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Rupert Murdoch in China, arguing for paid content, and greater freedom for the press. 'The challenge of fusing past and present is real for media companies, and for China. Our aim must be to enhance the lives of our customers and citizens, and yet we find ourselves in the midst of an information revolution that is both exciting and unsettling. It is a digital revolution turning traditional business models upside down … traversing geographic, industrial, and media boundaries … and creating a new source of wealth, material and social, around the world.'

Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor and author of the new book "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom" (Yale University Press), has gone even farther: his entire book is available - free - as a download from his Web site. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book electronically, with some of them adding comments and links to the online version.

While current computing practice abounds with innovations like online auctions, blogs, wikis, twitter, social networks and online social games, few if any genuinely new theories have taken root in the corresponding "top" academic journals. Those creating computing progress increasingly see these journals as unreadable, outdated and irrelevant. Yet as technology practice creates, technology theory is if anything becoming even more conforming and less relevant. We attribute this to the erroneous assumption that research rigor is excellence, a myth contradicted by the scientific method itself. Excess rigor supports the demands of appointment, grant and promotion committees, but is drying up the wells of academic inspiration. Part I of this paper chronicles the inevitable limits of what can only be called a feudal academic knowledge exchange system, with trends like exclusivity, slowness, narrowness, conservatism, self-involvement and inaccessibility. We predict an upcoming social upheaval in academic publishing as it shifts from a feudal to democratic form, from knowledge managed by the few to knowledge managed by the many. The technology trigger is socio-technical advances. The drive will be that only democratic knowledge exchange can scale up to support the breadth, speed and flexibility modern cross-disciplinary research needs. Part II suggests the sort of socio-technical design needed to bring this transformation about.

Abstract This paper argues that the evolution of e-book technology is related to the penetrating impact of networks and information technology on society. It defines the concept of e-book and describes some aspects of e-book technology. By focusing on book production processes, the paper examines what probable consequences the development of e-books and a global network economy will have for publishers and book industries. E-books, along with other electronic formats, will trigger major changes as the digital products and distribution channels will force the logic of the network economy on the book publishing industry.

"For the past five hundred years, humans have used print - the book and its various page-based cousins - to move ideas across time and space. Radio, cinema and television emerged in the last century and now, with the advent of computers, we are combining media to forge new forms of expression. For now, we use the word "book" broadly, even metaphorically, to talk about what has come before - and what might come next."

Kirk McElhearn is a freelance writer, specializing in Macs, the iPod, iTunes, digital music and more. In addition to having written or co-written a dozen books, he is a Senior Contributor to Macworld magazine, and contributes to several other web sites and magazines. He reviews classical CDs for MusicWeb and audiobooks for Audiofile, and is a translator from French to English.

This is an overview of the development of the digital research infrastructure in Arts and Humanities in Slovenia. The aim of the case study is to identify the development of the digital humanities infrastructure, to map all relevant recommendations, strategies, initiatives and key figures supporting and enabling the development of (future) policies. The main focus is on the development process itself; identifying individual initiatives, ideas, strategies, collaborations, accomplishments, references and the obstacles encountered. The paper includes a comparative component - considering developments in Slovenia within a broader EU and non‐EU context. Programme Seventh Framework Programme Specific Capacities

Mike Elgan writes about ebooks and how publishers should be embracing them and not trying to block them. He promotes the idea of an all inclusive package of ebook, hardcover and audio book.

Mike Elgan writes about ebooks and how publishers should be embracing them and not trying to block them. He promotes the idea of an all inclusive package of ebook, hardcover and audio book

This paper explores alternative forms of IBM technical documentation in the form of two case studies-one an eBook and the other a Macromedia Flash-based interactive multimedia presentation. Both projects were co-developed by the writers and graphic designers, with a mandate to create a rich, graphical approach to entice and engage users to read and understand complex technical concepts.

Saatchi and Saatchi suggest that the changes brought about by technology and the 'new' business model is merely structured to serve "the twin gods of the publishing world", namely advertisers and consumers, and as a result traditional 'media' are going to lose out.

Recently I was on an airplane reading an article in the New York Times when the woman in the seat next to me leaned over and asked what I was holding. I told her it was a Kindle, Amazon's new ebook reader. I showed her how it worked, explained e-ink, walked her through my collection of titles and subscriptions, and showed how I could look up words in the built in Oxford dictionary. Her response; "That is really cool, but I prefer the feel and smell of a real book."

"We wanted to ask a different question," said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University cognitive scientist. "What happens to people who multitasking all the time?" In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nass and Stanford psychologists Anthony Wagner and Eyal Ophir surveyed 262 students on their media consumption habits. The 19 students who multitasked the most and 22 who multitasked least then took two computer-based tests, each completed while concentrating only on the task at hand.

Interesting that. And scary. Hail the era of scatterbrains. I'm definetely one of them.

A proposed settlement between Google and book publishers and authors will give huge new advantages to students, minorities and disabled people, supporters said Thursday.

GOOGLE has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that produces the squiggly words used by websites to guard against spam and fraud. reCAPTCHA's technology would be used to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products "but also to improve books and newspaper scanning process."

Although many authors believe that their work has a greater research impact if it is freely available, studies to demonstrate that impact are few. This study looks at articles in four disciplines at varying stages of adoption of open access-philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering and mathematics-to see whether they have a greater im- pact as measured by citations in the ISI Web of Science database when their authors make them freely available on the Internet. The finding is that, across all four disciplines, freely available articles do have a greater research impact. Shedding light on this category of open access reveals that scholars in diverse disciplines are adopting open-access practices and being rewarded for it.

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about.

A new digital media company in the Web and mobile sector is going green, both in its operations and in the products and services it offers.

Vodafone is launching a cloud-based service designed for business people and consumers who are looking for a way to back up the data on their desktops, laptops and netbooks. The move is significant as Vodafone is making another move beyond the mobile market and is using cloud-based services to get there

"THE fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and utility produced popular impressions which still exist."