GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Amazon is announcing that a new kind of content will soon join books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs in the Kindle store. Called Kindle Singles, the 30-to-90 page e-chapbooks aim to split the difference between feature-length magazine articles and shorter books.

“Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format,” said Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti. The costs of print production, marketing and distribution have historically driven the page-counts of book monographs up and the word-counts of magazine and newspaper articles down.

Amazon said that Kindle Singles will have its own section in the Kindle store and will be priced “much less than a typical book.” Amazon will also grant authors and publishers the same royalty split for singles as on the Kindle Digital Text platform: 70% on books costing between $2.99 and $9.99.

There are print precedents for 10,000-to-30,000-word works — novellas, chapbooks, long pamphlets, extended journal articles, among others — but they’ve usually been either tied to specific genres or downright exceptions to the form. They’ve never been a central part of the publishing model in either fiction or nonfiction.

Translation Jackets for On Bullshit; Image by Princeton University Press

Kindle Singles is also unusual in calling on publishers to produce stand-alone “born-digital” works that may not ever be traditionally printed. Some publishers may use the form to sell individual sample or advance chapters of longer print books. Individual writers may benefit the most from the program, as it makes it easier for them to self-publish works that precisely for reasons of length can’t find support from traditional publishers.

Two further possibilities, particularly if other e-book retailers follow suit with similar chapbook-length offerings: digital-only publishers (or offshoot imprints) could emerge to produce works specifically for this format, or the additional revenue and marketing stream of electronic publishing could lead print publishers to produce more short-form books in print.

I wouldn’t discount this last possibility. In 2005, philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit became a surprise hardcover bestseller. Frankfurt’s “book” was a reprint of a journal article that had already been collected and published in a longer anthology. It sold over half a million copies and spawned a sequel, despite being just 67 pages long and printed in an unusually small 4″ by 6″ format.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Image from Toshiba

Today, Toshiba will announce its entry into the e-book market with Toshiba Book Place, a Windows application to both purchase and read enhanced e-books. The application will be bundled with all of Toshiba’s laptops, and will also be available as a free download from their website. The library will initially offer 6,000 e-books for purchase.

Wired.com interviewed Terry Cronin, vice president of Business Development and Channel Marketing for Toshiba America. While e-books for dedicated e-readers and other devices have been successful, he believes e-books for laptops can offer something unique for particular kinds of reading — especially those that benefit from immediate access to other media.

“It’s a device that people already have,” he said. “If you’re traveling or bringing a bag, you’re already bringing your laptop with you. You don’t need to bring another device.”

Cookbooks, children’s books, and textbooks all benefit from the greater storage space and graphics capabilities of a laptop, Cronin said. The goal a library of e-books enhanced with 3-D viewing and embedded video, audio, and online search and web browsing.

Toshiba developed the application with futurist Ray Kurzweil’s K-NFB Reading Technology, Inc., a joint venture with the National Federation for the Blind. K-NFB is working with publishers to encode the books in the XPS e-book format and add video and audio enhancements to the e-book library.

It’s not clear to me whether this will work. There are already e-book applications from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others available for Windows laptops with a much wider selection of books and portability across devices. The hope is that XPS will catch on, and emerge as a standard alongside EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and other electronic document formats. Then the store will be able to expand to support other outlets.

Toshiba Book Place [ToshibaBookPlace.com]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

We usually freak out at the idea that computer algorithms might tell us what to do. Yet we’re constantly asking them for instructions: how to contact person X, find document Y, or move from point A to point B. We just pretend that we’re in control. What if, instead, we made that submissive experience explicit, producing something unexpected — and fun?

You see, e-books may not yet have their avant-garde, but mapping apps just might. Self-described artist/architect/post-disciplinary researcher Mark Shepard built his alternative navigation iPhone app Serendipitor (currently in private beta) to inject Google Maps with the ethos of postmodern participatory art movements like Fluxus or Situationism. But when you mash-up movement with art, you get something very much like an alternate reality game.

