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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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

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 […]

Friday saw the launch of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, an organisation dedicated to understanding how to take advantage of “collective intelligence… new communication technologies – especially the Internet – [which] now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways.” One of their first projects is We Are […]

I recently went exploring in Second Life, and it didn’t take long to find bibliophiles. Over at the Coelacanth Books & News Store in Changmi, I met the proprietor Coelacanth Seurat (pictured, in front of her store, below), who is exploring the possibilities of text in the 3D virtual world. The store stocks Second Life-themed […]