Archive for the ‘eBooks’ Category
Friday, November 6th, 2009
John C. Abell, in his recent Wired article Steve Jobs’ Legacy Is the Missing Clue to the Apple Tablet, suggests that in the same way that he invigorated animated film with Pixar, the music industry with iTunes, and the mobile phone market with the iPhone, Jobs' next mission is to ...
Posted in Magazines, PicsNo, Publishing, Uncategorized, eBooks | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
A month ago Geoff Nunberg wrote two articles that got much attention on Google Book Search's "metadata trainwreck," relating to incorrect dating of books. I discovered another metadata-ish sort of problem, as I read Lorcan Dempsey's recent article on GBS word clouds, and the value of their "glancability" for getting ...
Posted in Google Book Search, Metadata, PicsYes, Train Wreck, Uncategorized, eBooks | 13 Comments »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Steve Pociask wrote an article in Forbes last week, Google's One Million Books, on the Google Book Search Settlement. There's been a lot of commentary about GBS recently, as the October Settlement hearing approaches, and I was doubtful that tweeting this article with it's forgettable title would get much attention. ...
Posted in PicsNo, Twitter, Uncategorized, eBooks | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Marginalia -- writing notes in the margins of books -- is not an exact fit for digital books. But the concept has been getting bantered about in a metaphorical sense to denote any kind of user annotation in digital texts. In my June article on Cathy Marshall's studies of user ...
Posted in Digitization, Marginalia, Metadata, PicsYes, Uncategorized, eBooks | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
Kevin Kelly's long NY Times article in 2006 on Google Book Search has some elegant words on the transformative effect of digital books in general, beyond GBS. I'll precede excerpts from Kelly with bits from some of my recent articles, which resonate in interesting ways.
Kelly's comments parallel the static print ...
Posted in Digitization, Google Book Search, Metadata, PicsNo, The Stream, Uncategorized, eBooks | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
As so often happens, there are gems far down in Mike Cane's blog article (Dumb eBooks Must Die, Smart eBooks Must Live) that deserve more prominence. Cane says the real potential of eBooks will only be realized (attained) when the "hidden" metadata content is brought out (Boldface added):
All of this ...
Posted in Google Book Search, Libraries, Metadata, PicsYes, The Stream, Uncategorized, eBooks | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 15th, 2009
A recent Wired article (Why E-Books Are Stuck in a Black-and-White World) has a good chart comparing four leading E-reader displays (E-Ink, Kent Displays, Pixel Qi, and Qualcomm). The chart appears far down in the article, though, and I suspect it was missed by many readers, so to make it ...
Posted in Color, PicsYes, Uncategorized, eBooks | No Comments »
Monday, June 8th, 2009
Clive Thompson, in his recent comments on how crowdsourcing has the potential to transform eBooks, refers to a a rudimentary form of crowdsourcing that's already being studied in print textbooks. The work he's referring to is by Cathy Marshall, who finds that used-book-buyers place value in the annotations (highlighting and ...
Posted in Marginalia, PicsYes, Uncategorized, eBooks | No Comments »
Monday, June 8th, 2009
A few excerpts from Clive Thompson's interesting thoughts on digitization last week:
Books are the last bastion of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn't embraced the digital age. ... Literary pundits are fretting: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe? ... To which I reply: ...
Posted in Marginalia, PicsNo, Uncategorized, eBooks | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
When I first read the passage below in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the sea of stories three years ago, it struck me as a remarkable word picture of my experience of the Web. So of course I went right to Google to see if anyone else had made this connection ...
Posted in Google Book Search, Libraries, PicsYes, The Stream, Uncategorized, eBooks | 2 Comments »
