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Who has exorbitant prices, other than scientific, academic, and professional publishers?
Publishers Marketplace scoops world! One major aspect of Edition not yet reported is that it will allow online retailers to sell the digital books directly from their site, with Google playing the role of electronic distributor. The selling feature is linked to Preview, the program that already lets retailers present the ability to browse inside Partner books. via Publishers Lunch Deluxe: Closer Reading of Google Edition. Is Google Editions the death of e-books? I don’t think so … sitting upright at a PC will never be the best way to read a long complex document.
Insanely credulous article makes one question the credibility of VentureBeat. Most useful link is in the comments: To give Acrobat.com Presentations a spin, visit http://labs.acrobat.com/
This is important because it is clever (and, unfortunately, rather evil) in that it creates a new and legitimate way of charging for something that has always been free. It is entirely within Amazon’s rights to charge for the infrastructure necessary to move content from RSS to the Kindle. Setup is extremely easy. I recommend to all my authors with blogs that they participate. Why not? At first this sounded exciting, but on further inspection, not so much.
I have been thinking about the challenge of integrating physical and digital worlds via [social books] and I have a suggestion. I think you need to be designing at a higher level of abstraction: really, designing a standard instead of a device. Think about it this way. Class of bibliographic entities:
Class of physical Enablers
Class of entity-level citation schemes, e.g.
Class of “pinpoint” citation services, e.g.
Class of web resources
Class of web services
Right now, we have a variety of entities pursuing efforts to connect all these classes with single threads e.g. Amazon connects e-book documents with Kindle with the Amazon catalog with recommending. Kindle is a closed system so that thread is the only you one can follow if you own the Kindle class of Enabler. the proposed sBook would connect codex books using a custom-built Enabler with some undetermined citation format with purpose built websites and offer Discussion and Recommending services. What is really needed, IMHO, is an open, platform-agnostic architecture that allows mix and match of all these classes. I believe Kindle is eventually going to be a limited success (not a failure, just a 10% of the market type thing) because it locks the reader into a single thread of classes. I’m more optimistic about Google Book Search because I think their physical enabler will be any device that can read a PDF and I think they will eventually ave a good citation standard and robust discussion services at GBS. Pretty straightforward question, which I have posed on the Amazon DTP forum and a couple of Twitter threads
Most people seem to be assuming that USB upload is the only option, which has obvious implications for increasing piracy.
Since Amazon hasn’t announced anything on this $64 million issue, I’m assuming the answer is either “no, never” or “yes, but not until after the textbook publishers finish their beta program this summer.” Why not just be transparent about it?
From an email to a guy who’s got a project to integrate the world of physical “codex” books with electronic resources. I have been thinking about the challenge of integrating physical and digital worlds via tools like the sBook and I have a suggestion. I think you need to be designing at a higher level of abstraction: really, designing a standard instead of a device. Think about it this way. Class of bibliographic entities:
Class of physical Enablers
Class of citation services, e.g.
Class of web resources
Class of web services
Right now, we have a variety of entities pursuing efforts to connect all these classes with single threads or paths, e.g. Amazon connects e-book documents with Kindle with the Amazon catalog with recommending. Kindle is a closed system so that thread is the only you one can follow if you own the Kindle class of Enabler.
Tthe proposed sBook would connect codex books using a custom-built Enabler with some undetermined citation format with purpose built websites and offer Discussion and Recommending services.
What is really needed, IMHO is an open architecture that allows mix and match of all these classes. I believe Kindle is eventually going to be a limited success (not a failure, just a 10% of the market type thing) because it locks the reader into a single thread of classes. I’m more optimistic about Google Book Search because I think their physical enabler will be any device that can read a PDF and I think they will eventually ave a good citation standard and robust discussion services at GBS.
Clear as mud?
Hastily,
last time I worried about swineflu: 1975 first Tweet on the recent outbreak: 4/22/2009 (don’t bother clicking on the link at the target page — goes to a real-time news feed
first significant “alerting”: 4/23/2009
Twitter maelstrom: as of 4/27, “Swine flu” items were showing up on twitter at a rate of 49 per 20 seconds, or ~ 150/min
this morning: told my 17-y-o daughter I have a snuffly nose. ”Do you have swine flu?”
No, but there is a case in adjacent Livingston County, Michigan.
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