Good design facilitates the function and purpose of the message you want to communicate. Your example is just a handful of paragraphs, so it's easy to interpret such simple information. When you have text, images, lists, objects and dynamic content your argument falls apart.
All of the elements I just described are made up of words and/or represent words.
Sure designers can lose their way and become engrossed in decorating elements (which in some cases becomes a USP), but that's not typically the end goal.
Do publishers and authors not looks at statistics? I'm sorry but ebooks aren't even close to the same value as print books. I have an idea of the production costs involved. Not to mention that with ebooks you're saving trees and reaching larger audiences. If the mobile app market shows us anything it's that micro-transactions are the way to go. Either sell your books for <4.99 or sell your books by the chapter (eg: 99c per chapter, if your book is actually engaging).
That or an unlimited book (library) subscription fee. Like job says piracy is going to occur if you don't make content accessible, and in the country I reside in (Canada), it's largely inaccessible.
This! Linked lists / trees are great in applicable use cases, I think the author or the article just being an attention whore... to be fair I haven't actually needed to use binary trees or linked lists in ages...
This article is kinda silly. Yes google owns everything but if they can afford to run a bunch of pilot projects that ultimately fail, what's the problem? These products can be re-imagined in more effective ways. Also allowing different teams to house their projects in various places (google code, github..) is awesome. Yes I agree things are a little bit all over the place, but I would possibly want to work at Google.
Maybe my perspective is skewed, as I don't use many google frameworks or resources to develop with...
Does it though? Really?