April 7, 2008

Blogging Reminder

As I mentioned recently, this blog has morphed, and I am now doing technical blogging over at Gilbane (see the XML Technologies & Content Strategies blog here and the Publishing Practice blog here). Just thought I would mention it in case you happened to drop in here expecting to see something else entirely!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:11 PM

February 13, 2008

We're Moving!

Well, sort of.

What I am actually doing is launching a new blog and practice as part of the Gilbane Group (press release here and the new blog, XML Technologies and Content Strategies, here). The new blog and practice are collaborations with my long-time Gilbane colleagues Mary Laplante and Leonor Ciarlone.

As we launch the new blog at Gilbane, I am transitioning this one to a personal blog, much like the one I had before, A Thousand Furnished Rooms. I will be discussing writing, literature, baseball, and life, not necessarily in that order.

I have been at this blog thing for more than four years, and it has always been an evolution. I started with a technology blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing, then started A Thousand Furnished Rooms. Somewhere in there I briefly had a politics blog (an ugly undertaking in a nasty little world). Also somewhere in there, I began blogging at Gilbane's primary blog, folded the politics blog (oh, happy day!) and combined Ideas in Technology and Publishing and A Thousand Furnished Rooms into this blog.

So now I evolve again. If you want to read about content management, XML, and publishing technologies and strategies, check out the new Gilbane blog (Atom feed here). If you want to hear about more nebulous topics, stick around here. You are more than welcome.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM

January 7, 2008

Fun with Google Street View

I was playing around with Google Street View. They added greater Boston recently, so I've been hunting down my house, the house I grew up in, and a few other spots. I was prowling downtown Boston and came across a bit of an oddity in and around the Big Dig. To see it, go here and then click on the arrow to go north. Voila! You are in the Big Dig tunnel. Click north again, and you are back up on the street.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:50 PM | Comments (1)

January 6, 2008

Garmin Schmarmin

So my wife was nice enough to get me a GPS for Christmas. This was a really welcome gift, as I have a terrible sense of direction and get lost readily. I also travel a fair bit, and have this long, involved ritual of researching and printing out the directions to every drive I will have to make on my trip. From the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to my client's building, from my client's building to the hotel, and so on. So I was thrilled to get a GPS, a Garmin c530.

Two days after Christmas, I took it on some local errands and then used it on a drive out to my brother's house a few towns away. I was looking forward to the drive home, when I would let the Garmin guide me instead of taking the same, somewhat roundabout way I have always taken to and from his home. Back in the car, I plugged in the Garmin and... nothing. I checked to make sure the power adapter was correctly plugged in. I let it sit for a while. Tried it again. Nothing. I got home, read the manual, tried a few more things. Nothing.

So I plug "Garmin c530 failure" into Google and look what the very first post, in a forum on Amazon, tells me:

Santa brought this unit for my wife. Worked excellant (sic) for a few hours, then died. Acted like the battery went dead and charger wasn't working. Fuse checked OK. Returned unit to Amazon and the problem was handled quickly and painlessly. Amazon shipped a new unit immediately. This new unit worked one month and died. Acted just like the frst failure. Amazon has advised that the problem is more wide spread than first thought and has offered a full refund.

Oy vey.

As if this review isn't damning enough, check out the date--Feb 5, 2007(!).

So this was a widespread problem almost a year ago, and the company is still shipping these turkeys? How is that even possible?

We took it back to Sears. They were great, provided an immediate refund, and we got a TomTom One XL. So far, I am really pleased with it.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:30 PM

January 3, 2008

The Kindle Digital Text Platform

I was rooting around on Amazon the other day, seeing what other kind of (non-book) content was available for the Kindle when I discovered the Digital Text Platform Amazon has made available for publishing content in Kindle format. "DTP" is listed as Beta, but I found it functional and easy to use. Basically you create all the metadata for the title, including pricing information, and then upload the content for conversion to the Kindle format. To test it, I created an eBook out of a series of articles I have written on content management and XML. They seem to want HTML ("The preferred format for uploading content is as a single HTML file"), but I got impatient when I then read you needed to assemble linked images in a zip file using special instructions. So I went with a single Word .doc file ("standard .doc files will often convert without a hitch"). For the most part, it did convert without a hitch, though it did a woefully bad job with a small number of very simple tables. To work around that, I simplified a couple of the tables and deleted the others. In fairness to Amazon, I worked quickly, and could have experimented with HTML tables.

If you're a Kindle owner and happen to buy the title, I would love to hear from you about the experience. Since I don't own a Kindle yet, I had to rely on the preview capability in DTP, which basically gives you an HTML view of the content.

From the introduction to the eBook:

The following articles, white papers, and blog entries were written between 2000 and 2006. They appeared in one of several publications: The Gilbane Report, eContent Magazine, E-DOC Magazine, or Transform Magazine. Some appeared in my blog, www.billtrippe.com, or its predecessor blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing. I undertook this compilation as an experiment in working with the beta version of Amazon.com's Digital Text Platform for creating content for the Kindle eBook reader.

I only edited the material lightly, so the articles are showing their age in places. Some links are likely out of date, some product references may be to versions of products that have since been superseded, and at least one product, XMetaL, has changed corporate ownership at least once since first written about in one or more of these articles. However, I chose these articles from many, many others I could have chosen because the material is evergreen and still useful, I think. I stand by what has been written here, especially for the price!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:56 AM

December 18, 2007

Call for Papers: Gilbane San Francisco 2008

They are now accepting proposals for panel participation and presentations for Gilbane San Francisco 2008, to be held at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008.

Join the content and information technology's leading analysts, IT strategists, and technologists at the industry's most popular and important conference this coming Spring. Share your expertise and experience, and network with the forward-thinking implementers and thought leaders.

How to be a speaker

Choose a topic area from the list below and see how to submit a proposal. The deadline is January 15, 2008. Topics to be covered in-depth include:

If you've never been to one of the Gilbane events and want see what we have been covering in our conferences, check-out the programs from the recent hugely successful Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:14 AM | Comments (1)

December 4, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...

Tomorrow, I will be part of a webinar, What Every Publisher Needs to Know About Content Management. It's being put on by Book Business Magazine and sponsored by Follett Digital Resources. Matt Steinmetz, Special Projects Editor for Book Business will be moderating, and I will be joined on the virtual dais by Jabin White, Vice President for Product Management at Silverchair.

