Bezos, after mentioning that Kindle represents 6% of Amazon book sales: “Books won’t go away just as horses won’t go away — they’re still around.”
Ouch.
Entries categorized as ‘Books’
A New Way to Help Kids Learn to Read
February 3, 2008 · Leave a Comment
LeapPads and the like have been around for a while. Put a specially configured booklet into an electronic pad. Tap a button or two with a special pen. Then let your child page through the booklet tapping on pictures and sentences to hear the story and learn the words.
Tag is different.
With Tag, the books themselves are printed on Anoto paper. The Tag pen reads tiny dots on the paper to know which book, which page and which word or picture is being tapped on. No need for a special electronic pad, just a pen and specially printed books. No need for special instructions, just tap.
How is Tag better than current solutions? Well, nothing is better than a parent sitting with the kid, but this is better than the other electronic solutions out there because it’s easier to use and less bulky. I think this will be an effective tool for teaching kids to read who are much younger than the kids who are helped by the options available previously.
Tag has another innovation. Plug the pen into your computer and the parent gets an interactive look at what their kid has been doing with the pen and how much he is learning. Nice!
Watch the video!!!
Links: LeapFrog Tag at Demo (with video), LeapFrog Tag official site, my 2004 review of the Logitech IO (also based on Anoto tech).
Categories: Books · Conferences · Family · Gadgets
Amazon Kindle – First Impressions
November 22, 2007 · 2 Comments
I bought a Kindle on Monday (see Amazon, CNet). It arrived on Tuesday. Here are my impressions.
- At $400, it is more expensive than the Sony EReader, but the Kindle has wireless (free EVDO) access to the Amazon store so you can buy books while you are away from your computer and start reading them in a few minutes.
- You can send email to your kindle with attachments. In my experience, so far, the experimental PDF conversion (10 cents per document) works really well and even keeps links.
- As expected, the electronic ink is much more relaxing to gaze at than a computer screen.
- The delay caused by refreshing the screen when you turn pages is not too much of a disruption if you are reading every word. However, it makes skimming impossible. For this reason, I don’t think I’ll be able to read my RSS feeds on the Kindle, only articles, books, etc.
- It is oddly shaped, yes, but it’s light and comfortable to hold.
- I’ve only read a portion of a book so far, but I’ll report back here when I’ve completed it. So far, it’s great.
- I haven’t used the clipping, annotating and highlighting features, yet, but I’m glad they are there.
- You can download samples of any book in the Kindle store (90,000+). This is great for reading the first chapter of books you are interested in at your leisure (not at a book store). If you choose to purchase, you can do so while reading the sample and have the full book in a couple of minutes.
- I’ve already used the browser with Wikipedia several times. I think that’s going to be a hit with a lot of people.
- I do wish that more text could fit on the screen and that the screen itself had a frontlight for reading in the dark.
Great so far…
September 4, 2007 · 1 Comment
I’m halfway through Bioshock on the PC (widescreenmod!) and William Gibson’s new book, Spook Country. Both are great so far.
I’m also really enjoying this season of Eureka!
Naked Conversations / TechCrunch Party
February 17, 2006 · Leave a Comment
I’ll be at the Naked Conversations Party tonight (hosted by Michael Arrington at his house). It should be a blast!
Shel and Robert really did a great job on the book. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable when it comes to blogging, so I was surprised to find so many examples in the book that were new to me. And the examples I was familiar with were given strong, in-depth treatment, showing me the rest of the story. I finished it last night, so I plan to put together a review this weekend.
At home, I haven’t had a lot of time to sit down, so I read half of the hardcover and had Microsoft Mary read the other half to me (using the Digital Edition). I used my laptop (booted to XP) and Adobe’s PDF Reader (with DRM) [Menu->View->Read Out Loud or CTRL-SHIFT-B]. Microsoft Mary is from the Microsoft Speech SDK. There were a few quirks (Read Out Loud doesn’t skip over urls in the footnotes and it mispronounces ‘Scoble’), but it was a pretty positive experience for my first time using text to speech so extensively.
