booktwo.org

With all my recent ranting about Digital Rights Management (DRM), I thought I should post some of the reasons for the unrest. Then I came across BoingBoing‘s Cory Doctorow advertising the course he’ll be teaching at UCLA this semester. It’s called “Pwned: Is everyone on this campus a copyright criminal?” and the course description sums up the potential dangers of DRM better than I would:

Every garden has a snake: computers aren’t just tools for empowering their owners. They’re also tools for stripping users of agency, for controlling us individually and en masse.

It starts with “Digital Rights

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My recent post on Adobe’s Acrobat-disguised-as-an-eReader Digital Editions software drew a response from m’learned friends over at Mobileread. Alexander Turcic pointed out that DE doesn’t only support PDFs, but also the forthcoming Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS), a new standard for content creators and consumers – about which the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) has just published a press release.

The new standard also includes a container standard for packaging ebooks (the Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format, or OCF), and is intended to make it easier and cheaper for all concerned. The IDPF and the OEBPS have…

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Fascinating review of (the not terribly new) The Future of the Page, edited by Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, over at Blogcritics.com.

Immediately, we confront the first puzzle not directly discussed within the book, but nevertheless obvious the instant we pick it up in our hands. This book is palpable. It is larger than a paperback. It is filled with illustrations. In fact, one chapter is printed on glossy paper. Why a book? Why not a website? Why not a collection of web pages?

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It may simply be the case that 500 years of entrenched reading habits have

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Whenever I try to tell people how the traditional book is on the way out and we’ll all be reading very differently a lot sooner than people think, the standard response is that people like traditional books, they like the look and feel, and nothing will ever substitute for that.

Well, sorry, but it will. I believe that a majority of people will switch to reading ebooks very quickly once the technology closes the look and feel gap between trad books and eReaders. And one of the key advances in this is electronic paper: a neutrally coloured, flicker- and glow-free…

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Adobe have just dropped the first fruit of their takeover of Macromedia – and it’s book-related. New eReader technology Adobe Digital Editions is a Flash-based Rich Internet Application – that is, it takes all of the online benefits of connectivity and streams them through a pleasant, pervasive interface that lets you interact with things rather than just look at them. Supposedly.

The most impressive thing about it is undoubtedly how easy it is to install and play with. Go have a try over at Adobe Labs. There are plenty of free sample books available there too.

Once launched, it…

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Another week, another interesting piece in the Times, which claims e-retailing, with Amazon.co.uk as its core exponent, is growing by 25-30% per year, expecting to make out at £10.3 billion when eBay, Tesco and the rest are all counted up. This is balanced by the slightly bizarre claim that “the market share of internet retailing [could be capped] at about 10%,” due to concerns about “after-sales service, a high rate of product return, and the pressure to make websites a more exciting experience for consumers.” In fact, these concerns (the first two at least) only really apply to electrical…

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I was recently re-reading my Masters dissertation, a rather inept analysis of the abstract classification problem: how to computationally document and classify not only the content of, say, images but also their emotional appeal and resonance. The problem was, unbeknownst to me, being solved or at least massively advanced by ad hoc systems such as tagging and folksonomies even as I wrote it. However, much of the paper was also concerned with the encoding of stories: how narrative, and the conditions that are required to make such a thing not only logically consistent but interesting, can be recorded on a…

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Our spy at the recent Digital Print World expo at London’s Earl’s Court reports that Canon was displaying a new set-up they call “One Book” – a digital printer combined with a perfect binding machine. The system requires the addition of a separate colour/litho printer for the covers, which are then fed into main set-up, but this doesn’t sound too difficult to automate, and can deliver about ten copies an hour according to our souce.

Also quoted is a report in Print Week magazine about a different printer which combines all these steps, and is being touted as…

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Following our extended coverage of the Sony eReader, I thought we should point towards a few other ways to read eBooks – chosen, it must be said, pretty much at random, but no less illustrative for that.

• Engadget on Panasonic’s Word Gear. This looks nice, and is competitively priced against the Sony. Unlike the Sony, it’s a fully-featured, colour screen, which means vastly reduced battery life, but the chance to view movies, photos, and, in the example given, scantily-clad Japanese girls.
• Symbian explain all about eBooks, and how to read them on their OS Phone. As Apple

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In Sunday’s Times, Bryan Appleyard wrote about the future of books. It’s a great article and deserves to be read in its entirety, but since we’re here we’ll note the key points, which are tantamount to articles of faith around these parts:

“Over the past decade, power in the book industry has drained away from publishers to the bookshops.” This is incontestably true, and Appleyard notes its main effect: publishers must now pay the booksellers vast sums to have their books placed in the areas of their bookshops in which they will sell. Without front-of-store positioning, and the stacks…

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