I'm going to be presenting a market overview, offer some definitions, and discuss some recent and emerging trends. I'm going to leave most of the heavy lifting to Jabin, though. He is truly one of the smart guys in the business and an excellent presenter, and I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

You can go right to the registration page here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:40 PM

November 30, 2007

Kindle Still "Sold Out"

I keep seeing references to Kindle being sold out, but I have yet to find a number of how many sold. The main Kindle page at Amazon now says you won't get one by Christmas. This seems like a problem to me--missing Christmas sales and also not even promising a specific ship date.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:04 PM

November 28, 2007

Wall Street Hearts AMZN

It's been an up and down week or so in the market, but not so for Amazon. Wishful eBook fans might imagine it is all due to Kindle, but impressive online Christmas shopping numbers are the more likely booster.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:53 AM

So You Want to be an Author?

Chris Webb, executive editor at Wiley Publishing, has written and has now assembled some terrific advice on developing a book proposal. Chris has been writing these over time, and has now pulled them together. As he notes, Chris does work in technology publishing, so some of these will be specific to computer book publishing, but much of what he has written is useful for any type of non-fiction book.

Oh, did I mention Chris was the editor for an excellent book on Digital Rights Management?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:37 AM

Social Networks

I am at the opening keynote at Gilbane. The speakers:

There is quite a bit of discussion on social networks.

I just passed 500 connections on LinkedIn. I mention this because I have found LinkedIn to be a valuable resource. It's a great way to keep in touch of colleagues, especially if they are also active users. I have found long-lost colleagues and friends, made useful connections, helped other people make useful connections, and even found projects and prospects there. I compare this with Facebook, which I joined more recently. Facebook is a powerhouse, no doubt, and there seems like an endless number of applications and activities there. But I guess I am an old fart. I don't get half of the apps, and I don't like the default behavior where every new app and even every action on every app is to ask your entire network to do the same thing with that app--take the same movie quiz, answer the same question, and so forth. It strikes me as the equivalent of forwarding the same email to every person in your contact list. Of course, you don't have to ask every contact to do something--you can select some or one or none. You can even do nothing with any of the applications, which is what I tend to do.

I don't know what the effect of Google's OpenSocial initiative will be. Conventional wisdom seems to be that it won't make a dent in Facebook, and, aside from LinkedIn, the founding members seem to be a who's who of failed social networks, including Google's own orkut. And, generally, I am deeply skeptical of anything Google does outside of consumer search and pay-per-click advertising. But assuming not everyone in the world will join precisely one social network, doesn't it make perfect sense for these networks to have a common API?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:46 AM | Comments (1)

November 23, 2007

Movable Type Weirdness

So I republished my blog and now I have new design for my home page, out of the blue, but the rest of my pages look like they use to. What gives?

I haven't had a chance to look into this yet, but if you have some quick ideas, let me know.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:00 PM

November 19, 2007

Amazon Kindle

Amazon debuted Kindle, its eBook reader, today. I haven't seen it yet, of course, but I'm impressed by the number of titles they have available at launch. And the pricepoints--NYT's bestsellers at a standard price of $9.99.

Lots of interesting details about the feature set as well as the complementary content, like Wikipedia, newspapers, blogs. Another detail, reported by CNET, caught my eye:

Kindle, which was manufactured by an undisclosed Chinese original equipment manufacturer, connects to its specialized Amazon store via an EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) cellular network through "Amazon Whispernet," built atop Sprint's EV-DO network. No data plan or monthly bill is required. "We pay for all of that behind the scenes so that you can just read," Bezos said, adding that he estimated that it would take "less than a minute" to download a book.

If it is really that easy to use and keep up to date, they are on to something.

WSJ.com has a blog roundup (subscription), and proving that Kindle seems to be real news, it even made All Things Considered. And, last but not least, PW weighs in.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:52 PM

November 13, 2007

Digital Text Community

Jon Noring of Digital Pulp Publishing has announced the start of "The Digital Text Community" (DTC), a public mailing list (on YahooGroups) devoted to serious discussion of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications.

The full group charter is found at the group's home page.

DTC will be lightly moderated primarily to ensure civil discourse, and a separate archive of the discussion will be started and maintained (Jon notes that YahooGroup's default archive is poor, to say the least.)

Jon explained his rationale for starting the group:

The primary reason why I am starting DTC is that there is, surprisingly, no independent and dedicated forum to discuss the various, interrelated technical and non-technical issues of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications, such as books, periodicals, etc.

Current discussion on digitizing paper publications is disjointly spread around in various nooks and crannies. For example, there are forums for particular digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg (e.g. "gutvol-d") and Distributed Proofreaders (which maintains a set of online-only forums.)

And then there are more generalized forums which touch upon various topics of relevance to text digitization, but which is not their main focus. Examples are Book People (which John Mark Ockerbloom is sadly closing the end of the month) and The eBook Community (another YahooGroup which I administer.)

The summary purpose of DTC is given in the last paragraph of the DTC group charter:

"This group is not affiliated with any particular project or organization, but rather is independent. It is hoped this group will be a bridge between the various text digitization projects, enabling information exchange for everyone’s benefit."

This sounds like a great new resource, and I have already subscribed. You can too, here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:27 PM

Adobe Management Changes

Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen steps down, and the market is reacting. But Adobe also said Monday that "fourth-quarter sales would be near the top end of its guidance of $860 million to $890 million."

Oh, for the record, I don't own any stock or have any other financial interest in Adobe. As a rule, I avoid investing in companies that I cover or might do business with--partly to avoid a conflict of interest but also because I am terrible at picking tech stocks. They either go bust, or I sell them at a small loss or profit the second before they take off like a rocket.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM

November 2, 2007

Sentiment is for Girls

Not my sentiment, of course. Mark Twain's, as recently shown at a great new (and free!) repository launched by the University of California Press.

Damnation, (if you will allow the expression,) get up & take a turn around the block & let the sentiment blow off you. Sentiment is for girls—I mean the maudlin article, of course. Real sentiment is a very rare & godlike thing. You do not know anybody that has it; neither do I.
The homepage for the repository is here.

