The Next Generation of Ebook
Will the Sony Librie actually succeed where all the others have failed? I have to admit, I'm intrigued. While I still like the old-fashioned book, I do like the idea of the ebook's portability and ability to access multiple texts, Web pages, etc. And Sony has apparently solved the readability problems that have plagued earlier versions of the technology. The Librie doesn't have online access, but I imagine that'll pop up in a future version if it catches on. And it should catch on, seeing as it's modelled after the iPod.

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File Under: Does It Just Have to Be the Hands?

Scientists (who else?) have created a cell phone system that can send "tactile melodies" - a set of pins rises and falls beneath users' fingertips in a non-Braille Braille-like fashion. This way people can receive messages on the sly. "Our major intention with this invention and development is to open up the sense of touch as a new channel for human communication." Um, it wasn't one? I suspect you nerds weren't doing it right, then. (From Clive)



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Aaarrrggghhh, Hand Over Your Harry Potter and No One Gets Hurt
The New York Times has an article on book pirates. No, they're not talking about Bookninja's rowdy cousins. We haven't talked to them since that Book Expo incident anyway.


Yet a quick survey conducted with peer-to-peer file-sharing software revealed the digital availability of dozens of titles currently on the New York Times best-seller list, including The Da Vinci Code, The South Beach Diet and, of course, hundreds of copies of any Harry Potter titles. Even the official audio-book versions read by the authors or celebrities are easy to come by. Computer and technical books that can cost as much as $100 in print are also a mainstay. Other recesses of the Internet are also rich in illegally traded literature.

A visit to a group called "#Bookz" on the Internet Relay Chat network revealed a multitude of titles being offered or sought every second.

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Why are the technology companies run by Luddites?
In an earlier post I said I was looking forward to the Sony Librie, a new e-book thingy. The techology is apparently what we've all been waiting for, but the suits behind it seem to have confused bookstores with Blockbusters.


Reading Librie isn't anything like flipping through a paperback, but it is a breeze. You just push a button on the side of the display to go to the next page, and the button above that to go back.

Skipping around a book is easy. A cursor button featuring a picture of a dog is scrolled at the bottom of the display. The Librie has a memory function that can place up to 40 bookmarks.

But you can't copy and paste passages to another computer or device. And copy protection built into the software garbles your books into useless data after two months. There's no way to digitally archive texts for later reference. That's a lot of restrictions, though the books available for this first Librie do cost only $3 per download.


Guess we'll have to wait for someone to come up with a version worth using.

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Using A9.com earns you an Amazon discount
I've been using A9.com, the new search engine from Amazon, for a while and kind of like its features, particularly the way it remembers your search history and allows you to customize its appearance. I just discovered it gives registered users discounts when they order books from Amazon. Not much -- about 1.25 per cent -- but I thought I'd let people know.

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Monster Island
The Japanese have proven cellphone novels can sell. The question is, will North Americaners read them? I think so, at least until porn becomes readily available on cellphones. Then it's all over for literature.

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Vidlit
Interesting idea. Audio stories with flash accompaniment. Hope it catches on.

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Resistance is futile
Ebooks are the way of the future.


The consequences of The Two Certainties are profound: at some point the ascending digital line must cross the descending print line. Not if, friends, but when. The Two Certainties point to a future in which ebooks inevitably dominate paper books. This might come to pass because print will die back when we print-reading dinosaurs die off. Meanwhile the digital generation will have become accustomed to reading off screens, and may even prefer them. Or it might happen because of some breakthrough in display technology, driven by economic pressure to take advantage of the superior functionality of the ebook, which will make believers out of even the crustiest of print fans.

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Is Google about to change the bookselling business?
Google's latest project, Google Print, may squeeze bookstores out of the marketplace altogether.


In recent years, publishing executives have been quietly trying to figure out whether they can get rid of the middlemen -- bookstores -- and sell their products directly to consumers. The problem has been that most book buyers do not pay close attention to which company publishes a book, and therefore consumers would be unlikely to go to a particular publisher's Web site to peruse its offerings.

