Isabelle Fetherston says something that I've been saying for awhile—e-books are great for older adults, because they can adjust the font size upwards as far as they need to. (Hat tip: Michael Habib)
Virginia Postrel, a great blogger on issues of design and style, rounds up and critiques some of the commentary on Amazon's Kindle.
An interesting project to watch out of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. I haven't read anything about this other than the linked article at Inside Higher Ed, so I'm not sure how fully-baked this idea is, but it's intriguing at the least.
The Economist talks about “citizen science”—distributing scientific scut-work that involves the kinds of visual processing that computers can't yet do well out to volunteers. (Hat tip: Slashdot.) And somehow neither the Economist nor Slashdot mentioned Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
More people are getting behind the idea that bibliographic records need to be more freely available.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The Coolest Use I've Seen of XML in Awhile
This is absolutely, utterly brilliant—an XML schema for knitting patterns. (Hat tip: Kat with a K.) Seriously, if you don't knit/crochet/etc. you probably can't even begin to understand the brilliance of the idea of expressing patterns in a standardized, machine-readable markup language—although the linked page does a nice job of explaining it—but trust me, it is brilliant. I'm so tempted to create a schema along these lines for crocheting patterns now, since I can't knit to save my life but can crochet a mean pair of gloves....
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Something to Keep an Eye On
I doubt that this new law, which would allow the government to seize computers that are used to facilitate intellectual property theft, is going to pass in its present form, or be upheld as constitutional if it is . . . but I didn't believe that the courts were going to uphold the laws that allow the government to seize property allegedly used in the drug trade without anyone actually being convicted of anything, either. But things could get very, very interesting for libraries that have public access computers if it does pass. This is definitely something that's worth paying attention to.
Another Nifty Tool Built on Amazon's Open Information
Don't you hate it when you're $1 or so short of having a big enough order on Amazon to qualify for free shipping? You feel like you ought to find something cheap to buy to fill out the order, but then you have to wander all over the site looking for something.... Well, now somebody has built a site that will do the searching for you.
Hat tip: Marginal Revolution.
By the way, I'm so happy to see that OCLC is moving towards making the WorldCat data ever more open. I can't wait to see spiffy tools like this being built for library users and not just book-buyers!
Hat tip: Marginal Revolution.
By the way, I'm so happy to see that OCLC is moving towards making the WorldCat data ever more open. I can't wait to see spiffy tools like this being built for library users and not just book-buyers!
Other Industries Confront the Web
I don't generally blog about the problems that the music and film/TV industries face in digitizing their content and making it available online, because 1) I just don't care about the music industry at all and 2) I don't have a particularly good grasp of the film/TV business model. But I've come upon a few interesting articles lately on the topic, so I'm posting them here as a link round-up.
The New York Times has a nice article on Radiohead's name-your-price album and related changes in the music industry.
Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily has become my go-to source for news about the WGA strike.
And, one with direct library relevance: You can now do keyword searches of [some] online videos.
The New York Times has a nice article on Radiohead's name-your-price album and related changes in the music industry.
Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily has become my go-to source for news about the WGA strike.
And, one with direct library relevance: You can now do keyword searches of [some] online videos.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Interesting story...
...in Slate, titled “A Librarian's Worst Nightmare”, about Yahoo! Answers. The story is interesting because it doesn't wail that Yahoo! Answers users are idiots who don't know that they're getting unreliable information; instead, it looks at what value uers get out of a service like Yahoo! Answers.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Some Thoughts on DRM
As I've been reading more and more people's reactions to the Kindle and its DRM issues, something occurred to me: why are publishers so concerned about wrapping up e-books in DRM, when they're willing to let e-journals and e-magazines float around online with no DRM at all?
This occurred to me because I know that, were I to get an e-book reader, I would very rarely pay for content for it—partially because I'm a Pennsylvania Dutch cheapskate, and partially because I can get digital versions of most content I'm interested in for free. Why? Because most of what I read is magazines/journals rather than books.
(Digression: Do not even start with me, a la the periodic NEA reports on the decline of reading for pleasure, on how reading magazines and/or online content isn't "real" reading and only books count. And really REALLY don't start with me on the idea that nonfiction books don't count either and only fiction reading is "real" reading. 1) In terms of any benefit of reading you could possibly name, I'll put one of the Atlantic's 15,000-word essays up against any of the formulaic crime/romance/etc. novels that most people read any day. 2) I do read nonfiction books when I have the time to indulge in them, and normally my #1 complaint about them is that they take what could have been a nice lean 15,000-word essay—in fact, these days, what often started off as a nice lean 15,000-word essay—and expanded it with a lot of filler that doesn't really enhance their point. End digression.)
So, why is so much magazine content so freely available? I'm not just talking about the content that is online free and ad-supported (although there really is a surprising amount of that going on amongst the major magazines), but also the magazines that aren't free online but that are aggregated in half-a-dozen different databases with no significant embargo period and no DRM and that most people can get free access to online without trying too hard. I mean, just using InfoTrac's General OneFile—which absolutely everyone in Michigan has free access to through the State Library—I could load up an e-book reader with PDFs of the latest issues of Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and The Economist and easily keep myself amused for two plane flights and a weeklong vacation, say. And when interesting articles caught my eye I could e-mail them to friends who I thought might be interested in them, print them out and mark them up for typesetting if I thought I could use them in a Greenhaven anthology . . . all the things that the book publishers would be dead set against me doing with any of their content. So why are the magazine/journal publishers so much less concerned about this than the book publishers are?
I don't think it has to do with popularity—The New Yorker, for example, has a circulation of over a million, which handily beats all but the most popular best-selling books. But I really don't know what it is, either. Theories?
This occurred to me because I know that, were I to get an e-book reader, I would very rarely pay for content for it—partially because I'm a Pennsylvania Dutch cheapskate, and partially because I can get digital versions of most content I'm interested in for free. Why? Because most of what I read is magazines/journals rather than books.
(Digression: Do not even start with me, a la the periodic NEA reports on the decline of reading for pleasure, on how reading magazines and/or online content isn't "real" reading and only books count. And really REALLY don't start with me on the idea that nonfiction books don't count either and only fiction reading is "real" reading. 1) In terms of any benefit of reading you could possibly name, I'll put one of the Atlantic's 15,000-word essays up against any of the formulaic crime/romance/etc. novels that most people read any day. 2) I do read nonfiction books when I have the time to indulge in them, and normally my #1 complaint about them is that they take what could have been a nice lean 15,000-word essay—in fact, these days, what often started off as a nice lean 15,000-word essay—and expanded it with a lot of filler that doesn't really enhance their point. End digression.)
So, why is so much magazine content so freely available? I'm not just talking about the content that is online free and ad-supported (although there really is a surprising amount of that going on amongst the major magazines), but also the magazines that aren't free online but that are aggregated in half-a-dozen different databases with no significant embargo period and no DRM and that most people can get free access to online without trying too hard. I mean, just using InfoTrac's General OneFile—which absolutely everyone in Michigan has free access to through the State Library—I could load up an e-book reader with PDFs of the latest issues of Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and The Economist and easily keep myself amused for two plane flights and a weeklong vacation, say. And when interesting articles caught my eye I could e-mail them to friends who I thought might be interested in them, print them out and mark them up for typesetting if I thought I could use them in a Greenhaven anthology . . . all the things that the book publishers would be dead set against me doing with any of their content. So why are the magazine/journal publishers so much less concerned about this than the book publishers are?
I don't think it has to do with popularity—The New Yorker, for example, has a circulation of over a million, which handily beats all but the most popular best-selling books. But I really don't know what it is, either. Theories?
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