 

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:37 PM

October 26, 2007

The Discoverability Wars

Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press has some thoughts about how discoverability and other publishing-oriented technologies have put book publishers in the catbird seat.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:52 PM

October 25, 2007

All the News that's Fit to Click?

eMarketer says that, "It’s wake-up time for the publishing industry. Like it or not, readers and advertisers are turning to the Internet, and print brands must follow." The numbers are compelling.

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You can read some of the summary and purchase the report here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:52 AM

October 24, 2007

"We're thrilled with the early results from customers"

Jeff Bezos says Amazon's customers like DRM-free music. Not a word about eBooks though. David Rothman from TeleRead has some thoughts about the eBook angle.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:26 PM

A Billion Here, A Billion There

And sooner or later, you start talking about some serious revenue.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report covering the second quarter and the first six months of 2007. Internet advertising revenues (U.S.) for the first six months of 2007 were nearly $10 billion, setting yet another new record and representing a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006. Internet advertising revenue totaled nearly $5.1 billion for the second quarter of 2007, exceeding the $5 billion mark for the first time in a quarter, a 25.4 percent increase over the same period in 2006.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:06 PM

October 21, 2007

TimesSelectors and TimesRejectors

Over at Civilities, Jon Garfunkel continues his thoughtful analysis of what the changing media mix might mean for the Old Gray Lady.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:54 PM

Another Reason to Hate Comcast

Not that you needed one, but here it is.

More thoughts from Vindu Goel and Dave Winer, and some rationale from Comcast.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:47 PM

October 18, 2007

100 Best Blogs

A list, from PC Magazine. Gosh, I don't recognize most of these. Some blogger I am.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:48 PM

October 13, 2007

Here and There

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:08 PM

October 12, 2007

Banned Books

A website called the Alternative Reel lists the top ten banned books of the 20th century, and I am proud to say I've read seven of them. Time to read the remaining three!

I like the cover art, and I recognize several of the bindings from my own library.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:02 PM

October 4, 2007

Meanwhile, Over at Gilbane...

The sessions that I have been organizing on enterprise publishing technology have been coming together. For the session on DITA and related standards like S1000D, we have Bob Doyle of the Boston DITA Group and Don Bridges of Data Conversion Labs. We have another speaker from industry who will be talking about S1000D, but he is still awaiting the go-ahead from his corporate communications folks.

For the session on multi-channel publishing, John Parsons, Editorial Director of The Seybold Report will be moderating, and two speakers are on board, again with a third likely to be joining soon. Rich Pasewark, a former colleague of mine from XyEnterprise and more recently with Quark, is working independently now on some very interesting projects. The second speaker is Mark Laroche, who is Director of Production for Digital Media at Random House. He is going to be talking about some very forward-thinking work they have been doing withe the Fodor's travel guides.

Finally, for the metadata session we have two speakers, with a third to be announced shortly. We were very happy to talk our client Richard Ferrie from Pearson into speaking. Rick is Senior Vice President, Publishing Operations and Content Management for all of Pearson, and has some top-level lessons learned on what works and what doesn't in bringing metadata into publishing workflows and systems. Gilbane analyst Bill Rosenblatt will also be speaking, bringing his perspective on metadata efforts at some of the largest publishers and media companies out there.

Keep an eye on the conference session descriptions page and the Gilbane events blog as we add new speakers and elements to the conference.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:05 AM

September 19, 2007

WSJ.com to go Free?

First Times Select, and now WSJ.com? WSJ.com is reporting that WSJ.com might drop its paid model in favor of an ad-supported one. And yes, the article is free, at least as of right now.

Meanwhile, ClickZ is reporting that mobile advertising is about to boom.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:40 PM

August 8, 2007

NY Times to Make TimesSelect Free

Barry Graubart weighs in on the decision at the New York Times to Make TimesSelect free.

Ny_times_logo

The Times has decided to stop charging a fee for its TimesSelect product. TimesSelect, which includes the Times Columnists and OpEd pieces, is free to print subscribers and costs $95 per year for others. There are approximately 220,000 paid TimesSelect subscribers, representing roughly $21 million in annual revenue. It also provides a perceived benefit to print subscribers... While I don't know if the Times will recoup that revenue simply from serving ads on the OpEd pages, this is clearly the right thing to do. Putting a wall up around Times columnists simply resulted in reducing the influence of the Times editorial page. In addition to limiting access for direct browsers, it also dramatically reduced the "pass-along" potential of Times content. Once the walls are down, I'd expect their editorial columns to often be at the top of the "most emailed" lists and also receive numerous links from bloggers, Facebook pages and more.

All good thoughts from Barry, so do read his entire entry. I just want to know if the crossword puzzle will now be available free.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:07 AM | TrackBack

July 17, 2007

The Dramatic Unity of Huckleberry Finn

ResearchBuzz offers up a nice find: The Ohio State University Press Makes Dozens Of Books Free

The Ohio State University Press has announced that it will be making “certain books” available for free download from its site. (You’ll need a PDF reader.) The books are available at here . There are actually over 60 books here, from Daniel Aaron’s Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819–1838 to John Harold Wilson’s Court Satires of the Restoration. Click on the book title for additional information about the book and PDF files of various chapters. The books I looked at were out of paper print but still had very assertive copyright reminders.What I did NOT see was any way to actually search the content, so here’s the Google query you want: keyword inurl:books site:ohiostatepress.org. Add intitle:book title to the search if you want to restrict your results to a specific text.

If you want to go right to the Huck Finn book referenced in the title, click here.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:10 PM

June 12, 2007

eBooks for Kids: BookFlix and More

This is interesting.

Two leading children's publishers, Scholastic, Inc., and Disney, will soon discover whether the laptop compares to the lap in the hearts of young readers.
Scholastic is officially launching BookFlix, an educational Web site pairing short films based on popular picture books along with nonfiction e-books that allow early readers to follow the text online.

Update: fixed the link.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:29 PM | Comments (2)

June 7, 2007

Steal this Laptop!

Abbie Hoffman would be proud. Ironically, Abbie's book is flagged as Copyright Protected on Google Books.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:14 AM | Comments (1)

June 1, 2007

Center for Future Civic Media

I get an excellent weekly news and analysis roundup, Outsell/EPS Insights (subscription required). This week they alerted me that the Knight Foundation had handed out its first News Challenge winners.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, top young computer programmers and bloggers, and MTV are among the 25 first-year winners of the Knight News Challenge, announced at the Editor & Publisher/Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in Miami. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation funded the contest with $25 million over five years to help lead journalism into its digital future. The first-year winners all proposed innovative ideas for using digital news and information to build and bind community in specific geographic areas.

That led me to check out the folks at MIT who were awarded the biggest chunk, $5M to fund a new Center for Future Civic Media. The idea is intriguing to me, as it seems to go beyond the dreary notion of citizen journalists to instead, "helping to provide people with the necessary skills to process, evaluate, and act upon the knowledge in circulation, civic media ensures the diversity of inputs and mutual respect necessary for democratic deliberation."

They need to work on their "about page," though. Whatever "Future Civic Media" might become, I doubt it includes tar.gz files.


Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:32 PM

May 6, 2007

Meanwhile Over at Gilbane

I have been in one of those modes where I have been too busy to blog, and yet have been working on a lot of interesting things. My Gilbane colleague Mary Laplante and I did a webinar with Oracle (details here about where to view the recorded webinar and download the associated white paper). If you haven't been keeping a scorecard, Oracle acquired Stellent a few months ago, and while the webinar was more broadly about web content management, it does give you some insight into what Oracle will be doing with Stellent. Hat tip to David Guenette, who co-wrote the white paper, and really did the heavy lifting there.

Also at Gilbane, I wrote a case study about Autodesk and its efforts over the last several years integrating Idiom's globalization management system into its technical documentation workflow. We then did a Webinar with Minette Norman from Autodesk, and she did a fantastic job of explaining the project at both the technical and management level. The recorded webinar and presentation slides can be found here.

Finally, David Guenette and I recently updated a Gilbane white paper on Digital Asset Management. The paper, sponsored by DAM vendor ClearStory systems, asks (and answers) the question, has digital asset management “crossed the chasm” from a technology used only by early adopters to one that is more part of the IT mainstream?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:41 PM

May 2, 2007

Folksy Copywriting is OK

But the email from Delta airlines this morning was a little too chirpy for me.

We're delighted to be one of the first to tell you that we successfully emerged from Chapter 11 yesterday (hooray!) after improving almost every aspect of our airline ahead of schedule.

Maybe I hadn't had enough coffee yet, but there was something Monty Pythonesue about it (The guns on the firing squad jammed! Hooray!)


Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:05 AM

April 24, 2007

Multichannel Workflows in the Offing?

Over at the Really Strategies blog, Ed Stevenson comments on some print-CMS partnerships.

Last week, Lisa Bos posted on the fragmentation between different types of CMS.  Interestingly, this morning I stumbled upon two announcements on partnerships between companies in different CMS spaces:

Found on Gilbane, "Managing Editor Inc. (MEI) announced a joint development with Clickability to integrate the SoftCare K4 Publishing System with Clickability’s cmPublish."  So here we have an editorial and production system (or print CMS) integrating with a WebCMS.

And CMS Wire announces that Alfresco and WoodWing Software formed a partnership between WoodWing’s Smart Connection Enterprise editorial workflow system and the Alfresco 2.0 open source enterprise content management system. 

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:12 PM

April 17, 2007

Pricing Trends for Scholarly Journals

DigitalKoans is alerting readers about a new report, Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006

LISU, which is based in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University, has released Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006, a report commissioned by Oxford Journals.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

The research updates the previous findings on pricing for biomedical journals, and has also been extended to analyze pricing for social science titles. Findings within the report show little variation to the original data published in 2004: there are continued trends in price variance across publishers, including median price increases ranging from 42% to 104% for biomedical titles, and 47% to 120% for social science titles.

The entire report can be downloaded for free here (PDF, 718K).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 12, 2007

Teleread Offers Kurt Vonnegut a Fond Goodbye

And includes a pointer to free downloads of some Vonnegut classics

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a sci-fi writer and satirist who wrote about heroics, vanities and greater sins, inspiring comparisons with Mark Twain, died yesterday at 84 with a full head of hair. You can read a Google News roundup and his New York Times obit along with a link-rich Wikipedia item.

Via Wowio, you can download free ad-supported copies of [a number of Vonnegut books].

I played around with Wowio, downloading Slaughter-House Five. Really, it is not much to write about--PDF files with ads stuffed in every so many pages. The ads are awkwardly placed--they look like full-page magazine ads--and in the default settings of the reader they are just disembodied page layouts. In Slaughter-House Five, it looked to me like the ads disrupted Vonnegut's intended pagination. In at least one place, an ad separates an illustration from Vonnegut's description. The effect is jarring, but if I were a starving college student again, I probably would put up with it in exchange for a free book.

Many, many publishing blogs weighed in on Vonnegut today, and for good reason. He was an oversized talent, and many people of my age and a little older read every Vonnegut book, often more than once. He will be missed.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:26 PM | TrackBack

April 9, 2007

Coming Soon to Widget Near You

Advertising. Proving once again there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:15 PM

A Great Question

Over at PersonaNonData, Michael Cairns asks, Why don't Libraries Have Publishing Programs?

My introduction to Charles Bukowski occurred via the display cases inside the Boston University library lobby, and I was drawn to them because I happened to be working in the library's special collections department at the time. The special collections department at BU is quite renowned and was established by Dr. Howard Gotlieb who recently died. (Gotlieb actually wrote one of my recommendations for business school). My job was less intellectual than hired muscle since the library was becoming so overwhelmed with boxed submissions they needed someone to unload the stuff and place the materials in uniform boxes on shelves. I didn't have too much time to peruse the material in some of these boxes but I do recall a wealth of material from from Herbert Swope and Fletcher Knebel, who's boxes were filled with photos of JFK and his family while they were all in the White House.
Some of the material deposited wasn't quite so moving or important (at least to my eyes) and in many cases it was clear that entire desk draws had been upended into a box and sent off to BU. These boxes often included things like gum, blank paper, pens, pennies, paper clips and other detritus which had minimal residual value to scholars. BU did have several archivists responsible for cataloging the vast amount of stuff that was deposited. They seemed to work fairly methodically (slowly) to identify the important material and provide tables of content for scholars. Increasingly, the material in formal special collections libraries like BU and in local libraries is being digitized and there is little doubt that this will accelerate.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:53 AM

A Tip of the Cap to...

