GW ePublishing

A must-read series on online privacy by the Wall Street Journal.  If you browse the web, if you write email, if you have an ISP you should know about this  

I know we've discussed in class how Google (and other entities) seems to know so much about us, but isn't it a bit naive to assume the opposite? We expose a piece of our private lives in every way: credit cards for example track where we go, where we eat, what we buy, and the like. Even if paying cash at places, we're signing up for list servs, blogs, campaigns, donating to charities that require contact information, filling out surveys. Given this, is it all that surprising that we are being "watched"? I don't think it's possible to function in today's society without exposing much of ourselves (when you want to pay cash somewhere, the bank knows when, where, what time of day you withdrew money), unless we change our names or deliver false information.

10 Crazy and Unusual Book Designs

Those were awesome, though I was a little surprised to not see Snoop Dogg's new book that can be...ahem...smoked: http://www.thedieline.com/blog/2012/4/3/rolling-words-snoop-doggs-smokable-book.html

hahaha! that's unbelievable!

How the Harvard Library is coping with disruptive change.

This is few months old, but still a worthwhile read on the state of the job market and planning for a career in publishing.

And an astonishing 91 per cent of the 20,000 people polled in the survey said they would now not bother to buy printed books if they could find a digital version.

I use my Kindle / iPad for all of my reading. Once I began using them, a strong preference for reading on them developed.

Publishers need to recognize that readers are shifting to ereading, and for this group if it's not in e-book format it doesn't exist.

Interesting article. I don't really agree with this statement: Maybe too much, said Michael Norris, a senior analyst for Simba Information. "I don't think that the U.S. market can support 50 or 60 e-readers," he said, adding that he had lost count of all the current models. The market can support it; it gives people more options, but it'll just turn into a matter of what device addresses/achieves all of the needs of the consumer. Like the model Arnie went over in class, it's like a bell curve of technological advances that we want/would like, slowly get, but that eventually ends up swamping us. We start out wanting a and b, then c, d, and e are added, which we like. By the time it hits m, n, o, and p, we're overwhelmed.

In the spirit of Halloween I share with you: "Frankenfont"

I originally saw this featured as an app for Google Chrome but Diigo wouldn't allow me to bookmark that. Here's the website for the ebook.

Breaking news about Google Books

Experimenting with new business models in epubs: "For the first time, customers can subscribe to unlimited reading of as many as 32 titles from five different publishers through one app, with one user interface, at one price."

Ursula K. LeGuin is disturbed by Google's keeping secrets about information

Barnes & Noble is doing ... something. Apparently.

Yes its called the Nook tablet. Very original.

Simple Touch = <3 Still not sold on the tablet yet...

I recently got to meet Art Spiegelman, best known for his graphic novels Maus I & II. I asked him about his opinion on digital comics and he recognized their presence but believes the best way to read comics is on paper.

Rethinking the bookstore.

Arnie, I read this this past Friday-really interesting about how insurance companies would stop sending ads to people who eat at fast food places because they would be bad insurance prospects

Like Harvey "Two-Face" Dent, a new dual-screen device has two faces to match its double identity: It promises to be an electronic book reader and a netbook at the same time."> text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Derik- are you insinuating that this new e-reader wants to kill Batman and destroy Gotham!?!