Category Archives: Technology

Digital Publishing, E-Books, iPhone, Publishing Industry News, Technology

Apple’s Wall gets higher

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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 inline with where ePub3 and HTML5 are going. But it’s still not available on the desktop, just iOS. I was dissappointed in this. I do have a few reference books that I like to look things up in. If I am working on the desktop it is sooooo much easier to just open the Kindle reader or Nook reader apps and find what I need, rather than having my iPad next to me. And isn’t this what textbooks are used for? Reference? Looking things up? Multi-tasking and note taking aren’t strong points of having a tablet. So rather than have the one device we’re back to two devices. Not cool.

Second, there is the partnership with textbook publishers coupled with the efforts to make textbooks available at the $15 price point. That sounds good to me. If anyone needs a price break, it’s students. My fear here is that it could be a “Netflix-like” situation, where if a publisher doesn’t like the revenue flow situation or wants to renegotiate terms and Apple digs its heels in… where does that leave all the students, their notes, school libraries, etc.? Which brings us to the third takeaway…

the new iBooks authoring tool. It sounds pretty easy to use and the seamless integration is cool, but there are so many other limits and ramifications. Liz Castro did a good list on the concerns around the authoring tool. My big concern is that whatever you make in this tool Apple will not let you sell anywhere else. I was so excited when Apple embraced the ePub format with the rest of the world. But now it seems they have taken a page from Amazon’s playbook (or maybe the iTunes .m4a strategy) and will start building their own walled .ibook garden. It’s a shame. Because these strategies are not about creating the best user experience (which I do believe has been a driving force at Apple), but it’s about controlling parts of the supply between content creation and the reader.

Birmingham, Events, Technology

Birmingham Wordcamp Jan. 14th-15th

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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 and meet some cool folks along the way. At a minimum you’ll walk out with a grocery list of killer plug-ins that you didn’t know existed. At least that’s what always happens to me.

So go check out the tracks and sign up, I’d love to meet some of you out there. Saturday takes place at the BJCC and teh Sunday line-up is at Samford. The WordPress faithful here in Birmingham really is a neat crew. I’m thankful for these annual events where I can soak in some new things.

Also, during the year, they have some WordPress meet-ups with most updates going out with #wpbham on Twitter. I haven’t been able to make one in a loooooooong time, but they always sound like fun. So check those out too.

Hope to see you in a week!

On the Web, Technology

Great Gatsby Videogame

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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 goal is to simply “find Gatsby”. I admit that I have not played very much of the game and have no idea where it goes with the story or characters. I just thought its was neat that even way back when NES was the coolest, someone thought it worth while to make a game out of a book.

Media, On the Web, Technology

Small Demons and Connecting the Dots

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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 able to list out three books that specifically mention that bourbon and cite the passages.

Want to know a character’s favorite recipe? Small Demons will eventually be the place to go. There is also a “My Library” tab, that is not yet active and I’m not sure how deep the social component will go. I’ve only been in for a day.

The “Books Mentioned in Other Books” is quite a big rabbit hole to start down. It goes on and on and on, but it’s fun to see what books, genres and author share certain things. As fun as it is, Small Demon’s bookshelf is still small, so all of the results feel a little truncated. There are many many books that will be added and indexed.

It’s one of those things that could only happen (and scale) thanks to the internet. It’s on the same track as LibraryThing (one of the most awesome services the internet has birthed). Here’s a quick under-two-minute video they produced to promo the new search/relationship/discovery engine: