Here in Alexandria, Virginia, of all places, we’re expecting a little snow this weekend. But Carly can top that one. In the mid-1970s when my wife was living amid the cacti in southern Arizona, a touch of the white stuff fell there around the same time of year.
The e-book world is even more bizarre than Planet Earth, of course, being built around the Tower of eBabel, and here’s something to cheer us up a little in that regard—PDFRead, which is supposed to offer PDF conversions for the Sony Reader and the Librie, the Rocket eBook / REB 1100, and eBookWise and Gemstar machines. Check out some related MobileRead postings. Here’s the download page on SourceForge. In other news:
- Bye-Bye PDF: The New Coming e-Book Revolution is an interview with Italian Web entrepreneur Antonio Tombolini, and generally it covers familiar territory. I just wish he were more sensitive to eBabel concerns. “PDF is more than fine, but it has to be optimized for the display sizes of these new ebook readers. Since these new ebook readers read every possible format out there: PDF, Mobipocket, HTML… it’s all about taking into consideration the size of the display, so it is not a problem of formats.” Ugh, tell that to David Haskin. (Thanks, Cliff.)
- Here’s info on the OCR software that Google is developing.
- Oregon’s Jackson County is shutting down 15 libraries—victims of a reduction in timber-land payments to the county. E-books would not be replacements for p-libraries, but I wonder if they might be a temporary solution. Nice going, Washington; we love your priorities. (Sarcasm alert.) Time for D.C. to be more generous to libraries directly?
- In a New York Times column headlined Spinning Into Oblivion—definitely a must-read for p-bookers—two online music executives tell how the big music companies unwittingly killed the CD business. Among their sins: too much cooperation with the big-box stores at the expense of small guys.
- OLPC might be rethinking its counterproductive policy of bundling in the constructivist educational philosophy with the $100 laptop, says Wayan Vota, the mastermind behind the decidedly unofficial OLPC News. He says that the OLPC site “now has a bland, pro-general education tag line.” May his hunch be correct! Constuctivism has many virtues, but let it compete honestly with other approaches. For now, the OLPC site still says that the XO machine “embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital.”
- MediaBisto has an item on the e-free/p-paid model, as well as a follow-up.
- And speaking of biz models, Sam Zell, who won bidding for the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Trib, the LA Times and Newsday, among other properties, hates the model of Google News and other search engines. “If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” For those who care, I stole the just-offered content directly from the Washington Post, which, via its laudable “Who’s blogging?” feature, may repay the compliment. Funny. Zell spoke just when Google was settling a lawsuit from AFP. (Disclosure: I own a very small slice of Google stock for retirement purposes.)
- On the Post opinion page, in an item I found via the newspaper’s own Google-powered search engine after seeing it in the Mobile Edition, Georgetown law Professor David Cole tells how he improved learning by banishing laptops from his classroom. “…I conducted an anonymous survey of my students after about six weeks—by computer, of course. The results were striking. About 80 percent reported that they are more engaged in class discussion when they are laptop-free. Seventy percent said that, on balance, they liked the no-laptop policy. And perhaps most surprising, 95 percent admitted that they use their laptops in class for ‘purposes other than taking notes, such as surfing the Web, checking e-mail, instant messaging and the like.’ Ninety-eight percent reported seeing fellow students do the same.” Mind you, via blogs and forums and the rest, laptops can contribute to learning, but Cole has a point. Hello, OLPC?
- A Sony Reader review appears in the Daily Gadget. Verdict: “I came away with a favorable impression of the technology, but utter disappointment in the device itself.”
Note that PDFRead tool is only creating page *images*, not extracting the text. In the case of the Sony Reader, this will produce a usable result but in an ideal result. While it is technically possible to do a PDF text-to-text-based Reader book, it is challenging and will usually require some human intervention. Also, Sony does not appear to be making the Reader’s input format (BBeB) specs available in the U.S. market, although they did make them available in Japan for their earlier LIbrie product (as far as I know, the input specs are the same for both Librie and Reader).
Good points, of course, Eliot. And of course, as I myself see it, this is yet another argument for the S word—standards. While PDF to HTML conversion, etc., is possible, this is far from an optimal way to go. Thanks. David
“On the Post opinion page, in an item I found via the newspaper’s own Google-powered search engine after seeing it in the Mobile Edition, Georgetown law Professor David Cole tells how he improved learning by banishing laptops from his classroom. “…I conducted an anonymous survey of my students after about six weeks—by computer, of course. The results were striking. About 80 percent reported that they are more engaged in class discussion when they are laptop-free. Seventy percent said that, on balance, they liked the no-laptop policy. And perhaps most surprising, 95 percent admitted that they use their laptops in class for ‘purposes other than taking notes, such as surfing the Web, checking e-mail, instant messaging and the like.’ Ninety-eight percent reported seeing fellow students do the same.” Mind you, via blogs and forums and the rest, laptops can contribute to learning, but Cole has a point. Hello, OLPC?”
Umm…maybe.
However, from personal experience a lot of lecturers vastly overestimate both a) their lecturing capabilities (i.e., they’re boring as hell) and b) their accuracy. I can’t count the number of times I have IMed a friend sitting four rows away with a link that demonstrates what the lecturer just said is complete BS.
And, at least from your excerpt, there is no evidence that the students actually learned more — just that they paid more attention to the lecturer. Believe me, the two are not the same thing.
Well, the 70 percent pro-ban figure is pretty impressive. That said, it might be very entertaining for someone to do a blog where students could post the as-it-happened impressions from classes that still allowed laptops. Ideally there’d be surreptitious videos and audios, too–so we could see just what from the instructor elicited such fond reactions as “BS!” (Fantasy warning.) – David
David, I don’t get your point. Speaking about the iLiad, I know for sure they are fully devoted to implement the more viewers for the more formats available to the reader. Not the same for Sony Reader, as it seems, but you know iTunes-EMI etc., these are really fast-changing times! 🙂
Nice hearing from you, Antonio.
I quoted you: “PDF is more than fine, but it has to be optimized for the display sizes of these new ebook readers.”
Actually PDF isn’t so great as an e-book-reading format. It’s device-related, whereas it’s better if the same file can be used on a variety of devices—a powerful argument for reflowable formats, so that your cell phone can display the same file as your iLiad or desktop. You’ve more or less said the same thing in more polite language and without mentioning XML-based reflowable alternatives such as the IDPF standard or OpenReader. Guess which is one of the companies behind the IDPF standard? Adobe. It recognizes the limitations of PDF for reading. While you can use tags to make PDF display better on PDAs, etc., it’s extra trouble. Hence you normally to have to bother with side-to-side scrolling, which a reflowable format will eliminate.
As for the people at iRex, maker of the iLiad, yes, they are showing much more interest in offering different format choices than is Sony, which only grudgingly included RFT, etc.
Thanks,
David