Group items tagged

When it comes to digitizing books and offering readers and writers a business model, Google has planted the wheat, harvested it, threshed it, ground it, and baked it. Now Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo think they each deserve a big slice of bread. They are taking the hen to court in order to get it. The effort, led by attorney Gary Reback, to challenge Google's deals with writers and publishers for digitizing "orphaned works" that are copyrighted but no longer published is less lawsuit than business by another name.

So hereby I want to announce that the code which was/is known as Swiss Bundestrojan/Superintendent trojan variant will be free, open, available and accessible to anyone who respects the GPL, and who is interested in the structure and construction of trojan horses and who is also curious what the root of all the rumours was.

# Free and open source software under GPLv3 # Multi-platform: runs on Windows, Linux and Mac # Full Unicode support: everything you see in Sigil is in UTF-16 # Full EPUB spec support # WYSIWYG editing # Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View ...

I'm working on a story to actually assess the state of development among big-name textbook publishers and will have more soon on that. For right now, though, it's quite clear that we have a very long ways to go. While a lack of content is a major issue, perhaps a bigger issue is the lack of standards via which the content can be disseminated. Obviously, DRM is a serious problem for textbooks. Copyright aside, though, there are currently around 30 formats in which e-books are published. If you're Pearson, into which basket will you be throwing all of your eggs? Frankly, there is only one that I see that makes a lot of sense right now. EPUB, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, is open, XML-based, and can grow as our needs increase. Even this format, though, needs traction with major publishers.

So I buy a Kindle book for my Kindle 2. It downloads to my machine. I open up the book -- it has no relation (except the relation of "not") to the book I ordered. Three emails, 4 days later, Amazon has still not responded to the problem. I wonder how they begin to discover/fix such a problem.

The Swiss government agency for Building and Logistics (BBL) has signed a software licence agreement with Microsoft worth 42 million CHF (about 27,8 million euro) without a request for tender, the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported on Tuesday.

In preparation for WIPO's initiative on Exceptions & Limitations to Copyright, the US Copyright Office is currently soliciting comments on the topic of "facilitating access to copyrighted works for the blind or persons with other disabilities". Written comments are due next week (April 21st, 2009), and there will be a public meeting in Washington on May 18th. EFF will be sending our own submission, as will many other IP and disability groups. But if you've worked on software or hardware to overcome your own visual or other disabilities, or co-operated informally (perhaps in an open source project) to provide wider access to content for users with disabilities, or have dealt with a publisher regarding the accessibility of texts, we'd like to encourage you to send the copyright office your own stories - and cc: us at accessibility@eff.org.

Amazon's Kindle, the first eBook reader that has really started to catch on with the public, deals almost exclusively with eBooks that have DRM. According to Ian Fried, the vice president of Amazon Kindle, customers don't seem to mind: "We've had very few if any customer responses that the choice we made with DRM was a problem." But DRM could become a problem if the Kindle goes bust - then all those people who bought Kindle eBooks with DRM will have no way to read them because no other device can open the files. Beyond that, not everyone agrees that DRM is a good business strategy. Publishing consultant Michael Shatzkin says it's tough to make the case that file-sharing reduces sales. He cites science fiction writer Cory Doctorow who, he says, "does the best he can to give away as much of his content as possible." And by giving it away, Shatzkin says, Doctorow's sales have skyrocketed.

This course provides an overview of the historical and modern context and operation of free and open source software (FOSS) communities and associated software projects. The practical objective of the course is to teach students how they can begin to participate in a FOSS project in order to contribute to and improve aspects of the software that they feel are wrong. Students will learn some important FOSS tools and techniques for contributing to projects and how to set up their own FOSS projects.

Good series of tertiary lectures.

"Fry talking about monopolies in the tech world and how he feels about being one of the most influential names in tech." I love his reflection at the end about the contribution of technology towards the human spirit, open source software etc.

By not supporting medium-sized deployments of, say 30 to 5000 laptops (a typical order from a school or an educational authority) the OLPC Foundation betrays an instinct for paternalism. We have too much paternalism in education already, and the technologies in Sugar were designed to give children democratic access to education.

CoSN.org site with news feeds and guest bloggers.

Of course, MovieMaker is NOT Open Source, but that's precisely the point...

on downloading MovieMaker (2003)

Scribus Templates

If you are considering a transition from M$ Publisher to Scribus then templates will be a question mark. I have not tried these templates.

Some programs are Windoze only but a few nice tools are mentioned here.