that was about 50 years ago - still a good book though!
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
- siruwastaken 7mo agoTruly sad to see this go so soon.
- adamgordonbell 7mo agoFYI: this is not Asimov's Science Fiction, the pulp sci fi magazine, found along with Analog Science Fiction and Fact at convenience stores near me, but something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Science_Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Science_Fiction
- shawn_w 7mo agoAsimov's and Analog are struggling too
- rvz 7mo agoI doubt anyone here cared and was reading for free for years. This "pausing" post got them the highest hearts and comments on their substack. The problem is, they are not charging when they should.
- bondarchuk 7mo agohttps://www.asimov.press/about https://www.asimov.press/about >We are an editorially-independent part of [Asimov](https://www.asimov.com/ https://www.asimov.com/). It seems to be a vanity publication for some kind of genetic engineering company.
- ilamont 7mo agoAsimov has supported us for the last two years, and we’ve received generous grants from Astera Institute and Stripe It’s not a business capable of operating without grants or support from its tech parent. With eight people on the masthead, the outlays are significant for a publishing venture.
- expedition32 7mo agoI read many history books that are funded by grants and governments. There will never be a world in which someone can sell enough books to fund 5 years of research on 1950s US-China diplomatic relations.
- b800h 7mo agoAh, I found this particularly offensive when I heard about the naming of the parent company. Randomly nicking a famous person's name for your company is pretty rubbish behaviour IMO. The odiousness decreases as a function of time since a person's death.
- bcjdjsndon 7mo agoIt's very easy to upset a human. Is it learned behaviour? Would a kid ever take "offense" to something like this... probably not, we must have learnt this at some point
- OJFord 7mo agoYoung children can absolutely be jealous - I can easily imagine (perhaps it's even a distant memory of having witnessed) a toddler being upset that someone else actually has the same name, nevermind co-opting it.
- bcjdjsndon 7mo agoYou're right actually, it's adults who are big babies. We give children shit for that as well
- kjksf 7mo agoMisleading people is not ok. It's so not ok that we have laws against misleading people. Not against this particular misleading (I don't think, although if Asimov had a formal estate they could probably sue). I can't open "Tom Cruse's Fine Wine" because I'm not Tom Cruse. It's wrong morally but also illegal. We have laws against things like that and Tom Cruse would surely sue my ass, successfully. The proof of that is that there is no "Tom Cruse's **" businesses out there. It might stop being illegal if the person dies because to sue you have to have standing. Unless there is formal trust like e.g. Tolkien's works and business affairs which probably have standing to sue "Tolkien's Fine Wine". A child would also take offense on being mislead. Not this particular misleading because it only misleads people who know who Asimov is and like his books. Your hypothetical child doesn't. But tell a child you'll buy him an ice cream if he finishes his chores and let's see how he reacts if you mislead him by not buying an ice cream. You must have learnt this at some point.
- unholiness 7mo agoI discovered them last year on Substack and they quickly became a priority read. A sort of Quanta for biology, taking time to explain enough for a popular audience but keeping technical rigor deep into some fascinating topics. Some highlights: https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/dna-sequencing?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=kk0yg https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/dna-sequencing?utm_sour... https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/phi80?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=kk0yg https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/phi80?utm_source=share&... https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/antibody-design?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=kk0yg https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/antibody-design?utm_sou... https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/viral-capsids?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=kk0yg https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/viral-capsids?utm_sourc... https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/legibility-problem?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=kk0yg https://open.substack.com/pub/cell/p/legibility-problem?utm_... ...All in the last month! At least they went out with a bang.
- mojoe 7mo agoI see this pattern a lot -- folks start a publication, publish for a handful of years, and then shutter. I did it myself with Compelling Science Fiction magazine. This is why I settled on releasing only one book per year, it's sustainable while working full-time on other projects.