The Literary History of Word Processing

January 23, 2012

Fun article from the New York Times: “The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute.” (thanks ropaterny and jmendelsohn for the sharing the cool article) I’m looking forward to checking out Matthew Kirschenbaum’s upcoming book, “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing” — among other things, it’s fun to think about the mix of authors [...]

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iBooks 2 and the Future of Textbooks

January 20, 2012

Well, if anyone is going to succeed in reinventing the textbook, betting on Apple to do so is a fairly safe bet. The newly-released iBooks 2 is good, and has the potential to be great. It’s worth noting that iBooks 2 is for all kinds of ebooks, not just textbooks, although the potential for educational [...]

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iBooks 2, and Steve Jobs on the Digital Textbook Market

January 19, 2012

For the textbook industry, iBooks 2 is very big news indeed. The digital textbook market has seen relatively modest growth over the past few years — for numerous reasons, one of the chief factors being how costly and time-consuming making truly enhanced textbooks has been —  as The Wall Street Journal (“iBooks 2 aims to boost [...]

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Some Thoughts on iBooks Author

January 19, 2012

Today was the day of the much-speculated upon textbook news from Apple. And as it turns out, it actually was pretty big news. iBooks Author could represent a big leap forward in terms of how digital textbooks are created — the barrier of entry for textbook creation just changed a whole lot. And that’s a [...]

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Video of the Week: The Joy of Books

January 18, 2012

A wonderful video from the folks at Toronto-based Type Books. If you love  books, it’s quite worth the two minutes to check it out. I think I spotted Jose Saramago and Umberto Eco on those parading bookshelves. Maria Popova at BrainPickings.org adds a nice thought on the appeal of spot-motion videos – “(One thing that’s always drawn [...]

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Interesting: Apple and Digital Textbooks

January 17, 2012

Apple is making an education-related announcement this week. It might be big news. Or might not be. Sometimes, speculation can be fun (even for those of us that don’t do that sort of thing for a living). The most intriguing bit of maybe/maybe-not news comes from Ars Technica (“Apple to announce tools, platform to ‘digitally [...]

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Newsweek: 31 Ways to Get Smarter in 2012

January 10, 2012

Just for fun, check out Newsweek’s “31 Ways to Get Smarter in 2012.” You can find the complete list of 31 brain-building pointers (I probably would have cut the list down to 20 … but at least there’s something for everyone) at The Daily Beast here. Some of them (#5: Toss your smartphone; #8: Go to [...]

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Preview: Authors@Google “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy”

January 2, 2012

Here’s a sneak preview of my December 16th 2011 visit to Authors@Google, on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy. Lots of fun. Tweet

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eBooks, Errors, and Plato

December 28, 2011

On the topic of ebook errors, let’s at least ask the question: should ebooks be edited, post-release? Our initial reaction may well be: “yes, why not?” But, TeleRead (“E-books: Good for fixing mistakes?“) offers an argument in favor of the ebook error as a historical artifact: “The thing about a book is that it’s a [...]

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What is a “vook”?

December 26, 2011

Remember Vook? Or, let’s take a step back:what is a vook? From the Vook website – “A vook is a new innovation in reading that blends a well-written book, high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story. You can read your book, watch videos that enhance the story and connect [...]

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