... Project Gutenberg, for all its work, including a newly posted "eBook," The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866, which brings us, among other things, passages from Nathaniel Hawthorne's notebooks. Here, Hawthorne offers some thoughts about a trip along Maine's Kennebec River.

Saw by the river-side, late in the afternoon, one of the above-described boats going into the stream, with the water rippling at the prow, from the strength of the current and of the boat's motion. By-and-by comes down a raft, perhaps twenty yards long, guided by two men, one at each end,—the raft itself of boards sawed at Waterville, and laden with square bundles of shingles and round bundles of clapboards. "Friend," says one man, "how is the tide now?"—this being important to the onward progress. They make fast to a tree, in order to wait for the tide to rise a little higher. It would be pleasant enough to float down the Kennebec on one of these rafts, letting the[Pg 178] river conduct you onward at its own pace, leisurely displaying to you all the wild or ordered beauties along its banks, and perhaps running you aground in some peculiarly picturesque spot, for your longer enjoyment of it. Another object, perhaps, is a solitary man paddling himself down the river in a small canoe, the light, lonely touch of his paddle in the water making the silence seem deeper. Every few minutes a sturgeon leaps forth, sometimes behind you, so that you merely hear the splash, and, turning hastily around, see nothing but the disturbed water. Sometimes he darts straight on end out of a quiet black spot on which your eyes happen to be fixed, and, when even his tail is clear of the surface, he falls down on his side, and disappears.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:41 AM

April 4, 2007

Is Print Dying?

Ed Stevenson of Really Strategies has a roundup of recent news.

A small handful of publishers made recent announcements on their decisions to cease publishing in print and move to sole digital content delivery.

The most notable is, of course, InfoWorld's cessation of print this month. 

We are merely embracing a more efficient delivery mechanism --the Web -- at InfoWorld.com. You can still get all the news coverage, reviews, analysis, opinion, and commentary that InfoWorld is known for. You'll just have to access it in a browser (or RSS reader) -- something more than a million of you already do every month.

We also heard Time's announcement that it will discontinue the LIFE newspaper supplement, but still look to build online product offerings under the LIFE brand.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:42 PM

April 3, 2007

Free New York Times Select for Students?

Maybe, Maybe Not.

This problem has been just around the corner since NYT.com first offered academic discounts on premium TimesSelect last year but it didn’t become a real issue until the move to free for students and educators. Prodded by librarians irked at spending large chunks of money to gain access to the whole NYT database through services like Lexis-Nexis, the NYT is changing the offer: only students at colleges that subscribe to the databases will have access to the full archives, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. The change is being made “out of respect and compliance with these agreements that we already have in place,” Vivian Schiller, VP/GM, NYtimes.com, told the Chronicle. One library director said database provider ProQuest was surprised by the paper’s decision to make the archives available to student subscribers for free. Barbara Fister of Gustavus Adolphus College was among those raising the issue online; she told the Chronicle she was torn between wanting all students to have access to the Times online and the fact that she just spent nearly $20,000 to provide archives access through ProQuest.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:38 PM

More from Finetune.com

I'm having perhaps a little too much fun with finetune.com in the interest of "research." After producing my first playlist of acoustic favorites, I came up with another one, rock favorites.

The icon this time? My girl, Cleo, who, behind her gentle exterior, is a rocker at heart.

I am looking forward to trying the Apollo client that I mentioned earlier. Having the widget bound to a particular HTML page is a pain in the neck.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:00 PM | TrackBack

March 31, 2007

Finetune.com

Playing around with finetune.com. This is their standard embed playlist widget.

They are coming out with an Apollo-based widget soon. I will be checking that out.

The icon? My little man, Petey.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:15 PM | TrackBack

March 28, 2007

Time Inc. Cancels Life Newspaper Insert; Will Focus On Digital

Another Life for Life

Just last night over drinks in Orlando a media executive, who knows I was associated with Life for many years but has not mag ties himself, asked me why Time Inc. didn’t just focus on Life’s photography and forget efforts like the weekly newspaper insert. The Life brand and legacy could be the draw for a photo-centric website, he argued, wondering why they had never managed to do just that. This morning brings news that Time Inc. is going to do just that—shutter the newspaper insert, which never came close—and wasn’t intended to—the Life weekly of days gone by, and will focus on various digital platforms as well as books.

Online plans already in progress call for a major portal to launch later this year; the plan is to get its entire collection of 10 million photos online. From the release: “The most important collection of imagery covering the events and the people of the 20th century will be made available to the public for personal use at no cost. More than 97 percent of this collection has never been seen by the public and contains the works of such master photographers as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks, among others.”

Is it me, or is the shift from print to digital accelerating before our eyes? This announcement follows closely on the heels of IDG announcing that they are ending the print version of InfoWorld.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 24, 2007

OUP on Google

OUP Behaves in the Sandbox

OUP's blog today, in a response to the Financial Times article (subscription required) of a couple days ago, talks about what Google's digitization effort is doing for publishing - and how they are responding to it in-house.

What we publishers have come to realize is that Google and friends have opened up the world to our content by showing us that discoverability and access leads to interest and opportunity. Every major media company is now thinking they need to figure out their share of the digital space.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 AM

March 21, 2007

More Thoughts on Google Books

Michael Cairns from the blog PersonaNonData wrote to highlight two recent articles on Google, one he wrote and one written by his colleague Peter Grabois. Both are skeptical of Google Books, for different reasons, and both articles are well written and very thoughtful. Michael also pointed me to a related article by Peter Brantley, who is one of the truly smart guys in the digital library world.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:00 PM

March 17, 2007

Those eBook Widgets

I haven't hidden my low opinion of Google's book scanning efforts. So I am intrigued that some of the larger trade publishers are stepping up and attempting to do their own digitization--and, notably, establishing their own methods of providing access to the digitized books. The efforts from Random House and HarperCollins have received a lot of attention, mainly because the two companies are such dominant presences in trade publishing. But a lot of the attention has been on their eBook "widgets," the viewing applications they have begun sharing. However, the real story is behind the scenes. Both Random House and HarperCollins are much more interested in having platforms that control the access to the content--allowing models like "look inside the book" and other kinds of partial access. To understand these offerings, you need to look beyond the widgets themselves.

