The 'Loyalty Oath' controversy was the McCarthy-era communist witch-hunt that took place on the Berkeley campus in the late 1940's. It began when "hundreds of University employees refused to sign a special anti-communist oath mandated by the Regents."Dozens of tenured faculty and staff were fired and the ensuing protests eventually spread to every campus and garnered international attention.The California Supreme Court struck down the 'loyalty oath' in 1952 and all the the terminated employees were reinstated.The collection includes 3,500 pages of searchable text, 20 images and 15 audio clipsThe book on the subject is The California Loyalty Oath Controversy by...
The E-Reader Design Invitational
The folks at the industrial design site Core77 asked its users to submit design prototypes for e-readers.The challenge:"Love it or hate it, Amazon’s Kindle Reader has people talking about digital reading devices. No matter what side of the fence you are on, here’s your chance to show the world your vision of the perfect Digital eBook. We want you to take an hour out of your day to design the perfect Digital eBook."The results are pretty impressive. Here two examples of the over 50 entries received. The winner will receive a $125 NIKE gift certificate. I suspect the opportunities for...
The Hands of Google
Asher Moses has a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Book scans reveal Google's handiwork, which introduces us to a new, undiscovered component of the digitization process; the hand scan."Digital bookworms reading titles like the 1855 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine and Plato's The Trial and Death of Socrates have been surprised to find large chunks of some pages blocked by manicured paws clad in pink finger condoms." Rob Shilkin, Google's Australia spokesman, tells us that "in the time since we initially began our scanning, we've vastly improved our scanning technology so that a random finger is automatically brought to...
E-Phone
It looks like the next generation e-book reader will be part of your phone.Rise of the mobile novel sets alarm bells ringing in Japanese literary circles is the title of Richard Lloyd Parry's piece in the London Times."For the first time, Japan's fiction bestseller list is dominated by books published, read and, in several cases, written on mobile telephones."I repeat:publishedreadand sometimes written on CELL PHONES!How does it work:You pay about $2.50 a month for a subscription to download novels from the publishers website to your cell phone."The stories are divided into gobbets which can be read in about three minutes,...
Digitization and the Bookseller
BooksnapWelcome to the next disruptive technology for the book trade.The force of commerce and the march of technology are soon to meet again at the booksellers door. The door might not be open for long but if entered correctly it might become a new source of revenue for the bookseller.Once Google's romance with the libraries is over do you think Google will stop looking for other sources of information to feed the machine?I would guess within 5 years or so Google will have cycled through the library trade and determined who they will be playing with and they will know...