June 2010
7 posts
My demo of open standards is better than your demo...
Make no mistake, Google and Apple are now having a proper, stand-up fight. But at least they’re fighting sensibly.
Easiest (free) ways to read ebooks on your iPad
In five steps:
Get yourself a free Dropbox account
Upload your ePub files to Dropbox
Download the latest version of Stanza for the iPad
Browse to your Dropbox folder in Safari, select the ePub file, then hit the Stanza icon
Go to Stanza and your ebook file should be there.
This is the easiest (free) way to get ebooks onto a suitable iPad ereader if you a)...
The command-line is a (useful) lie
Here’s a big, meaty post by Emily Short on the role of parsers in interactive fiction.
But at the end of the day … the trick isn’t to make the parser understand whatever a novice might type, and that the average novice user would actually be happier with a smaller vocabulary that has been spelled out in full.
It’s a matter of making the game better at communicating to the...
Vale, Cimmerian
The Cimmerian, home of probably the best articles about Robert E Howard and Co, is closing down.
But of late, Deuce and I haven’t been able to be that involved — I’m ashamed to say I’ve been so busy I haven’t even been able to read many of the current posts at TC. And so every time Deuce and I see a mistake in a blog post we should have corrected before publication, or a critical take that it...
March 2010
4 posts
The future of feed reading
It’s been a while since I used iGoogle. Initially, I liked the way it took my feeds into a single, multi-column display — separated into discrete blocks depending on their source, and then contextualised by tabs — and I was particularly impressed with its customisation options, which let me drag and drop elements, add applications and pull in my email. It wasn’t great,...
February 2010
12 posts
So who's going to buy an iPad?
Research group YouGov has released some interesting stats [PDF] relating to
iPad awareness and interest:
When shown a picture of the product and asked if they had heard about it 70% of British respondents said they had, compared to 64% in USA, 63% in Germany,
60% in Denmark and 53% in the Middle East.
Middle East respondents were most likely to buy the iPad, with 58% of respondents...
What could the Macmillazon affair mean for...
Now that Amazon has started putting buy links back on Macmillan books,
there’s no shortage of opinions on what it might mean for the future
of publishing, retail, distribution, and so on.
But here’s a question
that I don’t think is being asked: how will the the relationship
between publishers and authors change, and more importantly, how can authors exploit the situation?
...
Some vague stats on e-reader usage
NPD has released some interesting, though infuriatingly vague, tidbits
on usage patterns for e-reader owners. Buried inside this press
release (which seems to hang off the sloppily-worded “95 percent
of e-readers owners are happy with their devices”) is something
enormously interesting:
[It] seems that e-Reader owners aren’t married to their e-Readers to do their reading. About...
What Amazon and Macmillan Aren't Fighting About
I don’t want to dwell on this, but after seeing the responses of bloggers, Twitterers and commentators to the Amazon and Macmillan spat, I think it’s worth pointing out what the argument is about — and more importantly, what it’s not about.
First, here are two concise points lifted from my Twitter stream that, incredibly, seem to sum up about 40 billion words of reader...
Google Book Search Settlement Still Rubbish
Quick update on the Google Book Search (GBS) Settlement. At the end of last year, Google proposed a revised Settlement which was supposed to satisfy the demands made by the US Department of Justice.
Here’s what Judge Chin had to say:
“[The] amended settlement agreement suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism...
Google's cultural asphyxiation
My views on the Google Book Settlement are straightforward: solve
the antitrust problem. Google will gain automatic access to your work
via the Book Rights Registry on an involuntary basis, and that’s
utterly insane. Squabbles over copyrights, fair use, privacy, author
compensation, etc, are only meaningful in a marketplace — if the GBS
goes ahead as is, then we won’t have that,...
January 2010
3 posts
What the iPad looks like...
… without Flash.
The actual stupid thing Amazon did
John Scalzi on the Amazon thing:
Note to Amazon: Real people do not give a shit about your fight with Macmillan. Real people want to buy things. When your store takes them to a product page on which they cannot buy the thing on the page, they will not say to themselves, “Hmm, I wonder if Amazon is having a behind-the-scenes struggle with the publisher of this title, of which this is the...
Amazon pulls its head in
Well, that didn’t last long. Amazon has “capitulated” on its decision to wipe Macmillan from its stores.
According to a post on the Kindle forum:
Dear Customers:
Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for...
Where I'm at: the 2010 Edition
Crikey. Forgot about this thing.
Well, not really, I just haven’t been giving it much attention, at least not since September. Neglect is probably the right word, which is perhaps even worse. It’s like saying to your cat, ‘no, I didn’t forget to feed you, I just chose not to.’
In fact, like a cat, it seemed to rebel in its own way. A few image links in the CSS...
September 2009
5 posts
Map of Banned Books
Banned Books Week 2009 is in full swing. This year, there’s even a map showing where specific books are being challenged (in the US), and the reasons why.
The map is far from complete:
There are hundreds of challenges to books in schools and libraries in the United States every year. According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were at least 513 in 2008. But the total...
