Veronica Liesaputra presenting her PhD work on user-interfaces for eBooks.
This is a Google TechTalk from Google's YouTube channel.
An electronic book is defined as a digital book that not only captures the affordances of a physical book, but also transcends the limitations of its paper counterpart. There is much debate as to whether the use of the book metaphor is appropriate for an electronic document. - Veronica Liesaputra
Aaron Swartz has announced a demo of the Open Library Project. I really admire this idea and wish him and the team the very best of luck with it. The technology looks really good and the team includes designer Rebecca Malamud who’s work I have admired before at MappaMundi.net
At DailyLit you can subscribe to a book and get episodes sent to you by email. The books are, at the moment the usual collection of public domain material, but this seems like an idea worth reporting. I can see all sorts of problems with ISPs reporting this as spam.
The reason I ask is because I wonder if most people find that a book jacket, although and attractive thing, gets in the way when reading in bed. If I do read a hardback in bed then I usually take the jacket off and store it somewhere.
But what about reading in bed? Is it comfortable? Are there any gadgets out there? And what about e-reading?
Amongst the Christmas presents was this one: In Search of Shangri-La: The Extraordinary True Story of the Quest for the Lost Horizon by Michael McRae. I loved it to bits.
This is one of those books that sets up a train of ideas which leads to other things.
This book is about the search for a legendary paradise that has eluded explorers in remote Tibet for as long as anyone can remember. In a deep gorge between two high Himalayan mountain peaks, there was said to exist an earthly paradise, a utopia - well anyway at least a waterfall.
Geographers could not account for the fact that the river that flowed from the high Tibetan plains, could not lose so much height unless there existed a very high waterfall. Because certain areas of this deep gorge are virtually innaccesible, then it was presumed that there would be a waterfall somewhere in the innaccesible region. This book tells the story of its discovery and there are deeper mysteries:
