This post from Neil Gaiman’s Journal (Thanks from the future…) reminded me of another point against e-readers in general. When you buy and e-book, what happens to author’s signings, autographs, etc. I know most people don’t care, but many do, and that physical interaction with the author does have meaning. Yes I remember from the Times article–the first in my series on E-Readers (strange I didn’t mean for it to go there, but there you have it.)–that there might be more interaction in general, but all electronic, or from a distance.
So while authors may like the e-book idea for this reason, since it’s easier on them (although I think many do enjoy meeting their fans, and interacting with them (Wil Wheaton for example)), it’s a lousy deal for fans.
Category Archives: Tech
Bookeen – Cybook ePaper – the eBook reading device
Bookeen – Cybook ePaper – the eBook reading deviceThis e-book reader is much nicer looking, can read non-DRMed e-books (as well as DRMed ones), and a little cheaper than the Kindle. Still too expensive for my tastes, but it is more in the right direction.
(Three years of development and the Kindle is all Amazon could come up with, when they have models like this, and the Sony e-book reader? Wow.)
(Got this from the comments on Cory Doctorow’s article trashing the Kindle, over on BoingBoing.)
Amazon: Reinventing the Book | Newsweek.com
Amazon: Reinventing the Book | Newsweek.com
This is a great article (7 pages, so be prepared to spend some time on it.) on the future of the physical/paper book vs the electronic book. It’s mainly about Amazon’s new Kindle, but delves deeper into what reading may look like in 20-50 years, with books, and reader, and writers being interconnected.
It all sounds wonderful (to some people anyways), and I would love to be able to store a couple hundred books in a space the size of a single paperback (and wouldn’t my wife love that 😀 ), but while the price of the books are o.k. ($9.99 or less)(on second thought, maybe that is too expensive since you can get a paperback for $7.99 and the cost of digitizing a book is much less than that, $2-$4 may be a better price range here), I can’t bring myself to pay $400 for the reader, when I can get a laptop for that price. I think when the price of the reader drops to something like $99 (or even less), it may be more palatable to readers (myself included).
There’s, also the whole DRM encumberment going on which I find very absurd. If I buy a book, I’d like to be able to lend it to someone else, just like I can now, and maybe that’s the best argument for paper books right there.
Via Slashdot (Some good comments there, by the way)
Australian researchers find hunger switch – washingtonpost.com
This’ll be the new fad in dieting in a couple of years.
Australian researchers find hunger switch – washingtonpost.com
I am “Slightly Dorky Nerd King”
Well…
…I did it. Yes I did. I broke down and bought a new laptop. I got one preinstalled with Ubuntu Linux from System76. They get good reviews (especially for customer service), and the laptops are priced competitively. I narrowed down the choices to this one, and an IBM Thinkpad from Lenovo, and this one won out, because I could get the same options for a little less, and, (the big one) it comes preinstalled with Linux. Less messing around for me to make sure everything works. I’ve been using a Gateway laptop for the last 2.5 years, and installed Ubuntu (starting with 4.10–Warty Warthog) on it with minimal fuss. I don’t think I’ll ever buy another Gateway, since I ‘ve had nothing but trouble with the last four computers I ‘ve bought from them. The Lenovos are really nice (I just bought one for my stepdaughter), but the System 76 seemed a better fit for me at this time.
I’ll be blogging some more about this as things unfold. I’m really hoping this is closer to the Thinkpad than the Gateway in sturdiness: that’s really my biggest concern.
The previous post was brought to you by…
Viper’s Video Quicktags, a plugin for WordPress that lets you embed videos in your posts.
From the site:
This Plugins Provides Support For:
- YouTube
- Google Video
- IFILM
- Metacafe
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- QuickTime files
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- FLV (Flash video) files (only basic support, use a dedicated FLV plugin if you want full configuration options)
It, also, helps to bypass having to get an API from wordpress.com to post youtube videos.
Thanks Viper.
My top ten cool things for 2006
Everybody else is doing top 10 lists, why not me. 😀
- wxPython
Yep, cross platform, fairly easy to learn, more powerful than Tkinter (Python’s “official” GUI toolkit). It may have some faults, but it works well for me as a noob Python programmer. - Democracy TV
The free and open source internet tv platform. There’s an opportunity to build a new, open mass medium of online television. We’re developing the Democracy internet TV platform so that watching internet video channels will be as easy as watching TV and broadcasting a channel will be open to everyone. Unlike traditional TV, everyone will have a voice. An alternative to mass media, and corporate controlled TV. Hundreds of “channels”. My favorite? Punkcast.com, of course. 😀 - Coffee By Design
Coffee By Design’s mission is to educate people about specialty coffee and to provide them with the best quality coffee beans available at our Micro Roastery and Coffeehouses in Portland, Maine. We take pride in our reputation for offering the highest quality products at a fair price as well as providing extraordinary service. Our goal is 100% customer satisfaction. Damn good coffe. Fairly local to me, only 3hrs away. Great seveice, and good pricing. I recommend the Rebel Blend Dark Roasted coffee. Not only because it’s good but because a portion of sales goes to Rebel Blend Arts Fund, which gives grants to artists. - My cowon IAudio M5 Portable Digital Audio Player.
Plays all formats. of audio files you can throw at it, holds 20GB worth of music(and just about any other kind of file, but you can only view text files, not pics, or anything else.) Works with Linux, since it’s basically just a porable hard drive with music playing software on it. - Download Punk
See my post on this fine site. - Ghostland Observatory
These guys actually beat out Exene Cervenka and Joan Jett (both of whom I love, and had new CDs out this year) because of their originality, and total coolness and independence. Try Piano Man from Paparazzi Lightning. - Musee Picasso in Barcelona
From my 2 month working excursion. My favorite thing, a great collection. See this post for more things. - Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow
This fine book beat out a couple of others as my fave read this year, for it’s absolute strangeness, and great writing. On the short list:
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Driving with Shannon by S A Robinson
I thought I did a review of this, but I didn’t. It’s a semi-autobiographical memoir of a couple of teen age punk rockers trip cross country in the early eighties, a good, but not great book. - Eternal Gaze
A wonderful, animated short about the artist Alberto Giacometti
It even beat out How to draw a Bunny, for me. - My wife
Who continues towards her goal of being an RN, works a demanding job, and still loves me for who only knows what reason.
There’s really so much more like Cobh, Ireland, other bands, and download sites, my kids, my cats, my dad, ART books, not having internet for 2 months, Richard Dawkins, Keith Olberman, and many, many other things that I can’t think of, but, these are my top 10 cool things.
New host
Well the migration went fine, except for a few MySQL tics (notice the funny symbols in some of the posts.) Can’t seem to figure out how to get rid of them without editing every single post, so I ‘m not worrying to much about it right now.
I changed hosts for financial reasons, we’ll see how everything works out.
Finally a useful extension for Firefox (just kidding)
But, seriously, there is a great extension out there for researchers, writers, students, any one who needs to keep stuff organized, and referenced. It sure beats 3×5 cards. 😀
It’s called Zotero:
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.
You can save whole webpages, pdfs, images, citation sources from webpages, etc. It works with Amazon, Google Books, Library of Congress, many university libraries, (here’s a list of compatible sites) and if used with the book burro extension helps find books cheap. You can even save notes in EndNote format with it.
Academics rejoice!!!!!
(Hat tip to BoingBoing for this)