Here’s Shepard’s description of how Serendipitor works:

Enter an origin and a destination, and the app maps a route between the two. You can increase or decrease the complexity of this route, depending how much time you have to play with. As you navigate your route, suggestions for possible actions to take at a given location appear within step-by-step directions designed to introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route. You can take photos along the way and, upon reaching your destination, send an email sharing with friends your route and the steps you took

As it happens, this dovetails with “Reality Has A Gaming Layer,” a terrific article published yesterday by game designer Kevin Slavin for O’Reilly Radar. Essentially, Slavin argues that mobile applications like Foursquare, virtual games like Second Life, simulated-reality objects like the Tamagotchi, and casual games like Farmville or Parking Wars are converging with the “big games” — essentially, games that require extensive play in the real world — that he and other designers have been working on for years.

What we’ve been creating, as we’ve taken these gadgets out of our office and living rooms and brought them with us into the world, are experiences that blend information, entertainment, and interaction. When you’re taking a photograph or looking up a map on your smartphone, you’re really waving around a video game controller. Serendipitor might be the perfect example of that.

(out of the) wayfinding with serendipitor [Serial Consign] via Nav Alang/@scrawledinwax

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

With the success of the Kindle, Nook, Sony readers, and tablets like the iPad, it seems like electronic books have finally arrived. But I think we’re actually still stuck in between two developmental phases on the way to the future.

For a long time, work on interactive books was about building either theory or prototypes. People talked about what multimedia reading might or could or should look like, and they built what were mostly one-off or low-volume projects using CD-ROMs, software applications, or the web.

Now, though, the theory and the prototypes have blended: even when designers and programmers don’t have the resources to put their ideas into production, they have the visual tools (and we have the device literacy) to make concept videos that explain clearly what we think/hope the future of reading will look like.

Here are three examples. The first (which you may have already seen) is from Microsoft, demonstrating its aborted Courier tablet project:

The second, which I think is very smartly done, is from the design consultancy firm IDEO. It details three concepts: “Nelson,” a reading application that incorporates commentary on and context for the primary text; “Coupland,” a reader with a built-in social- and sharing-network; and “Alice,” an interactive/participatory reading/gaming app where readers can “unlock” elements of a story by manipulating the device or traveling to geotagged places.

This third concept video, from Canadian new-media-publishing firm PadWorx, is for an interactive electronic version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula scheduled to ship this fall:

The breadth of approaches reflects the difference in backgrounds. There are relatively few people currently working in this space with a long history of working on interactive fiction. E-books — even future-concept e-books — assembled by traditional publishers or booksellers tend to look like a traditional publisher’s or bookseller’s idea of what a book ought to look like. Microsoft casts a wide net, but it’s fundamentally a computer software company; IDEO has futurists who work in design and advertising; PadWorx’s e-book is assembled by makers with a background in film, animation, and video game design, and it shows.

For another view of an actual (not projected/conceptual) application — one perhaps driven slightly more by a mobile app designer’s experience — look again at Stephen Fry’s wonderful, autobiographical myFry app:

I don’t think anyone knows exactly what the future of reading will look like. But I think we may finally have a handle on how we might try to see and explain it before it finally arrives.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Actor/comedian/intellectual/newspaper columnist/quiz-show host/techno-bibliophile Stephen Fry’s new autobiography The Fry Chronicles is available in several different editions: hardcover, paperback, and Kindle, naturally, but also an enhanced book in Apple’s iBooks store and most intriguingly, an interactive application called myFry for iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad.

This signals something new. The mere fact of bundling a book as an application is old hat; there was a time, after all, before the Kindle and iBooks apps, when most apps for the iPhone were books. As the video above shows, though, myFry provides both the metadata and interface necessary to read the book nonlinearly — a synthesis of the familiar (flipping through the pages, jumping to any point one likes, not just a chapter head) and the new (sorting data by content tags rather than chapter titles or page numbers; following associative rather than sequential threads).

Alas, myFry is currently not available in the US; in the UK, it costs about 8 pounds, or about $12.50. Also, it’s not currently a universal application, meaning that iPhone and iPad users would have to purchase the application separately for each device.

As for other e-book formats, the iBook version of The Fry Chronicles is organized in the familiar manner, but enhanced with video clips, mostly of the author himself, hyperlinks, and other multimedia. The Kindle e-book, like the print versions, consist of the familiar rows of text + occasional images book-readers have come to know and love for ages.

