Yesterday Apple announced their latest plans for the iBooks platform. The event focused on textbooks and education. There were three main takeaways. All of which have their pluses and minuses. First, there is a new iBooks app for iOS devices. It looks slick with video, sound and other rich media embedded in the books. It’s [...]

I’m signed up and ready to go! Wordcamp Birmingham 2012 is January 14-15. WordPress is the software platform that this site (and a gazillion others) run on. It looks like they have a great line up this year, with three tracks offered. So regardless of where you are with your skills, you will learn something [...]

Earlier this year, someone says they paid 50 cents for an old Nintendo cartridge that had some Japanese bootleg version of a Great Gatsby game. And thanks to the world of emulators you can play this 8-bit wonder right in your web browser. You start off dodging butlers and tipsy partiers as Nick Carraway. Your [...]

Small Demons launched in beta this week and is trying to help us discover new things by connecting all the dots for us. How vague is that? But seriously that what it does. You can start with a person, book, movie, music, brand or thing. I chose a specific bourbon, Old Grand-Dad. Small Demons was [...]

No doubt the eReader sector is a tough business. One has to have the right balance of device manufacturing skills, end-user service, available titles, etc. Sony has been late to the show, even though they were an early mover. Their devices were over-priced and their customer-facing services and stores were cumbersome at best. But yesterday, [...]

Someone shared Seth Godin’s post The Future of the Library, via Twitter. In it Godin says “Netflix is a better librarian…”. Something that I totally disagree with. I have a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old at home. Ninety-five percent of what gets streamed to my house is kids’ programming. From which the Netflix-librarian-bot makes the following [...]

Hello independent bookstore owner. I am Trav. I believe in what you do and what you add to my community. I am your customer… and I have tools. You need to wake up and start participating, so I know you’re still there. Here is one thing all independent bookstore owners need to be aware of [...]

You can now download and read free ebooks from the JCLC OverDrive system, on the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. I’ve been doing this for two weeks now, and other than a lack of sleep from all of the reading, I have had no issues. This week I finished up two paper books and three [...]

Yesterday, I ran across this great (and way too short) video about the future of the desk. The next item in my feed yesterday was coverage of this week’s Books in Browsers 2010 summit, where the Internet Archive showed off what they have dubbed the Reading Desk 2.0. Basically, it’s an antique church reading desk [...]

It is 11pm and I just checked out a book from my local library. This week the JCLC system turned on its Overdrive-powered eBook network. So far it’s very very cool. The only complaints I have are tied to the CRAZY complicated hoops Adobe Digital Editions (which you will have to download) has in place. [...]