Bruce Schneier is reading “How to Survive a Robot Uprising”
January 24, 2006 · Leave a Comment
At least two of my coworkers own this book already. It’s a funny look at the techniques used in hundreds of scifi movies. Good stuff. That’s not why I’m posting about it, though. I skimmed Bruce’s comment section and found a reference to the Daleks in Doctor Who. No context, no explanation. Very few people(in the US) are going to get it – which makes the comment even more funny to me.
“Run up a flight of stairs. Oh, hang on…”
I’ll leave it to Wikipedia to fill you in:
Due to their gliding motion Daleks were notoriously unable to tackle stairs, which made them easy to overcome under the right circumstances. An oft-copied cartoon from Punch pictured a group of Daleks at the foot of a flight of stairs with the caption, “This certainly buggers our plan to conquer the Universe”. In a scene from the serial Destiny of the Daleks, the Doctor and companions escape from Dalek pursuers by climbing into a ceiling duct. The Doctor (Tom Baker) calls down, “If you’re supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don’t you try climbing after us? Bye bye!” The Daleks generally make up for their lack of mobility with overwhelming firepower. A joke around science fiction conventions went, “Real Daleks don’t climb stairs; they level the building.”In The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) a Dalek emerges from the waters of the River Thames, indicating that they are amphibious to a degree. Remembrance of the Daleks (1988) showed that they can hover using a sort of limited antigravity — first implied in earlier serials such as The Chase (1965) and Revelation of the Daleks (1985) — but their awkward forms still limit their mobility in tight quarters. Despite this, the Daleks’ supposed inability to climb stairs is still frequently referred to for humorous effect by journalists covering the series.
The 2005 series episodes Dalek and The Parting of the Ways featured Daleks hovering and flying, the latter also showing them flying through the vacuum of space. In the Dalek episode, the Dalek said “Elevate” before hovering, in the same way it would say “Exterminate” before exterminating.
Categories: Books · Doctor Who
Naked Conversations – available now in Redwood City, CA
January 21, 2006 · 1 Comment
I’ve been pestering the brick and mortar book stores around town, asking for Shel Israel’s and Robert Scoble’s book, Naked Conversations — I’m not a patient man and I don’t want to wait until the 26th for my pre-ordered Amazon copy to arrive. Today, I stopped at the Barnes and Noble in Redwood City, CA and found out they had several copies waiting to be displayed. Snagged one.
If you are also looking for a copy tonight or tomorrow, head over there.
I’m looking forward to really digging in. One really nice ‘feature’ of this book is the online appendix – a clickable list of sites that were mentioned in the book, organized by chapter. Does anyone have an xml reading list for it?
[FYI, I started reading it as a digital e-book(pdf drm) on my Palm TX. It was slow going because the official Adobe Reader for Palm takes a few seconds to go back a page and it won't do wide-screen mode - 2 issues that really hamper comfortable reading. There is a freeware PalmOS PDF reader-PalmPDF- which is vastly superior to the official app, but it can't open DRM files.]
Adobe Acrobat Reader for the Palm OS – DRM
January 20, 2006 · Leave a Comment
OK, so my digital download at Amazon finally went through. Then, I had to figure out how to get the pdf processed, my palm ‘authorized’, and how to get the file transferred during hotsync. This was not user friendly. I almost gave up before I figured out how the process is supposed to work.
Here’s how it works:
- Download and install Adobe Reader 7.0.5 (you must use the latest version of Reader)
- Download and install Adobe Reader for PalmOS (or Pocket PC or whatever)
- Start Adobe Reader for PalmOS and choose to authorize your PDA – a hotsync will be required.
- Download your PDF.
- Run Adobe Reader 7.0.5(it should open automatically during the download).
- Reader 7 will unlock the document for your computer.
- In Reader 7, choose send to mobile device.
- Reader for PalmOS will start and will install the document on your PDA.
Now, if only the PalmOS version of Reader would use the full screen 480 x 320 screen, not just 320 x 320. Ugh.
How many DAYS does it take to receive a DIGITAL E-BOOK from Amazon?
January 17, 2006 · Leave a Comment
I purchased an ebook last night(pdf) from Amazon. Here I am 24 hours later and the ebook is still not ready for download. My order info says “Open Order — Being Processed”. I used their click-to-call help service twice today to find out why I should have to wait ANY amount of time for a digital download. So far, no luck.
Bogus.
