It started back in February. One line of Ulysses every 15 minutes. It took 257 days. On November 13 the last of the 24765 lines was published.For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it is a social networking service that only allows 140 characters per message. Some call it micro-blogging, on one hand it seems like blogging ADD style while on the other it presents a fresh, new template for expression.The folks at Booktwo.org deserve a ton credit for this project. This is Literature 2.0 as much as it is Book 2.0. Booktwo.org says the core of their mission is "to explore...
Is the Kindle the Ultimate Reading Machine?
Evan Schnittman, vice president of business development at Oxford University Press, has an interesting, positive take on Amazon's Kindle that is worth a read.One thing to keep in mind argues Schnittman is that us book-focused news types are not the target audience for this product. This one is for the pure readers. Not the book collectors, the booksellers, not for the book as an object gang but "for folks like my sister-in-law Laurie, a voracious reader of print books" as Schnittman says.He goes on:"Immersive reading has always been the bane of electronic content. As extractive content such as reference has...
DRM Drama: The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
Mark Pilgrim has created a clever little piece, The Future of Reading ( A Play in Six Acts), about the inherent dangers of Digitial Rights Management (DRM).Using sources like Steven Levy's Newsweek article The Future of Reading, Kindle's Terms of Service, Jeff Bezos 2002 letter to the Author's Guild and George Orwell's 1984, Pilgrim adequately conveys some of the pitfalls of the DRM approach.The six acts are:1. The act of buying2. The act of giving3. The act of lending4. The act of reading5. The act of remembering6. The act of learningHere is Act 1:When someone buys a book, they are...
Another Amazon Innovation: Free Content For a Fee
As the media shower for Kindle enters its second day the blogosphere remains saturated with Kindle related posts.Forget the design, forget the compatibility issues, forget the price tag, the glaring day after issue is the potential copyright problems around the Kindle offering paid subscriptions to blogs that are otherwise available to all for free on the internet.I emailed Ron Hogan of GalleyCat fame after I realized that he was unaware that GalleyCat was available as a Kindle blog subscription for $1.99 a month. In a post yesterday he was relating author Seth Godin's experience with Amazon and Godin's decision not...
Kindlemania Begins, Some Expect a Short Run
Amazon has officially thrown it's hat in the e-book reader market with the release of Kindle, a $399 wi-fi enabled, keyboard equipped, design-needy, proprietary e-book reader.Will this be the device that catapults e-books into the mainstream?Some are not so sure.In his piece at Information Week Amazon Planning E-book Debacle Thomas Claburn flat out pans the Kindle calling the design "a thing of unsurpassed ugliness." and its "failure to learn any lessons from the iPhone will be its doom."David Rothman at TeleRead says the real problem is, and I agree, in the proprietary format or the "F word" as Rothman calls...