August 2009
11 posts
Shame, Yale.
Yale University Press won’t be publishing the images of those Islamic cartoon caricatures in its book about said Islamic cartoon caricatures, because its advisors advised that bombs might go off somewhere, at sometime, by someone.
That an academic publishing would act so unacademically is depressing. But censoring itself to prevent imagined violence only validates extremist methods. For...
It's on: Open Book Alliance versus Google
In response to the Google Book Search Settlement, a bunch of party-poopers are forming the Open Book Alliance, which opposes Google’s and anyone else’s book digitization process unless it is: “undertaken in the open, grounded in sound public policy, and mindful of the need to promote long-term benefits for consumers rather than isolated commercial interests.”
Here’s...
Should manga be worthy of its own museum?
Of course it should. If it has cultural and artistic significance, it’s probably worth keeping around. The Democratic Party of Japan doesn’t agree:
The DPJ strongly urged Prime Minister Taro Aso, who is known as a big fan of manga, not to build the facility aimed at collecting and exhibiting manga and animated films.
Although funding for the project gained Diet approval as...
What should Shakespeare sound like?
John Bell on ‘proper’ Shakespearean accents:
“As long as our actors are taught to exploit the timbre and range of their voices, to experiment with their emotive power, to employ clear diction and sharp articulation, accent is no consideration. We are speaking in our own country to our own audience. Until we are comfortable with our own voice, we can never own the material, be...
Google to grow into a tiger, eat our culture
Lawrence Lessig’s rundown of the Google Book Search Settlement is perhaps the best articulation of the ‘against’ position I’ve seen. He urges us not to look at Google as a kitten, but rather a tiger cub that can’t help but grow into a vicious man-eater.
In particular, Lessig talks about how the Settlement changes the print-based ‘ecology’ of ‘free...
Authors, say 'no' to Google ... or 'yes'
Panic, confusion, fear … that’s what happens when you mash together Google, the centuries-old book publishing industry, and one of the most complicated legal settlements in the past 30 years.
In this round, the authors get their chance to be confused. Should they opt in or opt out?
William Morris says they should opt out of the settlement:
“Now they’ve got this license to sell...
German Jews support 'scholarly' Mein Kampf
Stephan Kramer from Germany’s Central Council of Jews says:
“It makes sense and is important to publish an edition of Mein Kampf with an academic commentary,” Mr Kramer said. “A historically critical edition needs to be prepared today to prevent neo-Nazis profiting from it.”
The book, which has been banned in Germany for more than 60 years, goes out of...
On the new Tron movie
I’ll just come right out and say it: Tron is one my favourite movies.
It’s not great by any standard measure, but it had one attribute that made it stand out: the simulation. Visually, Tron was exceptionally well realised. It was beautiful, unique, considered, and somehow understandable. It successfully conveyed a vision for such an odd, outlandish (and cheesy) scenario, and I walked...
Age of Genetics
I’m an enormous fan of genetics. Perhaps dangerously so. That’s why I spent most of this evening swimming through Edge.org’s Church & Venter fest.
NYT says:
In roughly six hours of lectures both scientists tried to convey how the world will be changed by the ability to routinely read genetic sequences into computing systems and then store, replicate, alter and insert...
July 2009
18 posts
And... Doctorow on 'Free'
Cory Doctorow weighs in on Free.
Bits of note:
I think [Free] has exactly the same problem as The Long Tail, namely, an unwillingness to consider the wider implications of a world centred on a commodity that can be infinitely reproduced at no marginal cost.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Anderson’s dismissal of the Free Software Foundation founder, Richard Stallman, the...
Absurd: Google wants to make 'editorial decisions'
I’ve been cautiously optimistic about the Google Book Search Settlement. There are a few things to iron out — and I still haven’t wrapped my head around the implications of Google having access to a goose that lays golden eggs (i.e., making money from orphaned out-of-print-but-in-copyright books) — but on the whole, I think it’s dangerously exciting.
But that was...
Publishers talk to Apple about Kindle killer
The Financial Times says Apple “is racing to offer a portable tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season, in what the entertainment industry hopes will be a new revolution.” Somewhat surprisingly, book publishers are getting in on the ground floor:
Book publishers have been in talks with Apple and are optimistic about being included in the computer, which could...
Unpublished Vonnegut coming soon
Random House imprint Delacorte Press will bring out 14 unpublished short stories by Kurt Vonnegut — each in e-book form. From ArtsBeat:
In a news release, the publisher said that the first story, “Hello Red,” would be available as an e-book on Aug. 25, and a second, “The Petrified Ants,” would be released on Sept. 29; the rest would be available on Oct. 20.
Do we need a new word for reading on screen?
Bill Hill at The Future of Reading doesn’t think we need a new word for reading on screen. I happen to agree, but I think the question itself is somewhat benign.
If reading on screen and reading on paper are different, then they should be distinguished as such. It would be confusing to have any kind of meaningful discussion about their differences if we can’t talk about them as...
