Google Books + Sony eReader = Other Shoe Dropping
Just caught sight of this little announcement, tip o’ the virtual hat to my favo(u)rite snarky tech site, The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/19/google_and_sony_ebooks/
I haven’t invested in the Kindle (at least not for myself), so to me this news is All Good. More digital book access will mean more digital books, which will mean more information accessible to more people.
If Sony and Google figure out how to make this work for libraries, even better … my understanding is that Kindle doesn’t quite have that sussed.
Add comment March 20, 2009
Look Out, LibraryThing!
From the Old News Dept.: Shelfari announced on August 28th (yeah, this sat in my Drafts that long — want to make something of it?) that they’ve been acquired by Amazon.com — great news for the virtual library lover in all of us, probably boot-quaking stuff for LibraryThing. (And GoodReads is probably just salivating with acquisition-envy.) All this activity in the vLibrary realm is welcome, because it brings ever closer the day when you will be able to go to your virtual library shelf, pluck a virtual volume from it, and start reading.
Add comment January 6, 2009
Instructional Technologist, “In Quotes”
In today’s New York Times roundup of buzzwords for 2008, the word “Edupunk” (attributed to “Edupunk Poster Boy” Jim Groom) was included, with the following definition:
A style of hands-on self-education that benefits the student without concern for curriculums or the interests of schools, corporations or governments. In other words, an autodidactic approach that spurns commercialism, mass-market approaches and top-down goal-setting. Coined by Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va.
I’m not sure why, but putting the phrase “instructional technologist” in quotes struck me as somewhat disparaging. Maybe, as a budding instructional technologist, I’m just overreacting. Maybe the author of this piece was just unfamiliar with the term and expected his audience would be too. In any case, I thought it worth reproducing, so that we can all have a good laugh at the NYT in a few years when everyone (even writers at the New York Times) know what Instructional Technology is and does in higher education.
1 comment December 22, 2008
O’Reilly TOC
TOC = Tools of Change, don’tcha know. I knew O’Reilly blogged about tech (naturally) but I didn’t know they blogged about publishing (which is, well, just as natural a concern for a publisher). Lots of ebook stuff, POD, etc. here. Read on!
Add comment December 16, 2008
Google’s Editable Search Results
Well, Google, there you go again, doing something so innovative that the rest of the search world just has to scratch its collective head and wonder how you do it.
This time, Google is enabling those with Google accounts to customize their search results … a boon to researchers, especially librarians, who want to shape their searches into a higher quality experience.
Add comment November 21, 2008
Distributed Proofreading for eBooks
Want to get involved with the eBook movement? Project Gutenberg has a website called Distributed Proofreading that lets everyone edit OCR’d pages, one at a time, as a cooperative project. Link in, sign up, do some proofreading (if you have time) and let me know how you like the experience!
Add comment October 28, 2008
It’s Kindle, get it? Not THE Kindle, Kindle.
OK, I know Mr. Bezos is up to more in it than just dropping the definite article from the name of his new killer app for reading, but for some reason when I read his letter to the shareholders about it, dropping the “the” is the salient feature that seems to stand out to me.
No, I didn’t miss all the other stuff, about the paper-like eInk page, the cell-phone network distribution system, or the attempt to replicate the experience of reading a book and having it “disappear”. That’s all very interesting. But I think it is serious matter when big multinational corporate executive makes effort to drop important part of English language, like article, without particular reason. When we call up Amazon.com, and say “I want to buy Kindle”, don’t we feel little bit like Cave Man?
Speaking of the experience of the “disappearing” book, I think it’s arguable that printed books “disappear” at all. I’ve just finished a course in the History of the Book, and if there’s anything I learned in that course about print culture, it’s that the medium profoundly affects the perception of the work. Give this passage a tumble and then apply it to Bezos’ statements about the Kindle, and see what you think:
“A book, after all, is much more than its text; it encompasses a host of tangible components (paper, binding cloth, glues, inks), visual features (typefaces, margins, colors, illustrations), and what French critic Gerard Genette calls paratextual, often commercial, elements (a publisher’s name and logo, a price, promotional blurbs, lists of other books written by the author or sold by the publisher, and so forth). These material aspetcs, which differ with each particular edition of a text — lurid cover art, cramped lines of type, cheap paper, stiff bindings, a ribbon bookmark, gilded edges, glossy illustrations, and so on — powerfully influence how we approach and understand the text itself. We intuitively tend to read a book with a sturdy binding, large type, and plentiful illustration as a children’s book, for example, and perceive its meaning within that context. We cannot read a text without also, simultaneously and inevitably, reading its form.”
Megan L. Benton, Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America.
New York: Yale University Press. (2000)
Happy reading!
Add comment May 4, 2008
Happy Library Week (belated)
National Library Week was last week, but it’s never too late to wish your favorite Librarians a happy one!
http://www.jonathanrundman.com/jrundman_librariandemo.mp3
Add comment April 21, 2008
How Archive.org Digitizes Books
Wired Magazine recently published online a brief photo essay detailing Archive.org’s digitization process. Interesting to get a look at book digitization from a non-bookperson’s perspective. I find it ironic that they use the term “monastic diligence” to describe the rather tedious flipping of pages by worker bees operating book scanners. Even the most mediocre scribe must have needed more intricate skills than those required to place a book in a scanner and turn the pages. Not that there’s anything wrong with that …
Add comment April 8, 2008
