Category Archives: Technology

Digital Publishing, Events, On the Web, Publishing Industry News, Technology

Desks of the Future

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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 hacked together with a massive touchscreen eBook reader display.

I guess technically the video isn’t focusing so much on the features of a desk as it is the functions of a desk, but it’s interesting how integrated displays, etc. never came up in the discussions, in what they see as being needed from a desk, to help accomplish our reading, tasks, work, etc.

The discussion and tidbits being passed along on Twitter, via the #bib10 hashtag is worth following all day today and worth going back and reading yesterday’s feed. It sounds like it’s been a GREAT event dolling out plenty of practical experience and numbers for those in publishing to consider.

Birmingham, Book Talk, Digital Publishing, E-Books, New Releases, On the Web, Publishing Industry News, Technology

Free eBooks from Birmingham-Area Libraries

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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. But that’s no fault of the library system and is required by most publishers anyway. But once you get the Adobe Digital Editions set up right, it’s great.

Via my JCLC account, I have “checked out” an eBook and am reading it on both my laptop and on my desktop. I have not tried to put it on my Sony eReader yet, as it needs a new battery and won’t hold a charge (yeah yeah, I know. That’s not a problem people reading print books have, but hey… did I mention, I just checked out a book at 11pm!) Anyway….

Here is the one tip I can offer: Once you download your eBook file (it has a .acm extension), “right click” (or ctrl-click) and choose “Open With…” and navigate to Adobe Digital Editions. The permission drm-wrapped file that is downloaded is not a straight up ePub and this seems to work better than opening Adobe Digital Editions and trying to import the .acm file into the library.

Cool factoids of the new system:

  • You get to choose your “check out period”. You elect 7 days, 14 days or 21 days at checkout.
  • You can checkout up to 5 titles at a time
  • Every digital file has icons showing which platforms/devices that book can be read on
  • So far there are 477 fiction books and 435 non-fiction books listed

The eBooks are not Kindle-friendly nor iDevice-friendly, but here is a list of all compatible devices. I’m going to take a look at checking out books to the Sony Reader and various iDevices.

Kudos to the JCLC System in bringing another great service to us. You guys really are something Birmingham can brag about.

Digital Publishing, E-Books, Events, On the Web, Publishing Industry News, Technology

IPSA Presentation slides

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Here is the slide deck from my presentation at the June IPSA meeting. I only wish there was a way for me to display the Q&A that followed, the questions were great and just what one would expect from a room full of technologists, when the subject is ebooks and book publishing.

Book Publishing 2.010 :: IPSA :: June 2010

Digital Publishing, E-Books, iPhone, News, On the Web, Publishing Industry News, Technology

Amazon Kindle App for Mac Now Available

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It’s finally here! Click here to go download it (download will start automatically).

There’s nothing super special about it. With all the delays, since last year, I thought they were cramming in all of the annotations and such, but it looks like those are coming later. This app, which lets you buy and read kindle books on any Mac OS 10.5 machine does support device syncing, which is more important to me and worked fine this morning. So I can start readying a book on my phone and then pick up where I left off on my computer. Pretty handy. Bookmarks are displayed too. Not a bad little app, but you can see why they didn’t launch with a parade.

Let me know what you think about it or if you’re even going to give it a try.