Category Archives: Technology

I Bought an iPhone3GS and Now I Want to Read

Not sure if you looked up in the sky last night, but a rare astronomical event occurred as planets aligned with soon-to-expire cellphone contracts and only a 5-minute wait at the local Apple store… so after many months of waiting… I finally got my iPhone. I spent the evening getting my gMail and Google Apps affairs in order, downloaded a cool typographic wallpaper and now I’m ready to read.

I haven’t bought a book yet, but I grabbed these iPhone apps and a few freebie books to page? flick? thumb? through. What I’m asking is… what reader/app am I missing? I’m coming late to the game and I want to start with everything in the arsenal and then weed out the slackers. So, my iPhone book reading slate on Day One is…

Barnes & Noble Store
Barnes & Noble eReader
Kindle for iPhone
Stanza
Fictionwise’s eReader
Shortcovers
BeamItDown book of Benjamin Button
Iceberg book of Jame’s Patterson’s Maximum Ride

Of course, some of these are eReaders and others are books as apps, which should be fun to try and see what bells and whistles are available. So let me know of any free or paid apps that I need to add. True, I am always looking for good reads, but this time I’m looking for who is getting right and who is presenting the best reading experience on the iPhone platform. Though not my usual genre, I hear I need to check out some Harlequin material, as they have been leaders in the digital space for over a year now, but what else am I missing?

This is going to be fun!

Barnes & Noble eReader for Mac – My Thoughts

So I downloaded the free Barnes & Nobel eReader 1.0 this morning, to check it out. I’m on a Mac and was glad to see that B&N rolled out versions of the readers for iPhone, Blackberry, PC and Mac all at the same time. That’s a good move.

The first thing I tried to do was open some pdf’s, mobi, epub and prc files…

Continue reading Barnes & Noble eReader for Mac – My Thoughts

On the Same Page

I have just finished reading Clive Thomspson’s WIRED artcile on the Future of Reading. The notion of unleashing the book online to prod readers into interacting with text sounds like fun and I like the idea of focusing on the reader. I look forward to all the variations and trials that publishers put forward in the coming months, but there is one aspect of books that I hope they maintain in all their experimentation…

Continue reading On the Same Page

Allowing Comments to in-progress Manuscripts

O’Reilly Media’s Programming Scala won’t hit bookstore shelves for a long time. But the entire working manuscript has been posted to their site! Each and every paragraph, sidenote, chart and graph has a comment box underneath it. They are hoping that the community will contribute knowledgeble bits of information and ideas, which the author will vet and toss or incorporate. The idea is that this crowdsourcing filtered through their expert author will produce a more auhtoritative work.

Not too mention the marketing side of things. I guess one side could say “you’ll sell fewer books, because all of your hardcore readers have been reading while it’s been written”. Which might hold true for a few folks. But can you imagine the buzz this would build within the programming community? Or how much of a boost the book might get from folks talking about/buying a book that they were involved in producing? The system has a sign-in for commenters so that they can be credited in the final book, if their contribution is used. O’Reilly also provides RSS feeds for the various sections so that a commenter can keep up with that specific section of the text.

Obviously, this idea wouldn’t work for every type of book and the progamming community is a good place to start. It’s not the first book to be published from crwodsourced information, but it’s the first time, I’m aware of, a major publisher has added a crowdsourced component to the traditional publishing workflow. Which means that it gets checked and balanced by author and editor, which may be enough to sway a few naysayers.

I wonder what Andrew Keen would think of this community/professional mashup? Ha!