Next month Amazon will throw its hat in the e-book reader ring with the release of Kindle.Here is the good part:Kindle is clearly a cut above the existing e-book readers.-Its wireless capabilities allow the user to download content without having to connect to a computer.-It has a keyboard which allows the user to take notes and navigate the web.-It will come loaded with a few freebies like reference books.Now the bad part:With all this great e-book reader 2.0 functionality Amazon shoots itself in the foot by not supporting the open e-book standard that is used by most publishers. Using a...
Digitize Your Own Books: How to Build Your Own Automated Scanner
Who needs Google. Thanks to Muranushi Takayuki you too can make your own automated scanner. This is way over my head technically but you got to love the ingenuity.Thanks to .ike for the lead. His new blog Digitizing Books and Media will be a place where he shares his process of finding a way to digitize his book collection.
The Google Quandary: Book Search or Text Search?
Apart from the text does Google Book Search really have anything to do with the life of a book?I am not so sure.As Paul Duguid points out in his illuminating piece Inheritence and loss? A brief survey of Google Books:"Even with some of the best search and scanning technology in the world behind you, it is unwise to ignore the bookish character of books."Using Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy as his book of choice Duguid exposes some major quality control issues inherent in Google's digitization process. From missing pages to poorly scanned pages to the complete absence of vital data (like...
E-Books Stink
No, really.CafeScribe, a new website devoted to the digital delivery of textbooks for students, announced plans yesterday to launch "the world's first smelly e-book."They commissioned Zogby to undertake a survey of 600 college students and this is what they found:43% identified smell –- either new book smell or old -- as the thing they most love about books as physical objects.3 in 10 of the surveyed students associated “mustiness” with the books they most loved, although 16% -- possibly those most likely to hit the books early in the day – associated best-loved books with the smell of “freshly-ground coffee.”Oh...
Thomas Pynchon in Lights. The San Jose Semaphore is Solved
Ben Rubin's San Jose Semaphore is a "multi-sensory kinetic artwork that illuminates the San Jose skyline with the transmission of a coded message""Each wheel of the Semaphore can assume four distinct positions: vertical, horizontal, and left and right-leaning diagonal; together, the four wheels have a vocabulary of 256 possible combinations. The San Jose Semaphore transmits its message at a steady rate; its four wheels turn to new positions every 7.2 seconds."The installation occupies the top floors of Adobe's headquarters in San Jose. The piece is based on the semaphore telegraphs of the 18th century.The challenge: To crack the code.It took...