As far as I can tell so far, these are really for promoting the print books and not for selling eBooks per se. The Random House site says, “The Random House Digital Page Initiative is an on-going project to index, digitize, distribute and set the terms for using book content online. As part of that initiative, Random House has developed Insight, a service that gives search engines and online retailers access to digitized book content over the Web.”

Both offerings are addressed to balance the need for access and publisher’s concerns about control and insight into how the content is used. For example, Random House’s documentation says, “For the publisher, Insight is a tool to get the publisher's digital content onto the websites of retail partners, search engines, publicity outlets, authors, blogs, and readers … the publisher's digital book content remains in the hands of the publisher. It … implements business rules to guarantee that ownership and management of the digitized content remains with the publisher; and it manages access to the content from third-party websites.”

Also:

In terms of differences:

The HarperCollins/LibreDigital widget is based on the NewsStand technology. According to Todd Eckler, VP of Sales at LibreDigital, the primary difference with the HarperCollins version over the NewsStand version is more functionality for DRM and reporting.

The Random House widget is a Flash client. It looks an awful lot like Adobe’s Digital Editions, but it does not seem to be the same technology.

To my best understanding at this point, they both display PDF files, though LibreDigital does accept other formats (including OEB), and the Random House widget accepts all kinds of image formats as page files (their specifications say at one point “JPG, PDF, indexed text, etc.” and “jpeg, gif, png, pdf” at another point.) So I think it is fair to say that the LibreDigital tool is more of a conventional eBook platform that looks to ingest whole eBook files and the Random House tool is more of a page-turning device that is happy to manage and display page files of several different formats. Having said this, I can’t imagine too many people handing over a bunch of, say, JPG files to Random House with some kind of page manifest, but I may be missing something.

Interestingly, the early reviews on the industry blogs really seemed to favor the Random House widget. Fran Toolan of Issues in Publishing wrote of Random House’s widget, “It also has multiple features not found in Harper's. Some of the features include, displaying multiple sizes, searching for text strings inside the widget (using a Google text search), and offering ways to buy the book.” And C. Max Magee at Millions Blog wrote, “At a glance, the Random House offering is much nicer to look at, faster to load pages, and offers additional functions like search. So, if you want to know who winds the first round of the “Widget Wars,” Random House does.”

I think the real question down the road is who wins the next few rounds of the digital access wars. Google fired the first shot, but the major publishers are firing back--and trying to bring the smaller publishers along as allies.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:20 PM | TrackBack

March 14, 2007

Playing Around...

with the Random House eBook Widget.


Oh, click on it so you can actually read the thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:31 AM

March 13, 2007

Slow Blogging

I have been swamped with work, so I have been slow to blog. There are a few items of note, though.

Premium content does indeed seem to have a life. One of the interesting things about these three items is that two of them are top-shelf traditional publishers and the third is a top-shelf TV network. The lesson for me is that people will pay for premium content when the content is very good.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:56 PM

February 24, 2007

How About James Thurber Sponsored by Eukanuba®?

New Yorker Cartoons Available As Animated, Ad-Supported Podcasts

The New Yorker‘s famous cartoons can now be viewed as an animated, ad-supported video podcast on iTunes through RingTales, an online animation syndicator. As part of the deal with the Conde Nast publication (through its cartoon licensing arm, The Cartoon Bank), Santa Monica-based RingTales has the exclusive license to animate and distribute the New Yorker library of over 70,000 cartoons. Podcast subscribers will receive three new animations of The New Yorker “RingTales” each week. In addition to iTunes, which had 14 episodes 20-second episodes available as of Friday morning, the downloads will be available on the magazine’s site, newyorker.com, in March...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:31 AM

February 18, 2007

But How Does Dear Author Really Feel About It?

Adobe Labs Cooks Up Worst Ebook Reader in Ebook Reader History

Adobe Digital Editions

Dear Adobe,

I have, often, derided the Adobe Acrobat format for ebooks. I have told people on this blog, in emails, on message boards, that this is my least favorite format and that you should only buy this format when there is NO OTHER OPTION. Buying an Adobe ebook, particularly one that requires authentication to read it, is akin to shaving your head when you are one of the most recognizable people in the world and, at one time, one of the most beautiful people in the world.

You’ve come out with a great new software called Adobe Digital Editions, for those people who love ebooks...

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:24 AM

February 9, 2007

Steve Jobs Speaks Out Against DRM for Music

But over at DRM Watch, Bill Rosenblatt is sure that Apple's latest "DRM strategy" is pure PR.

Speaking of DRM, there happens to be a very good book out there on the topic.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:43 PM

January 28, 2007

File this Under "Not Exactly News"

Dear Author has seen the Vision of the eBook Future via Google and Random House and It Stinks

In 2004, Google announced its plan to scan every book printed. They began working with university libraries such as Harvard, University of Michigan, and Oxford. This caused the publishing industry some great consternation because an author’s work …

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:56 PM

January 18, 2007

eBooks in the K-12 Classroom?

TeleRead offers some thoughts on a WiFied eInk machine and perhaps a K-12 push for the Sony eReader.

Spurred by the threat of the rumored Kindle E Ink machine from Amazon, Sony is considering a WiFi-enhanced successor to the Sony Reader, as well as a push to get E Ink machines into the classroom.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:02 PM

January 9, 2007

The Search Continues for Steve Arnold

Steve Arnold weighs in on search in the government sector.

Steven Arnold, a search engine consultant with a government focus, discusses how to get enterprise search to work and the benefits of FirstGov’s approach to indexing. Steven Arnold got an early start on search engines. In 1971, his employer, Halliburton Co., assigned him to digitize the company’s technical reports in order to make them searchable. He has worked in the field ever since. In the past decade, he has moved over to consultancy, starting his own practice, Arnold IT. In 2000, he helped generate the technical plan for the first iteration of the General Services Administration’s FirstGov government search engine. (His son, Erik Arnold, currently works on FirstGov.) More recently, he launched the Google Government Report, a newsletter and electronic information service offering tips on how to be better recognized by Google. We caught up with Arnold to get his views on what is happening with both enterprise and Web search.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM

December 29, 2006

1984

IT WAS a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:18 AM | TrackBack

December 17, 2006

Another Sign of Life for eBooks?

