Re: today’s announcement about Google and Sony. It doesn’t appear to be a deal as such, but what’s clear is that half a million scanned books from Google Book Search will be made available as epub files, with millions more to come. Epubs. Ebooks.
Now, cast your mind back, if you will, to the London Book Fair 2007. I was there, twittering and liveblogging away. There were zombies and some book no one had heard of called White Tiger. All very good.
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A presentation you need to read, and not just for the explanation above of DRM: Date Repulsion Mode, the scale of cool, or why no one with a Kindle gets asked for their phone number in Starbucks.
Loads of excellent stuff on book data accessibility, XML, catalogues and innovation. And make sure you read the notes. Inspiring stuff.
Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book. (For those of you who don’t get Twitter, and those who are just bored by it’s sudden, seeming ubiquity: move along. Nothing to see here.)
I wanted to test Lulu‘s capacity for hardback books, to continue experimenting with the literary cornucopia machine, and to see if you could make a traditional diary/journal in retrospect. And you can, and it’s quite nice (apart from some weird kerning issues)….
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I’ve been thinking about “Free” again, in the context of, well, art. Specifically books of course, but lets look again at some other spheres of free.
With all the discussion of what Free means, we haven’t been talking a lot about perfectly viable models of Free that are happening right now. Newspapers and music occur to me as the big ones.
I don’t know if the Metro, London Lite and thelondonpaper are profitable or sustainable. But they do seem to be working right now. And this is pretty interesting. So’s the fact that increasing numbers of people…
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A quick heads-up on a little Apt project I haven’t talked about properly before. We got bored with all the comments and crud on YouTube, so we built Quietube – think of it as Readability for your favourite videos.
A little bookmarklet lets you easily and quickly generate a nice, clean page – and a short URL from any YouTube page. Check it out. If it all seems a bit confusing, here’s a quick tutorial:
