E-book wisdom for librarians, iPhone e-books, Intel-OLPC peace pact, and a shape-changing gizmo for e-books and other fun
Who should catalog e-books for libraries? How much influence should vendors have, vs. actual librarians? How about other nuts and bolts? Go here and here for some thoughtful discussion in the LITA blog and here for official information on the Library & Information Technology Association, part of ALA.
Other links of interest:
–Will Entrekin, a short-story writer self-published on Lulu, is experimenting with iPhone books (scroll down his page for more photos). Also see Publishers Weekly story on the iPhone, as well as an old Engadget item. So far Apple and Adobe have not revealed whether the latter’s Digital Editions software will make it to the iPhone. E-books are not the highest priority at the multimedia-fixated Apple.
–Intel and OLPC apparently will cooperate rather than fight on the issue of an affordable laptop for developing countries. The OLPC laptop is of special interest to TeleBloggers because of its high-res screen and other e-book-friendly features, not to mention the $100 price that’ll come sooner or later.
–No actual Silly Putty is used, but it might as well be—in a device that you can reconfigure to serve optimally as a phone, media player, e-book reader (via MobileRead). Quick description: “Connext is an all-in-one, flexible smart device that can morph its form to fit the application that it assumes. Combining OLED touch-screen technology with E-paper flexibility, this device can switch to become a mobile phone, computer, multimedia player, watch, physical avatar etc. - virtually and physically.”
July 14th, 2007 at 6:46 am
David,
On a slightly off-topic style note you are free to ignore, I have a questions: just what is your title length limit? You’ve been writing longer and longer, and longer titles (this one might be a record) which, personally, do more to confuse than enlighten me on what the post is about.
July 14th, 2007 at 7:47 am
Wayan: Big thanks for your feedback. I can see arguments either way. My own preference would be separate items, but I’m just plain out of time, and I’m thinking that the long headlines help people catch news they might miss in the roundups. I’d welcome others’ comments. I’d love to have enough volunteers so I could farm out items for others to write up. Between a sick wife and other responsibilities and a book project, the TeleBlog is no small trick to pull off.
And while we’re on the topic of volunteers, we need them BADLY–not just for content but also for infrastructure issues. The right column looks like crap with certain versions of Internet Explorer. Any CSS-hip designers out there?
Thanks,
David
March 16th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
[...] fine, because Apple already has an e-book reader. It’s called the iPhone, and the iPod Touch. Here’s the Teleread.org article with the scoop (from July 13, [...]