S&S news: Digital archive plans—and Claire Israel’s defense of DRM

Simon and Schuster plans to have 12,000+ books from its backlist digitized by the end of ‘07, according to Publishers’ Marketplace. Download sales tripled this year, and DearAuthor credibly believes that “competitive pricing” helped…

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:04 PM | TrackBack

December 11, 2006

More on Microsoft Book Search

Again, as I mentioned in another entry, I have not looked too closely at it yet, but Microsoft Book Search has nice behaviour in the basic interface, and the image in this page was clearly digitized with some care.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:45 PM | TrackBack

Borges Manuscripts Lost, Thought Stolen, Then Found

According to an article in the Boston Globe, two handwritten manuscripts by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges owned by a Harvard Square bookstore were found after being lost and presumed stolen. Store owner John W. Wronoski found the manuscripts Monday afternoon, stuck behind a photograph "just by weird chance," he said. "I am inordinately relieved."

The manuscripts included that of a favorite story of mine, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:36 PM | TrackBack

December 7, 2006

Microsoft Book Search

Microsoft has launched its book search product. My initial reaction is mixed, though I haven't spent much time with it yet. On the one hand, it doesn't seem to work in Firefox (get used to seeing the word "Loading..." if you try to launch it) and it is really slow to start, even in Internet Explorer 6 (I haven't tried it in Explorer 7 yet). On the other hand, the interface for browsing a found book is much more attractive than Google Book Search and the scanning, at a quick glance, seems to be of a signficantly better quality than that on Google Books. Of course, beating Google Books on scanning quality is not exactly difficult.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:50 PM

Download a Good Book Lately?

Late in the last millennium I went to grad school, getting my MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College. Recently, a writer from the alumni office, Christopher Hennessey, interviewed me about the eBook business, and he ended up writing an excellent article. You can download a PDF of the entire magazine here (about 2.7 MB). I also took the liberty of creating a PDF with just the article itself, which is about 500K.

A hat tip to Christopher for writing an excellent survey of the value of eBooks to date.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:48 PM | TrackBack

December 2, 2006

The Google Book "Nightmare"

Also from if:book, count Brewster Kahle among the people who are not fans of Google Books.

"Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare.".

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:15 PM

The State Of Magazine Websites

PaidContent.org points to some research, The State Of Magazine Websites.

(via Buzzmachine) The Bivings Group, which earlier this year did a comprehensive review of newspaper websites, has done it again with magazine websites: it researched the websites of the top 50 most circulated magazines in the U.S. and evaluated them.

Among the findings:

-- RSS feeds: 48 per cent of magazine websites.
-- Message boards/forums: 46 per cent
-- 38 per cent require registration to view all of the site’s content.
-- 38 per cent of the magazines offer at least one reporter blog.
-- Video is an offering on 34 per cent of websites.
-- Just 14 per cent of websites use podcasts and bookmarking; eight percent allow comments on articles; and six per cent use tags.

I want to know about the 52% of websites who have not implemeneted RSS yet. Hello, McFly!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:03 PM

November 30, 2006

DOIs for Books Gain Ground

Digital Koans alerts us to the news that DOIs for books are gaining ground.

According to CrossRef, the official DOI registration agency, over a half-million DOIs have been assigned to books or book chapters, and twenty of its members are using DOIs in this fashion. What’s a DOI? Here’s a short description from …

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:25 PM | TrackBack

November 10, 2006

Digitization at HarperCollins

If you are curious what HarperCollins is doing in terms of digitizing its content, this presentation (PDF) from the Frankfurt Book Fair spells it out some. HarperCollins is being aggressive with this. They cited the costs of digitization as an element in their recent disappointing quarterly profit, and clearly are committed to the efforts.

In addition to lower sales, [HarperCollins CEO Jane] Friedman attributed the drop in profits to continued investment in digital and global projects. HC has now digitized 12,000 titles as part of its digital warehouse, and during the quarter it converted 125 books to its new Browse Inside feature, which enables consumers to search HC books from the company's Web site. Friedman estimated HC will be adding 200 to 500 titles a week to the Browse feature. The company's Digital Media Café also launched in the period. "I remain excited by the digital world," Friedman said. HC's China initiatives also ate into profits in the period.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:33 PM

November 6, 2006

Wikipedia Woes

Perhaps another reason Wikipedia should consider an authentication process for authors.

This is likely a solvable problem, though hackers are determined folks. But the more I think about Wikipedia authoring, the more I think it makes sense for authors to be authenticated.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:15 PM

October 27, 2006

Revisiting Amazon aStore

I noticed recently some sales from my Andre Dubus Amazon aStore, so I spent some time today updating it and adding a couple of new features. Check it out, and shop early and often!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:38 AM

October 12, 2006

Simon & Schuster’s eBook Blog

TeleRead highlighted a new eBook-related blog at Simon & Schuster.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:58 PM

October 3, 2006

CrossRef Indicators

I remember when I first heard about Digital Object Identifiers DOIs and thinking, "great idea... needs critical mass." Well, according to the latest CrossRef Indicators, they have long since passed critical mass.

CROSSREF INDICATORS (September 29, 2006)

Total no. participating publishers & societies 1,683
% of non-profit publishers 64%
Total no. participating libraries 1,107
No. journals covered 15,215
No. DOIs registered to date 22,584,497
No. DOIs deposited in previous month 294,257
No. DOIs retrieved (matched references) in previous month 4,503,094
DOI resolutions (end-user clicks) in previous month 11,007,980

The 11 million plus DOI resolutions is staggering really. That is 11 million clicks on specialized, authoritative content in one month.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:57 PM

September 26, 2006

Sony eReader Available

The Sony Portable Reader System PRS-500 is now available. TeleRead has a very thoughtful article about some of the challenges Sony faces. Meanwhile, I keep offering to review the thing, but no word from Sony.

More here from paidContent.org.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:54 PM

September 21, 2006

Welcome Back, Peter Gammons

Peter Gammons returned to action for ESPN last night. Gammons, the Hall of Fame baseball writer, had a brain aneurysm in June, and the baseball season hasn't been the same without him. Gammons was the baseball beat writer for the Boston Globe when I was a kid and up through the time I flirted with the idea of being a sportswriter. I covered sports for my college newspaper and was a stringer for the New Bedford Standard-Times during a time when the Globe had an amazing array of sportswriting talent, including Gammons, Bob Ryan, Leigh Montville, and Ray Fitzgerald. Even among them, Gammons was in a class by himself. He created a feature that is now a staple of many sports pages, a weekend "notebook" of short items that runs a full page in the broadside Globe to this day (now written by the Globe's current beat writer, Gordon Edes). I can draw a line from that kind of short-form collection to today's blog. Gammons' blog (for ESPN Insider subscribers unfortunately) has been dormant since his illness, but he does have a new column up (and it's free!).