In the video below, Fry justifies his (and his publisher Penguin’s) approach to e-publishing, and articulates his vision of the future of books: “I think the point is not why I’ve done this, but really why anybody wouldn’t do it now.”

Fry’s embrace of electronic reading is significant in no small part because of the depth of his knowledge of the history of print. In 2008 he made and starred in a BBC documentary on Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press, titled The Machine That Made Us. He’s also a novelist, a journalist, and a celebrated narrator of audiobooks. There are few public figures with the kind of total media experience that he has, both as a performer and thinker.

The myFry application does have its critics. Gavin C. Pugh, a writer for NextRead and FutureBook, complains:

I like a book to look like a book. I like the text to be formatted paragraphs that are indented unless you need to show a scene-break. If they are formatted like a webpage as Penguin have chosen to do here it changes the flow, at least for me. I also like to see each page turn.

Instead each section is presented as a webpage not only in formatting but in scrolling. And it does spoil the flow. Readers tend to scan webpages but absorb books (or things that look like books). How do I know the difference? I downloaded the sample Kindle and iBook versions. I didn’t feel any connection with app but when I started reading the Kindle version my finger ended up hovering over ‘buy’ option

The Kindle version, too, can be read on any device that supports the Kindle app; Pugh appreciates the multimedia enhancements of the iBook version, but laments that it’s limited to iDevices. Chris Matthews at TeleRead adds that the myFry app “does seem a bit expensive for what you get.”

It’s no longer only print aficionados who are resisting the next generation of e-books; experienced digital readers are protesting too, in the name of price, cross-platform portability, and book-specific standards. Meanwhile, other digital readers are waiting for something new; a book designed specifically not only for digital reading but for their device, that takes advantage of all of its strengths to present an innovative reading experience.

I see one potential solution to this impasse: transmedia bundling.

By transmedia, in this instance, I mean simply that different or derivative versions of the same object exist in different media formats. In this case, it’s printed books, audiobooks, enhanced and plain-vanilla e-books, and software applications. It could also include web sites, video games, posters, licensed merchandise, and so forth.

The movie industry has been extremely savvy about bundling its transmedia products — at least after films leave the theater. You can buy a deluxe edition of a film and receive a DVD, a Blu-ray disc, a booklet, an interactive game, a digital file of the film for your computer or media player, and other accessories, for a single price, usually not significantly more than if you had purchased just the DVD.

The book publishing industry hasn’t followed their lead. Instead, every product is treated discretely, released along different production schedules. Moreover, the industry has generally assumed that every e-book sold is a print sale lost — that the few readers interested in reading a book in both a print and electronic version will gladly pay full-price for both.

Now, however, we’re at the point where iBooks, iPad, and Kindle are not offering different scans of the same book, but genuinely different products — each of which may appeal to different readers, but also to the same reader differently depending on context.

The devices — especially dedicated e-readers — have also reached the point where it’s not uncommon for users to have a personal computer, a tablet, an e-reader, a smartphone, and a print library. But there is no way, short of purchasing a book and scanning it yourself, to read the same book in even a handful of those distinct contexts without spending a fortune.

Suppose instead that Penguin offered a deluxe hardcover version of Fry’s book for $35. Or even $50. (Amazon UK is currently selling the hardcover for 9 pounds, or about $14.) With this, you would get:

• A handsome slipcover;
• A finely printed book;
• An audiobook, on either CD or mp3;
• An e-book, in the format of your choice;
• A software application, for the OS (mobile or otherwise) of your choice;
• A commemorative flag, T-shirt, poster, and/or pin.

In other words, instead of punishing your transmedia collectors, reward and embrace them. Let bibliophiles strive to outdo one another with the audacity of cinephiles. Make the release of a new book an event.

Ripping compact discs provided a natural way to enjoy music anywhere; DVDs quickly did the same for movies. Now even Blu-ray’s DRM days are dwindling. In all of these cases, the industry lagged and fretted about privacy while users found and shared solutions on their own.

