TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘net tools’ Category

By David Rothman

Who says large-print books are just for the elderly and others with visual impairments?

In promoting a related podcast set for Tuesday, April 29, at 2 p.m. EDT, Library Journal and Thorndike Press note large print’s usefulness for “struggling readers,” including the English-as-a-second-language variety.

Now here’s a question: Can’t easy-to-use E tablets work out as well, in their large-print modes? I don’t know if they’re there yet in terms of simplicity for unassisted users, but sooner or later, they will be. Anyone with opinions and maybe even anecdotes? Success stories?

Speaking of accessibility per se: Check out Building Accessible Websites, by Joe Clark, a long-time TeleBlog reader, who has just released a free online preview. “Not only will you learn everything you need to know from this book, but you can actually read it for pleasure,” says Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards.

About the first image: That’s a copy of the Longman edition of Great Expectations, “intended for visually impaired students who attend mainstream schools.”

Related: E-books as the new large print: An eye doctor speaks out.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

The nurses and the social worker agreed. “Hearing,” they all more or less said, “is the last thing to go.” At 5:30 p.m. today my mother, always a good listener when my sister and I needed her, died at 94 of congestive heart failure in a rest home in Springfield, Virginia.

I don’t know what the final words she heard were, just that we encouraged her to let go when there was no more fighting to do. Dorothy and I, in fact, tried not speaking to her, despite our wishes to the contrary, so she wouldn’t linger on in pain—congestive heart failure isn’t as gentle a death as the medical gobbledygook might suggest to the ignorant—and within an hour my mother was dead. The intervals between the heaves of her chest grew longer, until at last the moaning stopped and she was still.

Yes, my mother had us late in life and would have been 95 in November. The Titanic had sunk only a year or so before her birth, and on Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list in 1913, Pollyanna was number eight in fiction—safe within even today’s abbreviated public domain.

Lessons from my favorite Luddite

However keen I am on e-books for the elderly, I could not win Mom over, but she enjoyed share of her paper books—from the best-sellers of Herman Wouk, years ago, to, more recently, Nicholas Sparks—along with tunes from Broadway musicals and trips to Nags Head and Fourth of July celebrations at the neighborhood swimming pool and German chocolate icebox, the recipe of which I’ll try to reproduce here in time. Is it really true that chocolate, gooey ladyfingers and whipped cream will prolong life, especially with cherries atop this phenomenon of a dessert? Well, it worked for Mom.

To tell you the truth, except for TV and a fondness for the telephone, almost a flesh-and-blood appendage for her, my mother was a bit of a Luddite. I think she prided herself on avoidance of gadgets and tech as much as—until her old age, when she had no choice—she did on her avoidance of doctors. The phone, moreover, was hardly a replacement for all bridge games and garden club meetings and coffees klatches with temple friends.  She believed strongly in community and continuity in the old-fashioned senses and was also a regular at community potluck suppers in her younger days; what’s more, she and her food were always available to comfort the sick or those in mourning. Now her friends can return the favors.

(more…)

Popularity: 6% [?]

By Bob Wyman

Moderator: You should cap “Internet” and “Web,” at least in a “the” context. Below, excerpted with permission from a post to the online-news list, is wisdom from Bob Wyman, a Google tech staffer and long-time Net expert. - D.R.

In the technical community that created and named the Internet, the convention is to capitalize when one is writing about the specific “internet” that we call the Internet and not to capitalize when referring to generic internets. In this case, the technical community is essentially acting as their own lexicographers and using the capitalization to add disambiguating information to the text. Think of it as a case of case-sensitive encoding.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By David Rothman

Could Flickr and other sites based on grassroots content have to dump some of Grandma’s photos and other items in time? Even at the risk of kissing off eternal permalinks? That’s the possibility broached in a Silicon Valley Watcher post by Tom Foremski, a former reporter for the Financial Times.

FlickRs and the rest may not be able to grow new markets enough to pay for hosting costs, he says. A debatable thesis? Well, we know that storage prices are headed download, so I’m not sure. So what about bandwidth costs? I’m welcome comments? Your thoughts? Could it be that we’re dining off a feast created by over-expansion during the dot-com boom?

The e-book angles

What about the e-book angle? FlickR-style sites are catnip for people looking for Creative Commons art for books (although remember there could be issues besides copyright, such as modeling fees). What’s more, some e-books in the future would be harmed by the ditching of permalinks they reference. Also, what about future multimedia e-books that supposedly are to be stored for free forever?  Let’s hope Foremski is wrong. Meanwhile here are more details from him:

“Companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits. They will have to dump the data, dump the grandma photos.

“That means dumping the many links that users created to their content. The idea of permalinks, links that will remain rooted forever in the concrete of the Internet, will become a fallacy.

(more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

Misbehave on an airliner in the future, and the pilot just might zap you with a nasty shock from the bracelet you’re forced to wear. Don’t laugh. The patent for such a system already exists.

DRM-friendly E Ink machines aren’t quite that bad, but metaphorically don’t you feel as though you or your “protected” books are wearing such a bracelet? Wouldn’t it be great if your E Ink gizmo ran with an alternative operating system and maybe even let you choose your own e-readerware, such as the .epub-compatible FBReader? And how about the possibility of WiFi via an SD card slot, at least on some machines? Couple that with recent efforts to iPod-ize the downloading of public domain books and other nonDRMed titles—make things toaster-simple—and you can imagine the possibilities. Oh, and for good measure, how about a way for your machine to accept text-input, assuming it doesn’t already? Or maybe run a Web browser optimized for E Ink, even if it’s no speed champ? Would be handy for downloads, eh?

OpenInkpot—looking for volunteers and ideas

With the above in mind, I’ll enthusiastically share an e-mail from Yoav Felberbaum of OpenInkpot—while urging qualified volunteers to pitch in, and reminding vendors that the open approach just might lead to some free and incredible R&D, in effect:

“We are delighted to have been accepted into Google Summer of Code, and even more so when you consider that OpenInkpot was founded only three months ago!

“OpenInkpot was founded in order to create a free alternative to the often proprietary and closed operating systems present on the various e-ink devices out there. In the short period that OpenInkpot has been active, there has been remarkably rapid progress with the Jinke Hanlin/lBook V3 hardware—to the point where we already have our own firmware booting on the V3. But we still have a lot ahead of us!

“We are always in need of more people and ideas, and Google Summer of Code offers us, and you, a perfect opportunity to be part of the future of reading!

(more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

By David Rothman

Microformats are old news to attentive TeleBlog readers, and now they could be about to take off in a big way, with encouragement from Yahoo—not just the developers of Firefox and Internet Explorer, both of which already have committed to supporting them.

In a nutshell, Yahoo will be able to extract information in context from a suitably coded Web page—and then reposition it for more precise and flexible search results, in keeping with the philosophy behind the semantic Web.

Microformats as traffic boosters

TeleBlog regular Branko Collin gave a nice explanation of how microformats could aid pickups of information from book reviews for Technorati. Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation, whom I met Friday at a library conference in NYC, has also been a big booster of the concept. I  can see why. As described by Wikipedia, “any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.”

That sounds anti-commerce. But actually microformats could help even commercial sites by, say, bringing more traffic to a book review magazine than it would receive otherwise. Theoretically Yahoo could create a page listing reviews for a certain book and automatically pick up ratings from each publication’s writeup. Such a capability, in turn, might just drive you to visit the sites and see how the reviewers justified the rating. What’s more, other sites could ride Yahoo’s coattails and reproduce the Yahoo page.

Enticing shoppers

Imagine other possibilities. What about a cookbook publisher that could use microformats to ease distribution of sample recipes—to entice shoppers to check out the actual book? In fact, over at the PersonaNonData blog, Michael Cairns (photo), former president of Bowker, gives examples of how microformats could help publishers of cookbooks and others. Granted, some publishers may fret over loss of control over content, or of the public domain requirements, but the more forward-looking publishers will embrace the microformat concept as a way to weave themselves more tightly into the fabric of the Web. Needless to say, they could use microformats to promote paper books, not just E versions of the same titles.

Related: Technocrunch’s latest microformat-related post (from which I’ve picked up the image). Also see Microformats.org.

Popularity: 5% [?]

By David Rothman

Despite the famous Internet dog cartoon—no one online knows you’ve got four legs and a tail—I’ve had pretty good luck when I met TeleBlog regulars in person.

Take Paul Biba, the semi-retired corporate lawyer shown here. He wasn’t wearing his red suspenders, but his offline persona was exactly the same as online when we explored the Tools of Change conference together. Same for Jon Noring when he dropped by the D.C. area for archive-related work. I’ve never run into Ficbot, but I’ve no doubt that if I visited Canada and ran into FB on a Toronto subway, I’d spot her with an e-reader or at least a good paperback, maybe in French. And Garson O’Toole? Like Ficbot, he uses an a pseudonym online, but I’ve not the slightest doubt he’ d be the same scholarly self in person. Same for Mike Cane. Cranky, funny, a smart-alec and proud of it.

But not everybody is as billed, nor obviously should you trust anyone you really don’t know, and with that in mind, here’s a pointer to an entertaining segment from National Public Radio called Spotting the Internet Liar. Hey, relax. The interviewee, Jeff Hancock, a Cornell professor of communications, says cellphone users are the real ones to be wary about. Check out his publications and current research.

Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

The bad news: Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, now available for download, is buggy. Hey, it’s a beta. We’ll cut Microsoft some slack here. Good to see an official blog devoted to IE, one way for surfers to offer feedback.

The good news: IE8 is apparently far more Web-standards-compliant than earlier Explorers. Kudos to Opera for providing Microsoft with a little encouragement.

The bottom line: Hopefully few sites with obnoxious messages such as, "Best viewed with Internet Explorer." A salient aspect of the Web is or should be seamless linking. Do you really want to change browsers whenever to go to another site?

The hope for the future: May this claimed focus on standards compliance spread to the e-book area and bring Microsoft back into the IDPF!

More info on Explorer: Wikipedia article, source of the screenshot. Click here for detailed view.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Joe Wikert, a VP in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons

After that initial wave of publicity it’s clear Kindle news has really slowed down over the past several weeks. The lack of buzz is no doubt partially a function of Amazon’s out-of-stock situation, a problem that’s literally existed since day one.

That said, and despite the fact that the number of Kindles in circulation is still probably small, the number of owners subscribing to blogs on their Kindles is apparently growing. I’ve noticed several Kindle blog subscriptions showing up in Amazon’s Computer & Internet (C&I) bestseller list.

(Why they show up there is beyond me, but mis-categorized bestsellers has always been an issue on those lists!)

The latest Kindle blog subscriptions to infiltrate the C&I top 20 are:

#5 — Amazon Daily
#11 — The Onion
#18 — The New York Times — Latest News

So is this an indication of

(a) the popularity of blog feeds for the Kindle,
(b) the relative softness of the C&I segment, or
(c) a little bit of both?

Imagine how these blogs would dominate this list if Amazon could fix the inventory situation…

Popularity: 5% [?]

By David Rothman

Harvard wants to Web-publish the research of faculty members, and other schools will inevitably follow.

Will this kill off academic journals? Not all of them.

The smarter ones could adapt with better-than-ever peer review procedures and maybe even use a blog approach. They could link to the best research and also comment on the worst, while offering far, far more depth than a blog would.

Perhaps in the future, professors and grad students be judged partly by the reception they get from trustworthy sources online. I can even see link-related algorithms to help quantify this. The more links you get, and the better the numerical ratings, the more valuable your paper could be in your quest for tenure. I’d hate to see everything reduced to numbers. But this could be yet another tool. Who knows? Maybe a Google research team is already at work on these matters.

One other suggestion would be for the academic journals to try more multimedia, online conferences, wikis and other alternatives to the static text to which they’re partial now. It’s time for academic journals to learn to love the Web.

Related: Media Commons Project from the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Technorati Tags: Harvard University,academic publishing,academic journals

Popularity: 5% [?]

By David Rothman

Matt Warburton, Yahoo community manager, is assuring bloggers at the dying Yahoo 360 site that his company “will offer the ability to export your blog posts and comments in a format that can be imported into other blogging tools. As long as the blogging tool has an import function, you should be able to transfer your posts and comments to it.”

Beth Wellington, however, a 360 user-victim who made more than 800 posts for her Writing Corner blog shown here in its old location, now relies on Blogger. And, sure enough, it’s missing an import function At least she is contemplating a switch to WordPress; other 360 bloggers may lack the tech smarts to do so. So they’re still out of luck.

On top of everything else, the latest note from Warburton is light on other specifics, such just when the new tools will be available.

(more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

By David Rothman

Firefox is both the joy and bane of my life–I love the plug-ins, hate the memory hog act. But Firefox 3 Beta 3, still working great after maybe ten hours on my HP desktop, might be my salvation.

This is just a beta, so don’t blame me if it wipes out every bit on your one-terabyte drive, but if you’re adventurous, maybe you should give it a try. Download it here, while keeping your expectations realistic. Remember, the beta won’t play nice with all your plug-ins. Click on the screenshot for a closer look.

So what do you think? Is this just the ticket for stocking up with public domain goodies at Manybooks.net or Feedbooks or Gutenberg or doing Gmail? What are the pros and cons?

(Via ArsTechnica and Slashdot.)

Popularity: 4% [?]