TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Carol Jurd’ Category

By David Rothman

“I read a lot of news by surfing the Internet, as do many of my colleagues and friends, and I’ve always dreamed of a way to browse news based on geography. What’s happening in Paris today? What are the top headlines in Japan? In collaboration with The New York Times, we’ve come up with a solution: The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser. This is the first time we’ve endeavored to show news updated in real time, and we’re very excited to work with this first-class publication to bring you the latest and greatest news.” - Wei Luo, Tech Lead Manager, Google Earth.

The TeleRead take: So when will other international publications follow through with similar arrangements? And how soon until we see Google Earth-style features built in open source browsers like Firefox? A Techmeme roundup is here. Meanwhile you can click on the graphic for more details.

The e-book angle: How soon until certain e-books use geo-mapping as as one alternative to traditional indexes.

Related: Jon Noring’s proposal for a GPS repository, which, among other things, could ideally pick up news stories from a variety of publications. Also see Carol Jurd’s post on The Geography of E-Book Mentions.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Carol Jurd

Being back at university again has made me start really looking at academic books. Every university has them—rows and rows stretching over floors of valuable real estate. Will we ever see them all digitized and put into some easily searchable format?

I decided to find a book that cries out for some more imaginative formatting, and there was an obvious candidate from John Bagnell Bury (photo)—A History of the Later Roman Empire. Yes, I located it on paper.

History is comprehensive to the point of being daunting, covering every aspect of the Byzantine empire (and I’ll ignore Mr. Bury’s comments about calling it “Byzantine”).

E-indexes vs. P ones

A paper edition of History runs into two volumes; and for the serious student of ancient and mediaeval history or church history, this is a very important publication.  But it also points out the horrors of trying to research a subject using the old p-book index.  Students are struggling to finish the amount of work as it is, so who needs to waste an hour trying to locate references in a book? Luckily, via David, I’ve since found that History is indeed online, from McMaster University (vol. 1 and vol. 2 in PDF) and a University of Chicago-related site (HTML pages). 

Being able to search the text is one thing, but to be able to hyperlink references, add notes, bookmark sections—now that could be a real time-saver with the right software in use.  And no more of those dog-eared volumes with broken spines and lots of underlining (usually by someone who liked red pens)!

Popularity: 4% [?]

By David Rothman

Oh how I’d hate it if TeleRead weren’t a global e-book blog. Where would we be without posts from Branko Collin in Amsterdam or others such as Carol Jurd in Adelaide or Ficbot in Toronto—or, now, Richard Herley, the prize-winning novelist whose essays reach us from a village in the Hampshire Downs in the U.K., an area shown in the photo?

But no course requirements, no academic details, bedevil us. What about institutions? How can degrees be more similar in a number of places—not just Europe or the United States but also cash-strapped developing countries? And can open source software and the right library resources, including, yes, well-stocked national digital library systems, help? Not to mention OLPC-style computers and variants that can display e-books well.

The World in Your Library conference

Such topics will come up Friday at an all-day conference called The World in Your Library: International Users and International Librarians: Enriching the Academic Experience, and I’ll be among the speakers along with another name familiar to TeleBlog regulars, Wayan Vota of OLPC News. If you’ll be attending and want to say hello, just shoot me an e-mail. Wayan and I will be part of a 3-4:30 p.m. program and demo XOs afterwards, although we’ll be there all day. Beyond the librarians, I’m also looking forward to meeting Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation. The event is part of the LACUNY Institute series from the Library Association of the City University of New York.

Where the TeleBlog is weak: We need more contributors from developing countries, such as David Ajao, who wrote about e-books on mobile phones in Africa. E-mail me if you’re working to popularize e-books there and want to write about successes—or challenges.

Popularity: 7% [?]

By Carol Jurd

Moderator’s note: Well done, Carol—you’ve made me want to download this 1916 PW bestseller. I invite others to submit their own appreciations of public domain and Creative Commons works. - David

Written in 1916, Mr. Britling Sees It Through is an account of the effect of World War 1 on British middle-class society.  H.G. Wells, shown here, wrote in the very midst of the war and, I would imagine, has drawn on his own feelings and the reactions of those around him at that time.

His non-science fiction works have rather faded into the background; not as gripping as alien invasions or mad scientists, they evoke the values of a past era.  But look past the Edwardian tennis parties and middle-class mores—these are first-hand accounts of way society changed from the Victorian era into the world as we know it.

Cracks already appearing

In Mr Britling’s world the cracks are already appearing before war is declared.  At the start we see him attempting to explain the English way of life to a visiting American.  Britling is a journalist and essayist, a thinker; words roll off his tongue and his pen.  His existence is comfortable and his biggest problem finding time for the latest mistress.  At first the war seems only a niggling worry and the cause of minor disruptions to everyday life; gradually it comes to dominate everything.

Wells uses the trivia of day to day life to map out the descent into world madness. It is one thing to read about world catastrophes, but it is the day-to-day disruptions and hardships that affect us most.  When Britling’s own teenage son is sent to the front, it becomes real and heartbreaking.

If you do read this, try some of Wells’ other novels: Kipps or The History of Mr Polly.

Other availability: Project Gutenberg.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Carol Jurd

If you find books like Copleston’s History of Philosophy to be among your favourite bedtime reads, or think Thucydides is more exciting than Dan Brown, then you are probably a Book Geek.  Don’t fret, it’s not fatal (unless you try to cross a busy street whilst reading Virgil) and a lot less expensive than an addiction to sports cars or yachts.

Over the years I have learned to ignore comments from friends and family in the vein of, “Are you actually reading that?” or, “Don’t you have any interesting books?”  Sigh!

In fact, with the resources of the Internet you can stock up on very geeky books for the cost of your broadband connection. There seems to be a large amount of material printed in the late 19th/early 20th century, now out of copyright.  There are also some more modern academic publications available at eScholarship Editions.  Not for download, but can be read on-line.

For the Classics geek there is TextKit. Books are in PDF format and cover Greek & Latin texts, grammars and so on.  How could you resist “Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb” by William W. Goodwin?

The Digital Book Index lets you search by subject matter or term for Ebooks, also providing details about publication date, format, whether the book free or for sale.  The subject list is quite amazing - nine pages of books on Philosophy? Over thirty subheadings under Agriculture?  These people have literally left no stone unturned!

The Intra Text Digital Library contains many works by ancient writers, many in their original languages, also English & Italian.  Format is mainly HTML for on-line reading.

Project Gutenberg contains a vast amount of material, but I do think its search page could do with a little attention, some of the results seems a little strange at times.

Finally a word of praise (yes!) for Google Book search - they seemed to have listened to the criticism and now have it right.  Searches for obscure works and subjects brought instant (and mostly sensible) results.  A pity they all seem to be in PDF or text format, but given the confusion over formats it is not surprising.

And having just found Heinrich Ritter’s “The History of Ancient Philosophy” I am now going off to read a good book!

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Carol Jurd

Cleaning out behind some cupboards the other day I came across an old 5 1/4″ floppy disk—we’re talking really “floppy,” with about 360KB of storage. It seemed so strange to think that whole computer programs used to fit on one of these. Coincidentally, we had just bought some extra storage for my MP3 player and husband’s phone: two Sandisk MicroSD flash cards, 2G of storage capacity on a device the size of my fingernail and about as thick. This storage was to be used for extra MP3 files, but we could have used it for e-books, photos, documents, most anything.

To bring some of the improvements in data storage into perspective: my much-battered p-book version of Goodwin’s Greek Grammar measures 12.5 x 18.5 cm and is about 3cm thick (that’s 5 x 7.5 inches for non-metrics), the same book in PDF format (from Textkit) takes up about 8.5MB on my computer. I could store about 88 of these e-books on a CD. Not bad for something the size of a small notepad. I could fit 235 of these 8.5MB e-books on my MicroSD card, a device that makes a postage stamp look bulky! No doubt we will soon get 10 gb versions, although we may be at the lower limit of usable size as the MicroSD card is almost dangerously easy to lose.

Will my whole library eventually be reduced to a box the size of my p-book version of the Greek Grammar? Or a matchbox?

Moderator’s note: I’d emphatically agree with Carol’s matchbox prediction. I lack time to Google up the most definitive and detailed sources—maybe other TeleBlog folks can—but meanwhile check this out. - David Rothman

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

“UMPC sales haven’t made a blip on the industry radar screen. ‘We are talking a fraction of a percent of the total PC market. Noise,’ says analyst Leslie Fiering of Gartner.” - BusinessWeek.

The TeleRead take: The additional power needed to run XP is one of the problems with the UMPC. At least the Linux-based Foleo (PR photo via Mobile Gazette story) avoids those hassles. Meanwhile here are some thoughts from Carol Jurd, source of the above link:

“I guess we have well and truly scooped them as we have been discussing UMPCs for some months. I wonder how long it will take for these journalists to see that a UMPC would make an ideal device for reading all those pages of reports that the average business person, lawyer or accountant has to wade through, along with two dozen law journals, newspapers and so on. And maybe even a few e-books to liven up the long plane trip after examining the case law of Grunch V Grunch 1987! Having the whole lot weigh in at less than your shaving/make-up bag is also a big plus.

“Back in the days of vinyl records I have no doubt there were people out there saying CDs would never take off because they were too small.”

Related: Darn! A laptop from Palm—not a tablet.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Carol Jurd

As the e-book evolves, we struggle with various competing formats, argue about DRM and a host of other issues; the technology leaps ahead and we struggle to keep up with the practical details. One of the problems is that in the last 2,000 years the only changes in book formats were scrolls to handwritten books to printing. The technology involved in printing books changed, we got paper instead of vellum or papyrus, but a book was still a book.

But what happened in the last great print revolution, when we humans learned to write down our words? It’s almost impossible to understand what a leap of imagination was required to take human voice sounds and turn them into little squiggles which could be read by another person, even one in another far-off town, who also understood the “code.” How long did it take to evolve from pictures of things happening to being able to record speech? And the formats! The Phoenicians wrote from right to left, as Arabic is written. The early Greeks wrote from right to left or left to right and sometimes meandered both ways.

Battles over “letter formats” and “pen technology”

Letters had to be changed to incorporate new vocal sounds and dialects. Most of us only see the end result of neat inscriptions on vases and buildings. No doubt there were times when entire schools of scribes battled it out over “letter formats” and “pen technology.” Tom Holt’s Olympiad gives a very humorous spin to the introduction of writing into Greece by Phoenician traders. I suspect his version is not far from the truth.

On the way to developing standard ways of writing there were no doubt many casualties, as there might be with e-Book formats. We also need to guard against an English-centric view of e-book technologies. Sometimes when faced with writing out classical Greek, Arabic or even music notation, I find myself drifting back to to the old pen and paper method rather than fighting my computer keyboard!

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Carol Jurd

Mighty Bright Light has inspired some favorable write-ups already. Is it as good as it’s cracked up to be?

My husband bought me one about two months ago, and after using it one-two hours every day for 2 months, I am delighted to report that I am still on my first set of AAA batteries. Those of you who use booklights would be aware of how they chew through batteries, so this is amazing. The
flexible twin necks make it so easy to get the light just where you want it. After using book lights both for reading books and playing music in bands I have to give this a five-star rating. You probably won’t find the light in a book shop—try a musical instrument store.

It occurs to me that a decent size book reader device would be ideal for musicians’ charts. It could sit on a music stand and a small foot switch could control page turns. No more lugging around bags of charts! Bliss!

Detail: As long as the clip fits on the Sony Reader I think it would work—it is a bright white light, very easy to read with. Price in the United States is about $25 list.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

Just the other day, TeleBlog contributor Carol Jurd was correctly bemoaning the heft of the usual laptops—a hassle for many e-book readers, especially some women. Suppose, however, a notebook computer can be slim and fashionable for female book-lovers and even offer an E Ink screen for times when the usual LCD is powered down.

Well, here’s the Metro concept notebook for Carol and maybe the ladies at DearAuthor.com to fantasize about. Let’s hope vendors will oblige her, ideally with somewhat larger e-paper screens. Beyond that, I can’t wait for color E Ink—with the decent contrast shown in the illustration—to be real at an affordable price. Same for tech from rivals like Nemoptic.

Yes, this ties in with the earlier Intel news. It’s the E Ink/e-book angle—yes, books are among the apps seen for the Metro—that I’m focusing on here. More details from Wired News and Google News Round Up.

Popularity: 2% [?]

By a TeleBlog Contributor

Will e-books benefit from the OLED tech used in Samsung’s forthcoming 11-inch TV and other models? And how about this beauty from Sony, shown in the photo?

Remember, one of the issues of OLED screens has been, “How long will they last?” But TVs remain on for hours and hours. Related: Engadget stories on OLED TVs and earlier TeleBlog items on OLEDs. (Thanks to Carol Jurd.)

Popularity: 2% [?]

By Carol Jurd

A few weeks ago, when posting a TeleBlog comment, I mentioned an interesting device in one of Arthur C. Clarke’s books, Imperial Earth.

The device was called a “Minisec” and was a combination video/sound recorder, telephone and file storage system. It was small—hand-sized—and could be connected to a computer terminal by what Clarke called an “optical interface”; file exchange was measured in megabytes per second. The device had a keyboard with small keys and several “modes” so that keys could be used for multiple functions.

‘75 tech

Sound familiar? The only thing Clarke hadn’t foreseen was the use of wireless broadband to connect the device to a worldwide “file storage” system (the Internet?). Considering that the book was published in 1975, a few years ahead of the time I was presented with a strange device called a “personal computer” running VisiCalc, this prediction now seems very daring. (And for those weren’t around then—that was probably about 1979.) (more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]