Whichbook.net is such a good idea it’s surprising it hasn’t been shamelessly copied elsewhere. You move a set of sliders and get recommendations from UK library catalogues.
Jun 11th 2007
May 10th 2007
A better way to read?
The subject of reading from electronic screens is a matter of ongoing debate. Many claim people will simply never read off screens in the way that they read off paper now. Excepting e-ink-based paper, which promises to revolutionise our understanding of “the screen”, are there simple ways to improve our reading experience on the web?
Dec 30th 2006
Bookmobile: Books everywhere
One of the subjects touched on in the fascinating talk by Brewster Kahle which I linked to yesterday was the Bookmobile, an on-demand books service in the back of a van connected to the Internet Archive’s hundreds of thousands of free, digitised texts.
The set-up, which cost around $15,000 including the car (breakdown below, no pun intended), consists of a mobile satellite connection, a couple of laptops, a laser printer, a guillotine and a book binding machine. It can produce books anywhere in the world that can see a satellite, in minutes, for a cost price of $1 a…
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Dec 29th 2006
Universal access to all knowledge is within our grasp
Via Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s Status-Q blog, I came across this fascinating talk by Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive, which has been working to provide universal access to all human knowledge for more than fifteen years.
It’s a couple of years old, but Kahle’s major point – that libraries are not important simply as repositories of knowledge, but that they make it available for research, thus expanding the sum total of that knowledge in the world and improving it – is anything but redundant. If you’ve wondered how Google…
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Nov 14th 2006
Seeing clearly
As accessibility is the watchword of the web standards movement, it’s kind of depressing to hear that traditional publishing is serving the blind and partially sighted community so badly: research for the Royal National Institute of the Blind found only twelve per cent of maths and eight per cent of science GCSE textbooks were available in a format which could be used be visually-impaired children.
The RNIB has led accessibility programmes for years – notably Daisy – and I happen to know it’s currently at work on a new XML-based standard for transferring all newly published material…
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Nov 13th 2006
Digital Natives
Last week, John Naughton, journalist, technologist, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University and author of A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet, gave an electrifying address to the Society of Editors conference, in which he attacked their newspapers’ demonisation of youth and technology. It’s reprinted in full in The Observer, but here are some choice moments:
The novelist William Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’, and he’s as sharp as a razor. He also said: ‘The future is already here: it’s just not evenly distributed.’ As it happens, I
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Oct 31st 2006
Pwned, 0wnz0red, punkd by DRM
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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Oct 4th 2006
Willkommen zum Buchmesse
Today´s Guardian ran a large picture on page six of mass-market paperbacks being laid out in Frankfurt, under the headline ´Cover Story´and bearing the strapline:
The 380,000 books displayed on stands at Frankfurt Book Fair has helped offset fears about the viability of print in the digital age.
Wishful thinking. I’m in Frankfurt this week too, for what is by far the largest and most prestigious gathering of the publishing world, and no one seems to be taking the future seriously. The facilities provided pay ample testament to this, and would shock those used to attending more modern…
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