When Google Print generates a search result, however, it lists the book's publisher alongside each book page. It would be relatively easy for publishers to insert themselves as one of the links that a Google Print user could use to buy the book.

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Rise of the machines

Ubertech-dude and all around nice guy, Clive Thompson, gets suckered by a robot.



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Who's afraid of the darknet?
James Patrick Kelly has a very thoughtful piece on Asimov's about file sharing, copyright, Creative Commons and digital-rights managment. A must-read for those who believe digital is the way of the future for publishing.

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If only he'd printed The Communist Manifesto first
Johannes Gutenberg a fraud?

Johannes Gutenberg may be wrongly credited with producing the first Western book printed in movable type, according to an Italian researcher. Presenting his findings in a mock trial of Gutenberg at the recent Festival of Science in Genoa, Bruno Fabbiani, an expert in printing who teaches at Turin Polytechnic, said the 15th-century German printer used stamps rather than the movable type he is said to have invented between 1452 and 1455.

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E-paper explained
Recently we had a nice little discussion on the boards about e-books and related advancements, such as e-paper. Here's an informative technical article explaining how e-paper works, and how it may just revolutionize the way we read — and create.

Flexible displays are a staple of science fiction. Imagine unrolling an electronic newspaper that's automatically updated via the wireless Web. Or unfurling a screen stored in your location-enhanced mobile device so you can consult a digital map without squinting.

I imagine this every day. Get on with it already!

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Google Scholar
Stand on the shoulders of giants.

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

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Jstor quaking in cyberboots

Google Scholar may change the way academics do research.* (But can it keep them from plagiarizing the fuck out of each other?)

"It could be a huge timesaver, and it could force us researchers and scholars to refine our craft."

One side effect of Google Scholar is that academics may realize they have been missing out on a lot of potential resources.

"It's going to be interesting, because we're trying to explain to our faculty that the price of scholarly journals is just skyrocketing," said Daniel Greenstein, the librarian for the California Digital Library (www.cdlib.org) of the University of California. "As they go to Google Scholar, they're going to find a bunch of stuff we don't have access to, and I think that could end up creating a degree of frustration that could reflect badly on the publishers."

(As usual, the mainstream media is now reporting, days later, on something the blogs had posted on the day the service went live. The local news radio here in Toronto has a slogan that goes something like, "If you're reading it, it's history. If you're hearing it, it's happening." Let me amend that. "If you're reading it on paper, it's history.")



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Hot chick reading Calvino at three o'clock...!

What could be wrong with this RFID technology? I see a device like that freaky tracker from Aliens - making these high pitched pings as an army of Gwen Stefanis and Janeane Garofalos close in on me from every side, ready to bludgeon me with copies of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. They're in the air ducts!! Aaaagh! Hot. If I gotta go, I want to go like that.



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Publishing's Y2K

In 2007 the publishing world will move from 10-digit ISBNs to 13-digit ISBNs. This will be part of a global effort to keep up with the production schedule of Joyce Carole Oates.

The new 13-digit ISBN, which has capacity for just under one billion numbers, will affect all aspects of the publishing supply chain right through to libraries and high-street book stores and the International ISBN Agency has warned firms to review all their IT systems well ahead of the 2007 deadline.

People, do we really need a billion books? Somebody shoot the guy in charge of the Star Wars stock writer puppy mill. I heard Richard A. Knaak is chained to a stake there and mounted daily by both Margaret Weiss AND Tracy Hickman. (From Moby)



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Do computers impede learning?

I certainly believe they do. Especially when they have HalfLife2 loaded on them... Ooo... the graphics...



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The next generation of text messaging
The cellphone novel?

One day soon, when your cellphone sounds, it could be a novel calling to recount how the headstrong heroine dumped the handsome heartbreaker. Or it might be a guidebook surfacing at a critical moment in a crowded bar to provide you with pickup lines in Spanish, French or German.

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War and Peace on a cell?