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:21 AM

September 19, 2006

Bookshare.org Founder Awarded Genius Grant

Jim Fruchterman, CEO of The Benetech Initiative, has been awarded a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each of this year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows learned this week that they will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” funding over the next five years.

Jim Fruchterman, 47, is an electrical engineer turned social entrepreneur who adapts cutting-edge technology into affordable tools for the visually impaired and other underserved communities. In 1989, Fruchterman founded the nonprofit company Arkenstone to develop and manufacture a reading machine for the blind using optical character recognition technology. He delivered the reading tool in a dozen languages to 35,000 people in 60 countries.

In 2000, Fruchterman founded another nonprofit company, The Benetech Initiative, to create innovative technology solutions that address social needs. Benetech’s first project, Bookshare.org created the world’s largest accessible library of scanned books and periodicals providing people with visual or print disabilities access to a dramatically increased volume of print materials.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:45 PM

Russian Math Professor Bypasses Establishment Publishing to Share Breakthrough

Meanwhile, TeleRead shares some news about why hundreds-year old societies may not be the sole arbiter of scientific breakthroughs anymore.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:37 PM

Coming to a Browser Near You: 340 Years of Science, For Free

The complete archive of the England's Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is freely available electronically for a two month period that began on September 14th.

The archive contains seminal research papers including accounts of Michael Faraday's groundbreaking series of electrical experiments, Isaac Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope, and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking.

The Society's online collection, which until now only extended back to 1997, contains every paper published in the Royal Society journals from the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions in 1665, to the most recent addition, Interface.

I picked one article at random, from 1784. Would you be shocked to learn that the scanning and rendering are far superior to Google Books?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 13, 2006

Britannica v Wikipedia

Dave Winer points to an an interesting back and forth between the leaders of Britannica and Wikipedia, and offers some thoughts. The direct link to the article is here.

Which reminds me of the journal Nature's article on the accuracy of the two works when it comes to science.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:26 PM

September 8, 2006

Note to Google Books

When you scan a page that has an illustration with an overlay, lift the overlay up so the illustration is actually visible. Oh, and make the book square on the scanner bed so the page is not crooked. Oh yeah, and decide whether to scan the whole book in color or in black and white. Of course, you should also be sure there isn't some bizarre problem with the scanner first. And, needless to say, if the scan you end up with is completely nonsensical, you might not want to include it.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:40 PM

September 2, 2006

Google Books Allowing Downloads: Blah, Blah, Blah

There was quite a buzz about Google allowing people to download PDFs of public domain books as of this week. Almost everything I read was incomplete, or wrong, and there was plenty of irrational exuberance. To me, any discussion of downloadable public domain books has to include Project Gutenberg, but few of the articles mentioned it. So much of the coverage is fawning, which means the project is doomed. It really is the dot.bomb era all over again. I suggest the cheerleaders start here and see how shoddy and incompetent the work is.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:18 PM

September 1, 2006

E-dictionary Studies

Does learning change when kids use electronic dictionaries instead of paper ones? TeleRead highlights some recent research.

“We can be very optimistic of the potential of these students proving that there will be no detriment to learning using eBooks. This optimism obviously begs continuing research.” - Prof. Richard Ballaver and Nicole Adams, Ball State University

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:07 PM

August 27, 2006

‘The Complete New Yorker Solves the DVD-swapping Problem

Via TeleRead The New Yorker will soon offer “a collection of all 4,000+ back issues stored on a 3-by-5-inch 80GB portable hard drive."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:42 PM

August 26, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

I don't know, but maybe they were going for an aerial view here? Every page I looked at in this book is badly done. Is this what some of the top libraries in the world want done with books that are nearly 200 years old? And when Willis A. Boughton donated this book to the Harvard libraries in 1933, did he expect the book to be manhandled this way? I go back to an earlier post I wrote, reflecting on how the president of the University of Michigan gushed about the role of Google Books in historic preservation. Did it ever occur to anyone that Google might know how to build a search engine, but they might not have a clue about how to handle and digitize books?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:28 AM | TrackBack

August 22, 2006

Amazon's aStore Feature

I do the Amazon.com affiliate thing, and noticed today they have a new feaure, currently in Beta, called an aStore. As Amazon describes it, "aStore by Amazon is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website." It really is easy to create one, and I did a bare-bones one in a few minutes, highlighting the work of my favorite author, Andre Dubus.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:23 PM

August 20, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

The thing I have noticed, scanning so many pages of Google Books, is that when the scanning of a book starts to go wrong, it goes very, very wrong.

But, hey, they've got hyperlinks!

Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:06 PM

August 13, 2006

Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane...

If you have a keen interest in eBook markets and technology, you really should follow the TeleRead blog. This weekend it has a number of fine entries, including Dear Sony: Please listen to Jane about your eBabel problem—if you want to woo romance readers. The advice applies to all kinds of readers, including romance readers.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:38 PM

August 12, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

Check this out. And then the frontispiece photo, where they apparently failed to notice--or failed to do anything about--an overlay over the page. Once again, Project Gutenberg does it much, much better.

UPDATE: It also occurs to me that Google Books does nothing for the visually impaired, but other eBook efforts do.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:37 AM

August 11, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

Oy vey. Start here, and keep paging forward. Maybe the person scanning this book was drinking.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)

August 10, 2006

But Did Anyone Bother to Check if Google Has a Clue?

University of Calif. Joins Google Book Scan Push

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:54 PM

August 6, 2006

Google Books Stupid Page of the Day

One could guess at what this page is supposed to include on it, but, then again, maybe not. All of which makes this sound like a good idea.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:22 PM

Improving eBook Reading

Jon Udell has a practical suggestion for improving the reading experience with eBooks.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 PM

July 26, 2006

Wikipedia

Well, on any given day, this could be true. Then again, maybe not.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:53 PM

July 17, 2006

eBooks Done Well

Andrew Pace, head of information technology for the North Carolina State University Libraries, likes what he sees from