In a few hours Margret Atwood and company will unleash LongPen on the BEA. From London to Walla Walla authors will be signing books for BEA attendees from the comfort of their own home (or publishers office).It is billed as "the world's first real time, pen and ink long-distance autographing device" which produces "legally valid" signatures.LongPen is the next generation of the Autopen, a technology first invented in 1803 (it was called a polygraph) and was used extensively by Thomas Jefferson.These days it is a required technology for many politicians, celebrities and sports stars who simply cannot personally keep up...
Craig Does Like Newspapers. A Brief Chat with the Founder of Craigslist
Newmark started Craigslist 12 years ago in his San Francisco apartment where he created an online platform for his friends to basically help each other out. Now there are people helping each other out in 450 cities in 50 countries claiming over 7 billion hits a month.In a previous post I responded to a few comments made by Newmark at the recent Newspaper Association of America annual convention in New York. One of the comments was that he has a ""great deal of sympathy for people who run the printing presses. They are screwed." Based on the current state of...
Reader in the Tub
You hear it all the time from us traditional book defenders and many times it is the first arrow we throw. Margret Atwood threw it at the recent London Book Fair.- You can't read an e-book in the bathtub!Well maybe you can.Chris Steib has recently undertaken "the Ultimate eBook Experiment"His contestants: A paperback copy of Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 and A Sony Reader.Steib puts each through a rigorous 6 step program that runs from "functionality" testing to submersion in water dressed in GLAD Cling wrap. The clear winner:The Sony Reader. The Reader would have swept the competition if...
Bill & Craig’s E-Textual Adventure
Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Craig Newmark, founder of the seminal classified website Craigslist, weighed in this week with their thoughts on the future of reading and newspapers. These enemies of hard copy were clearly in their print is dead mode.This years annual convention of The Newspaper Association of America featured Newmark being interviewed by Charlie Rose. A controversial choice to say the least since Newmark's brainchild Craiglist has single-handedly destroyed the classified advertising revenue stream that has fed newspapers for decades.He spoke of the need for newspapers to use their high profit margins to pay more attention to investigative...
Google the Bookseller
It was bound to happen.Word from the London Book Fair is that Google is going into the book business. By year's end they will launch two book related initiatives that will further alter the book landscape.What's in store:A book rental program that will let you rent the content of a book on a weekly basis.andA book retail program that will allow users lifetime access to the texts they purchase.They are not attaching the cursed e-book tag to either project.Michael Cairnes, who was at the Google sessions at the London Book Fair, has the scoop in his blog post titled "Google...