Manybooks.net
At last, all the classics available for reading on your cellphone or PDA for free. I've only browsed through the site's selections, but they had everything I looked for, from Aristotle to Moby Dick. Check it out if you've got a device that'll let you read e-texts.

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Yeah, Alex, War and Peace on a cell:

http://www.manybooks.net/titles/tolstoyletext01wrnpc11.html

File under: did you know?

That Byron's daughter is widely thought of as the first computer programmer? The children of poets rock. (Especially of poets named George Gordon, ahem.) (Thanks, K!)



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Cellphone novels...
...are big in Japan. Of course, so is tentacle porn.

Several mobile websites offer hundreds of novels -- classics, bestsellers and some works written especially for the medium.

It takes some getting used to. Only a few lines pop up at a time because the phone screen is about half the size of a business card.

But improvements in the quality of liquid-crystal displays and features such as automatic page-flipping, or scrolling, make the endeavour far more enjoyable than you'd imagine.

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Edited by author 04-05-2005 09:58 AM
This'll wup those used bookstores's butts

Amazon.com has purchased Booksurge and clearly plans to get in the print on demand business. Does this mean I can order all my books to match my living room colours? Oh, god, this is going to be just great!

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Edited by author 04-08-2005 07:42 AM
Here we go again, tilting at windmills

Physicists in Spain are celebrating the 400th anniversary of publication of "Don Quixote" in a very small way: they wrote the first paragraph on a silicon chip in letters so tiny the whole 1,000-page book would fit on the tips of six human hairs.

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The history of desktop publishing in Japan
From the introduction of woodblock type to the development of a Japanese word processor. I'm going to read this as a bedtime story to the next kid I have.

Determined to make their offices as efficient as those of the West, the Japanese invented a typewriter for their own complex writing system early in the 20th century. The typist was touted as the belle of the workplace. But the Japanese typewriter was a challenging tool that could only be mastered after rigorous training. The development of a truly efficient writing machine -- the word processor -- necessitated a reassessment of the Japanese language itself.

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Edited by author 05-04-2005 09:21 AM
Obsolete or antique?

Turns out all those old computers are worth a fortune!

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Edited by author 05-06-2005 10:01 AM
Men in safari jackets sighted at Google board meeting

Anglophone cyber-colonialists are raping and pillaging and, guess what? The Parisians are smoking-mad (and I mean Gauloises).

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More on how Google is killing Europe

When Google Challenges Europe. Google's plan to digitize the (English-speaking) world is forcing the (not-English-speaking) world to counter-digitize. I somehow doubt Google even noticed Europe. This is like the ant writing a book about it's battle against the shoe.


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Morse code still beats SMS

Clive points us to an interesting it-ain't-over-yet article about a 93-year-old telegraph operator pitted against a 13-year-old rival (named Brittany, no less) with a cell phone and an arsenal of text message shorthand. Stop. Guess who wins. Stop.


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Sci-fi pirates
Sci-fi writer John Scalzi says stop worrying about online piracy already. Scalzi has made money in the past by selling his books as shareware, so it's an interesting take on things. He's also got some Jesus bumper stickers for you that are kind of fun.

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Edited by author 05-20-2005 10:52 AM
You wascally wabbit

Google has had this for a while but I thought I'd point it out for those who don't know and need a giggle. Among almost every language living today, Google provides Elmer Fudd, Pig Latin and Klingon as personalised home pages.

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You left out this one:

http://www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/

Well, blimey, if it isn't a bill bisset page!

Edited by author 06-17-2005 10:25 AM
Steve Jobs commences

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Heartwarming.

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On screen, Ensign Crusher...

Is reading online better than on paper? It could be, says a California scholar. (You just knew he had to be from California.)

The reading experience online "should be better than on paper," Chi says. He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. "Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer," Chi says.

ScentHighlights? Sounds like something that comes with weather like we're having here in Toronto. Ozone, old man, raw sewage. Highlights, all.