That’s already beginning with books. This won’t be the end.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Photograph of Stphane Mallarm’s Un Coup de Ds, Public Domain

E-readers have tried to make reading as smooth, natural, and comfortable as possible. The ideal is for the device and text to fade away and immerse you in the imaginative experience of reading. This is a worthy goal. It’s also a profound mistake.

This is what worries Wired’s Jonah Lehrer about the future of reading. He notes that when “the act of reading seems effortless and easy… [w]e dont have to think about the words on the page.” If every act of reading becomes divorced from thinking, then the worst fears of “bookservatives” have come true, and we could have an anti-intellectual dystopia ahead of us.

Lehrer cites research by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene showing that reading works along two pathways in the brain. When we’re reading familiar words laid out in familiar sequences within familiar contexts, our brain just mainlines the data; we can read whole chunks at a time without consciously processing their component parts.

When we read something like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, on the other hand — long chunks of linguistically playful, conceptually dense, sparsely punctuated text — our brain can’t handle the information the same way. It goes back to the same pathways that we used when we first learned how to read, processing a word, phoneme, or even a letter at a time. Our brain snaps upright to attention; as Lehrer says, “[a]ll the extra work the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words wakes us up.”

I think Lehrer makes a few mistakes here. They’re subtle, but decisive. I also think, however, that he’s on to something. I’ll try to lay out both.

First, the mistakes. I think Lehrer overestimates how much the material form of the text — literally, the support — contributes to the activation of the different reading pathways in the brain. This actually deeply pains me to write down, because I firmly believe that the material forms in which we read profoundly affect how we read. As William Morris says, “you can’t have art without resistance in the material.”

But that’s not what Dehaene’s talking about. It’s when we don’t understand the words or syntax in a book that we switch to our unfamiliar-text-processing mode. Smudged ink, rough paper, the interjection of images, even bad light — or, alternatively, gilded pages, lush leather bindings, a gorgeous library — are not relevant here. We work through all of that. It’s the language that makes this part of the brain stop and think, generally not the page or screen.

Second, it’s always important to remember that there are lots of different kinds of reading, and there are no particular reasons to privilege one over the other. When we’re scanning the news or the weather (and sometimes, even reading a blog), we don’t want to be provoked by literary unfamiliarity. We want to use that informational superhighway that our brain evolved and that we have put to such good use processing text.

Reading is, as the philosophers say, a family-resemblance concept; we use the same words to describe different acts that don’t easily fall under a single definition. It’s all textual processing, but when we’re walking down a city street, watching the credits to a television show, analyzing a map, or have our head deeply buried in James Joyce, we’re doing very different things. And in most cases, we need all the cognitive leverage we can get.

Now, here’s where I think Lehrer is right: overwhelmingly, e-books and e-readers have emphasized — and maybe over-emphasized — easy reading of prose fiction. All of the rhetoric is about the pure transparency of the reading act, where the device just disappears. Well, with some kinds of reading, we don’t always want the device to disappear. Sometimes we need to use texts to do tough intellectual work. And when we do this, we usually have to stop and think about their materiality.

We care which page a quote appears on, because we need to reference it later. We need to look up words in other languages, not just English. We need displays that can preserve the careful spatial layouts of a modernist poet, rather than smashing it all together as indistinguishable, left-justified text. We need to recognize that using language as a graphic art requires more than a choice of three fonts in a half-dozen sizes. Some text is interchangable, but some of it is through-designed. And for good reason.

This is where we’ve been let down by our reading machines — in the representation of language. It isn’t the low-glare screens, or the crummy imitative page-turn animations. They’ve knocked those out of the park.

In fact, we’ve already faced this problem once. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, book production went into overdrive, while newspapers and advertising were inventing new ways to use words to jostle urban passers-by out of their stupor.

Writers wanted to find a way to borrow the visual vitality of what was thought of as ephemeral writing and put it in the service of the conceptual richness and range of subject matter that had been achieved in the nineteenth-century novel.

That’s where we get literary and artistic modernism — not only Joyce, but Mallarm, Stein, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, Dada, Futurism — the whole thing. New lines for a new mind, and new eyes with which to see them.

That’s what e-books need today. Give us the language that uses the machines, and it doesn’t matter if they try to get out of the way.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews