So Misguided

Just catching up on the news:

Yahoo launches podcast site (Washington Post). http://www.podcasts.yahoo.com

Bible group spreads word by SMS (cnn.com). The Bible Society in Australia launched a SMS translation of Bible verses: “In da Bginnin God cre8d da heavens & da earth.” The word of God dispensed via cell phones, oh dear.
http://www.biblesociety.com.au/smsbible/

Oct. 29, Business Blogging 101 seminar in Seattle: Business Blogging 101 is a full-day workshop for those new to blogging. Get up and running with an effective weblog strategy. Cost is $195.00 and includes lunch and continental breakfast. Great speakers: Molly E. Holzschlag, Robert Scoble, DL Byron, Buzz Bruggeman and Steve Broback. http://www.blogbusinesssummit.com/seminars/

Posted by Monique at 03:11 PM. Filed under: Blogging • Technology •

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Print-on-demand publisher Trafford, based in Victoria, pledged $1.6 million on August 31 to help in the global race to document and teach endangered indigenous languages.

The donation was announced at WITFOR 2005 in Botswana, where over 800 delegates were gathered to discuss ways to give those in the developing world access to technology.

$1.6 million is a tremendous gift. The full press release is available on the Trafford website.

Trafford.com/pledge

Posted by Monique at 12:08 PM. Filed under: Books • Technology •

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On Slashdot there is an interesting story from CNN about some US libraries using Microsoft Media DRM to automatically return audiobooks that are overdue.

Essentially a patron borrows the title for 3 weeks or whatever the standard borrow time is. After 3 weeks, when the book is due, the patron must renew it or return it. If the book is not renewed or returned, the audiobook is unreadable because the encrypted file is no longer playable.

Here’s the CNN story.

Just yesterday James and I were talking about distribution models in a digital era and how technology is or will be used to protect copyright. (There are lots of things I’d like to say on copyright, but for the moment, let’s assume that we do want to protect copyright.)

The conversation came up in part because I came across this blog Freedom to Tinker, which had a link to a Princeton student’s thesis on the affect of filesharing on the music industry.

PDF: Music Sales in the Age of File Sharing

I haven’t had a chance to read all 73 pages, but the abstract notes that although filesharing had a negative affect on sales by the 15-24 age group, there was a positive affect on sales by older age groups, which resulted in an overall positive affect.

So what does this mean for books? Should we give away content? Should the above librarians not worry about encrypting audiobooks?

I sit on both sides of the fence at the moment.

Posted by Monique at 07:14 AM. Filed under: Blogging • Books • Technology •

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Amazon.com is way ahead of its fellow online book retailers. You can still buy the latest 50 Cent album, as well as cameras, phones, jewellery—bless their cotton socks—almost anything. Earlier this year you could also watch short films, and now you can buy short stories for 49 cents. Right, I forgot they also sell books.

Amazon announced this week Amazon Shorts. They are starting with 59 authors who’ve submitted short fiction, and Amazon is selling the stories for 49 cents each. You get a digital file. I haven’t bought one yet so I don’t know what it looks like.

Amazon Shorts web page

Categories include Literature and Fiction; Nonfiction and Essays; Biography and Memoirs; Maybe You Know ...; Mystery and Thrillers; and Editors’ Picks.

Posted by Monique at 07:00 AM. Filed under: Books • Technology •

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I’m a day behind but not a word short. CBC reported yesterday that podcast, phishing and wiki are among the new additions to the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Read the CBC article

Second edition? The first edition was published in full in 1928. Is there a certain number of words that have to be added before it is considered a new edition vs. a new printing? Curious.

Posted by Monique at 07:58 AM. Filed under: Books • Technology •

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Big news out of Seattle today. Amazon.ca has finally launched Search Inside the Book. SITB has been available on the .com site since Oct. 2003, but it took much longer to launch the program in Canada.

Search Inside the Book lets customers search for keywords inside a book. For example, if I want a book on Turkey, I can select the Search Inside results tab, then see 2-3 pages of the book.

Helpful for sorting out Turkey vs. poultry. Nice for fiction if you want to read a couple of pages to see the writing style. And, of course, an interesting opportunity for readers and publishers.

GooglePrint is also available but I’m not sure how many Canadian publishers are on board.

Posted by Monique at 08:31 AM. Filed under: Books • Technology •

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I was asked today why I thought online publishing won’t takeover traditional publishing. My answer was that humans have been reading off paper for hundreds of years, and I don’t believe that books are fungible.

Music formats—from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to MP3—are much more fungible. The delivery mechanism has a history of fairly rapid change. One format has acceptably replaced another. It is foreseeable that this is an infinite process. For literature—text on stone, animal skin and papyrus to parchment to codexes and bound pages to ebooks—the cycles of change have been much longer and the adoption of new technology has been slower.

Parchment, for example, was introduced as a replacement to papyrus sometime after the 3rd century. Documented use of papyrus, however, continued in classical literature until the 7th century, and even until the late 11th century. Not exactly a quick uptake of technology.

I think until we run out of trees and the ability to use 100% post-consumer recycled products, bound pages—or books—will still be used. Etexts, audio books, and whatever digital format we create for the future will of course be acceptable and used by many people, but the historical data on the adoption of ebooks does not suggest any wide scale change in the habits of book readers.

Now newspapers are a different story. The nature, however, of a newspaper—a collection of short articles—translates well online, as do certain types of books, such as reference manuals, recipe books and perhaps even poetry and short fiction. Like the shift from papyrus to paper, change is inevitable, but I’d argue that the phase out period will likely extend well beyond my lifetime.

Posted by Monique at 05:48 PM. Filed under: Blogging • Books • Technology •

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Have a look at what the geeks are up to:

“Mighty Mouse” has been one of the top 10 searches for the last couple of days according to Technorati.

Apple.com/mightymouse

I want my mouse to roar!

Posted by Monique at 09:00 AM. Filed under: Technology •

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As if there aren’t enough things messing with my brain, the CBC reported this morning that marketers are trying high-tech tools to push the brain’s “buy button.” Now that’s invasive marketing.

Full story CBC.

And why do marketers need high-tech tools? Perhaps they are not as creative as Tod Maffin. Darren Barefoot is reporting that bloggers and podcasters can get a 30% discount from the CBC Online Store. Now that is pushing my buy button.

Visit Darrenbarefoot.com for the coupon code.

Posted by Monique at 05:20 PM. Filed under: Technology •

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James and I entered the world of OS X this weekend. Life is different.

I’m not good at the initial discovery stage, in technology anyway. I like someone who knows what they are doing to show me around, then I’m happy to go off exploring. My first impressions of OS X is that it is not intuitive in the ways I expect it to be and sometimes it is dumb.

Things I don’t like but know I’ll get used to:
I dislike that the sleep, restart, shut down has moved from the right-hand side to the Apple menu.
I dislike that I have no idea what application are running, where do you see that now? How do I switch from one app. to the other? [Wow, I just discovered the little triangles. Ok, but I hate the dashboard, can it go away and only be viewable when you want it? I’m sure it can. I must find that preference.]
I dislike that our monitor goes black with the words “No Input”. It seems this is the sleep mode, but the computer is actually active so why the blank? I don’t know yet.
I dislike the windows. I haven’t figured out yet the logic of where things are. When you double click on the hard drive, you get a left-hand column, then the next column shows the folders in the hard drive. Ok, what the hell are the things in the left-hand column. There’s an applications folder here, but also one in the harddrive folder. There’s the stupid house icon “James” (see below “Things I’ll always hate”), a documents folder (where does that live?), Movies, Music and Pictures.
When I put my music in the Music folder, it wasn’t accessible from iTunes. Sometimes computers make me feel dumb.

Things I’ll always hate:
On set up you define a user. James and I share the computer but I put his name as our first user. That made him Administrator, with a shortname of James. When we realized that we don’t want to be separate users, just one user, we also realized that you can never change the shortname for the Admin person. That really sucks. And why can’t you change it? You can change the user name and password. Our computer is forever James. And there’s a stupid house icon that I don’t understand.
I hate that when we started up the mini, it didn’t have Tiger already installed.

I’ll have to check in after a couple of weeks and see if I still hate these things.

Oh, and we swapped the cube for the mini. Life is different. Smaller anyway, and we have less cash.

Posted by Monique at 07:16 PM. Filed under: Technology •

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Whenever I’m a little busy, I lose things. First my mind goes, then the physical things around me go. I don’t know where they go. If I did, they wouldn’t be lost. So for me the human factor and car keys is just one example of how I’m failing to keep things together: like my hands on my car keys.

Last night I was listening to Kim Vicente on CBC talking about his book The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live With Technology.

I was in the car, which meant I’d found my car keys. Vicente was talking about how technology fails us. For example, car dashboards on BMWs that allow you to check the oil from inside the car but not in any sort of intuitive way.

Vicente also mentioned ways technology is fixing usability problems. For example, did you ever notice that your car key is symmetrical? You can put it in upside down. It works. I never gave that a second thought, of course when something doesn’t work, I give it a lot of thought.

Do you have any good examples of quiet technology saving the day, or examples of technology wrecking havoc. Mmmm havoc. I can feel myself returning to my nature state.

Posted by Monique at 06:00 AM. Filed under: Technology •

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I am dead impressed with the Britons at Penguin UK. Twice this year I have been wowed by their book marketing campaigns.

It is easy to bemoan the less than creative tactics North American companies use to market books, and then not do anything about it. So I’ve been mulling over the state of affairs in an attempt to generate creative ideas with action items.

One of my reflections is that publishers treat reading as this serious thing that will somehow improve your life and that’s why you should do it. This line of thought in teen marketing particularly sucks. Publishers talk about making reading cool, but I don’t think we actually get around to making it really cool.

So what’s cool and how do you find it?

I think the book publishing industry does a lot of inward looking vs. outward looking. Forget what that other publisher is doing, what are the cool recording studios doing, what’s Apple doing, what are cell phone companies doing? Why not look at industries with high competition. Seems to me that in hugely competitive markets, the creative departments and ad agencies are really driven to create clever and unique campaigns. Is the lack of exciting, memorable book ad campaigns partly due to a lack of competition? I think so.

I don’t know what kind of rabbits I can pull out of my hat in terms of book campaigns, but I’m setting my sights on Penguin UK.

A couple of months ago Penguin launch “Are you good booking”. The site was set up to promote the male counterpart to chick lit, but it wasn’t just about books the boys would like. It was about what books you should have on the coffee table or be able to discuss with a date. What books would make you good booking in the eyes of a lady love who loves reading. Jocks and books, the ladies’ man and books. Sex it up.

The campaign was clever. There were polls and puns and lots of sex talk. I vaguely recall a list with books that had great sex scenes. I can’t find the original screen shots I took, but the site does still have Good Booking Monthly selections and the cheekiness is carried through in some of the copy. For example, “Hornby Days are Here Again.” Can’t you hear the ladies cooing, “oh Nick.”

So that was number 1. Number 2 is Penguin Remixed. Hear Penguin. Sample Penguin. Remix Penguin.

I know some of you cool kids already know about this, but I’m gob-smacked by this most awesome use of spoken words. I’ve been to other sites with audio readings by the author. Those are lovely, but really author readings are better live and the audio clips don’t normally make it anywhere interesting—like passed around to your friends and saved in your playlist. Enter Penguin.

Penguin has taken 30 of the “best spoken word samples from some of the greatest books of all time and the finest actors around.” Read here: Penguin has published many of the greatest books of all time, many being Penguin Classics—you remember the orange spine, the penguin logo ... anyway they have posted the media samples for us to play with and they are cool. Not just wouldn’t it be nice if the kids thought books were cool, but truly pass-on-to-your-friends cool. Try these samples on for size. There’s a contest too to submit personal entries. Books, music, online contests: I like it.

Check out Penguin Remixed but make sure you have an intervention plan in place. This site is addictive.

Have you seen any great campaigns lately for books? Or that could be modified for books? I’m on the lookout.

By the way, Geist magazine has a cool Haiku Night in Canada video and a Listening Room.

Posted by Monique at 06:36 PM. Filed under: Books • Technology •

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I bought a PSP this week. Mmmmmm. It is a handsome little machine. Unfortunately for me I have to give it to someone else. Regardless, portable entertainment has arrived. It is a very sweet looking package, slim, great screen, and you can play games, music and movies. Also good for photos. I fear the thing will get easily scratch, but what’s a little wear and tear. Love nips really.

If only it could offer wireless phone and internet ... I looked at the Fido Hiptop2. Blech. It looks big and ugly.

I’m waiting for the sexy little machine that will solve all my wireless work/play needs.

James sent me this peek at things to come, check out Jason Kottke’s post:

The Sony Librie.

The thing that blew me away was the Sony Librie, the first commerically available electronic ink e-book reader. Here’s a photo I took:

What you can’t see from the photo is how insanely crisp and clear the text on the “screen” is. It was book-text quality…it looked like a decal until you pushed the next button and the whole screen changed. It was *really* mind-boggling and you could instantly see how most books are going to be distributed in the very near future.

Ah, books and the future, a subject close to my heart.

I think there’s a separate post in me regarding future distribution models for books. Stay tuned, the life of the mind isn’t exactly reliable or timely. I find lately I’ve been reflecting on the book industry and where it should be going. These are fleeting moments of brilliance that have yet to make it onto paper.

Not associating myself with genius, just an interesting segway, Albert Einstein apparently felt like an underachiever.

In my case, I’m testing Newton’s theory of relative motion. A body at rest will remain at rest. I’ve noticed in my house this does not apply, “oh, are you having a nap?”

What gave it away? The pillow? The horizontal position? The closed eyes?

Posted by Monique at 05:46 PM. Filed under: Books • Technology •

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