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Edited by author 07-05-2005 05:13 PM
The iPod is the future of publishing
Some time ago I wrote an article saying iPods could dramatically affect the book world. Turns out they already have.

The future has clearly arrived: Apple's immensely popular iPod --the software company shipped 5.3 million of the variously priced and sized devices in its second fiscal quarter of 2005 alone -- is making consumers more comfortable with the idea of downloading audiobooks and listening on-the-go. So could DABs -- which are more accessible, hip and cost-effective than traditional formats like cassettes and CDs -- be the next big thing?

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Too tired to read to your kids tonight?
Just let the computer do it.

For all those parents whose voices have grown hoarse sounding out the rhymes in their child's favorite picture book "just one more time," some reinforcements have arrived. One More Story is a new online library where children can choose a book -- complete with narration, highlighted text, and the book's original illustrations -- and listen as they read along on the computer.

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Writers learn to love the web
And not just for porn and online poker.

Novelist Jasper Fforde has built up a substantial personal website since publishing his first book in 2001, with content dedicated to the alternate-reality Britain that provides the backdrop to his stories. He runs a selection of websites with his partner, fleshing out the world of his main character, the time-travelling literary detective Thursday Next.

I don't remember being particularly web savvy," he says about the origins of his online endeavours. "When we started jasperfforde.com, it was a curiosity: websites weren't a new thing, but they were new enough. I thought about the world I created, and I liked the idea of visualising it. I thought that would fit in well with the idea of a website; help blur the edges between what's real and what's not."

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The latest in e-paper
I can't wait until this stuff becomes mainstream. (Although it may really kill off our kind....)

The new product, first to be shown on July 14 at the Tokyo International Forum, is a film substrate-based bendable color electronic paper. Similar to Flash memory, the display integrates a non-volatile data memory function that is able to continuously display the same image without being connected to a power supply. Electricity is only needed when users want to change the displayed content. According to Fujitsu, the material used enables high-resolution and "vivid color" images that are unaffected even when the screen is bent.

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The Readius
The e-reader is coming.

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Sony Librie unchained
Someone has produced a non-DRM version of Sony's nice but crippled e-book reader.

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Edited by author 10-03-2005 02:20 PM
Yahoo tries to please the people

They're going to ask nicely for our work.

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Technology finally catches up with the whims of Ninja Murray

And my vocation has been clearly defined to boot. I'm an EPG: "Expert pub goer".


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The Sony Portable Reader System
Sony's latest e-book reader wants to be the iPod of books, and it may be. Publishers certainly seem to think so, as Random House and HarperCollins will sell books through Sony's Connect store. Unfortunately, their Connect store only works with Internet Explorer 5.5 and up, so who knows if the store is any good? Still, I'm intrigued by the reader.

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Waiting for the new Gutenberg
The Guardian says e-books are going to take over the market sooner rather than later. I was fine with that until Bill Gates started talking.

For the demagogues at Microsoft and Google, the future is a place where we will all be wandering around with "tablets" onto which extracts of the entire human literary output can be downloaded. Like an iPod for books.

"Within four or five years, instead of spending money on textbooks," Mr Gates said recently about students, "they'll spend a mere $400 or so buying that tablet device and the material they hook up to will all be on the wireless internet with animations, timelines and links to deep information. But they'll be spending less than they would have on textbooks and have a dramatically better experience."

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Personally I can't wait for this to happen. I'm a law student and these books are killing my back (I cracked a couple of vertebrae in the army, and after two surgical procedures I still can't sit straight for long, let alone lug all these books around!).

And we'll be able to search text and highlight and de-highlight and never have to scrape around going "Now where in H is my berloody bookmark box?!?"

More on the Sony Reader
Wired has a detailed piece on Sony's new e-book reader, including pics and an explanation of how the E Ink technology works.

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Internet Marketing,promotion of money,eBay, of the reference.
Books of the program-all in one place.
So it is convenient.Email marketing software. Free Adsense Templates page.

It's a pleasant surprise to find a sanctury from all that modern inane garbage they call music.