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It's a Bird, a Plane…a Hybrid Tablet/eBook







It's a Bird, a Plane…a Hybrid
Tablet/eBook

It's a Bird, a Plane…a Hybrid
Tablet/eBook
04/13/2005 07:27 PM

We hear Microsoft is privately showing off a prototype of a hybrid Tablet PC/eBook unit around the Redmond campus. And we also hear that Chairman Bill Gates might use the upcoming WinHEC show to publicly tout this kind of new mini-Tablet form factor.




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It's a Bird, a Plane…a Hybrid Tablet/eBook

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BIRD BY
BIRD


BIRD BY
BIRD
08/02/2004 03:38 PM
heronThe best thing about Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing & Life is, even when the thought of sitting down and writing is about as appealing to you as root canal work, she inspires you to want to write. That alone is worth the investment. The book is full of mostly well-established wisdom about the art of writing, but it's written intelligently and with great humour and passion. She really practices what she preaches.

She takes you through the standard rules: Write every day at the same time, always write something each day, no matter how brief, or how hard it is; break the job into manageable tasks ("take it bird by bird"); start with short assignments and "shitty first drafts" that just get everything down, and edit later; avoid perfectionism; write about what you know; use your own authentic voice and style; use index cards as reminders, phone friends and experts to get background material you need quickly and authentically, and use writing groups and trusted readers to keep you going and honest. She explains how to deal with writer's block, agents, publishers, and jealousy of other (successful but clearly inferior) writers.

What I liked best about the book were some of the humbler, lesser known rules of good writing:
  • Stories tell themselves through you, so it's critical to find means to silence the noise in your head and let them come out
  • Flawed, hopeful narrators are great voices, and points of view, from which to tell your story
  • Plot need be nothing more than the discovery of what each of your characters cares about, revealed vividly and continuously
  • Characters must show strength or courage to be sympathetic
  • Dialogue must be authentic and individual, yet concise and fast-moving
  • Good writers must be observant, reverent, and even startled by life and its lessons
  • Great stories are about great truths, things the writer cares passionately about that come out in the writing: "To be a good writer you not only have to write a great deal, but you have to care."
  • You must trust yourself and your intuition, especially with first drafts, not self-criticize and second guess every step
  • You have to give the best you have always, not save it up for the next story
  • Writers have a duty to the reader to be honest, to make things clearer, to help heal readers' "gaping wounds and dazed expressions", to soothe
The book includes an extraordinary 2-page story by the author that illustrates these and other points: It is charming, heartbreaking, full of surprises, imbued with the author's great love for two very special characters, imbued as well with a bit of wonderful, spare, dialogue, some stunning imagery and an improbable analogy. But mostly, the story moves, and in so doing it takes the reader along for the ride.

Until you can read Bird by Bird for yourself, here are two quotes by other accomplished writers about the art of writing:

"The greatest writing is done on the edge of what you know and what you don't know."
-- Beth Nielsen Chapman

"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think."
-- Edwin Schlossberg

Fishing changes set bird on bird


Fishing changes set bird on bird 02/18/2004 01:31 PM
Drops in the number of fish thrown back by fisherman forces a scavenging seabird to prey on fellow birds, scientists say.

Wizdom Announces Award of Phase II DoD
SBIR to Research Methods to Increase
Production of Focal Plane Arrays (FPAs):
Focal Plane Arrays Produced by Rockwell
Scientific are Crucial to Nation’s
Missile Defense System


Wizdom Announces Award of Phase II DoD
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Scientific are Crucial to Nation’s
Missile Defense System
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Wizdom Systems, Inc., a leading consulting and engineering services company has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research grant from the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to research process and control methods that will significantly increase the yield in the production of Focal Plane Arrays (FPA), devices crucial to the successful deployment of the nations missile defense system. The project is managed by the Air Force Research Laboratory; Space Vehicles Directorate. Wizdom is teamed with Rockwell Science Center RSC of Thousand Oaks, California, which is the end producer of the FPAs. This grant marks Wizdom’s tenth SBIR awarded by the Federal Government. [PRWEB Oct 29, 2004]

Just In Tokyo ebook


Just In Tokyo ebook 03/06/2004 01:53 AM

This week's featured content is the ebook Just In Tokyo. It's a offbeat guidebook to Tokyo written by web veteran Justin Hall and is now available for download under a Creative Commons license. First printed a few years go, it's now out of print and Justin is asking for voluntary donations if you like the downloadable book.


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Ebook column that gets it all wrong


Ebook column that gets it all wrong 07/29/2004 02:52 AM
Gizmodo has a new column called "Feature Creep," and they kicked it off with an editorial about the future of ebooks that is striking for its complete disregard for the actual marketplace experiences with ebooks. It's full of hoary chestnuts about ebooks that have been emptily mouthed for 10 years ("Call it digital paper or electronic ink, it's the future of eBooks.") and aside from the occassional iPod comparison, there's hardly a paragraph in there that couldn't have been written in 1997 -- nor one that takes note of any of the events since then (well, to be fair, there's also a lot of puffery stuck in there to promote an ebook company called Vertical that probably didn't exist in 1997, but that's beside the point).

Take DRM. The author asserts on the one hand that DRM can work, and that it won't be so invasive that it turns customers (which the author insists on calling "consumers," an odious buzzword that invokes Gibson's description in Idoru, "...a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.") off.

This despite the actual marketplace fact that all DRM becomes invasive (ask any copyright policy maker in a country that allows parallel importing how he feels about the "lightweight" region-coding DRM on DVDs that reverses the laws he was elected to enact).

This despite the actual marketplace fact that DRM is generally broken within a few days of engagement with the public, often by teenagers, grad students, or people with ready acccess to sophisticated DRM-cracking tools like Google and the sinister Shift key (for more on DRM, see my DRM talk)

But the author goes further and asserts that without DRM, there will be no market for entertainment product ever again ("If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period.") despite the fact that the software industry got bigger when it abandoned DRM, and despite the fact that no new medium has ever succeeded by appealing to the virtues of the medium before it (there're very few ideas more goofy than the idea that people will start buying ebooks just as soon as they have fewer features and more restrictions, provided that the ebooks can be played back on special-purpose devices with sharp screens). He cites Sony as proof of this ("Sony may be nuts, but they're not that nuts."), despite the fact that Sony was forced out of the walkman market by its failure to deliver the DRM-free devices that its customers demanded. Yes, Sony is that nuts.

He doesn't even touch on the marketplace experience of every published writer who's tried giving away DRM-free ebooks -- me, Lessig, Jim Munroe, the Baen authors, Orson Scott Card -- universally, the experience is that we sell more books (Lessig's latest just went into its third hardcover printing, for chrissakes). This of course echoes the experiences from elsewhere: the movie studios' box office revenues appear to be increasing as a function of the amount of movies being shared on P2P nets and the only quantitative study of music downloading and music sales concluded that the effect was usually neegligible, rarely negative, and sometimes positive.

He does, however, take time out to snidely dismiss blanket licensing schemes -- like the ones that enable radio, live performance, covers, lending, coursepacks, jukeboxes, rentals, etc etc etc all over the world -- as a kind of pipe dream ("When the visionary of all visionaries develops a model for all-you-can-eat media consumption that provides for the artists to actually eat, perhaps I'll change my mind; until then, we are what we are, and we'll have to play nice within the confines of the present system.") despite the fact that these systems have been employed to universal good effect whenever new technology makes exclusion too costly to work effectively. It's like he's totally missed the fact that trillions of dollars go right into the pockets of creators and rights-holders through these schemes.

Bizarrely, he asserts that people might buy periodicals that expire off their players in 60 days -- despite the fact that every one of us has a friend or relative with a giant stack of old computer mags, or National Geographics, or colorful Wireds, sitting on a shelf.

Really, it's as though he sat down and called an ebook startup's PR guy, then reasoned out all of his conclusions a priori, without reference to any of the activity in the field.

I believe fiercely and passionately in ebooks -- that's why I give talks like this one -- but articles like this do nothing to advance the discussion. They're echoes of the dotcom snakeoil that dominated the ebook discussion five or ten years ago, and it's a disappointment to see this kind of editorial-in-defiance-of-facts on a hip net-zine like Gizmodo. Link

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eBook Information and Resources


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http://12.108.175.91/ebookw eb/links

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Here's yet another story about misplaced digital rights management technology. A review of the new Sony Libre says that it's a great new eBook reader with hellish DRM technology that makes it mostly useless. Because someone was so afraid about business model issues, rather than looking at what customers wanted, the Libre will only let you view an eBook that you bought for 60 days -- and then it gets locked up. The reviewer describes it as "a sad business model" and notes that he feels "sorry for this terrific little device... hamstrung as it is by misguided anti-piracy efforts." At what point do companies realize that DRM turns customers off and simply opens up opportunities for competitors? There's simply no customer demand for crippled products.

Frankfurt eBook Awards


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The AdSense Secrets eBook


The AdSense Secrets eBook 03/17/2005 03:40 AM
p style=color: redThis entry was brought to you by a href=http://go.lockergnome.com/527Google AdSense/a/p p There's an a href=http://go.lockergnome.com/527AdSense eBook/a out there that speaks the plain ol' truth, although its value is underestimated. I personally would have sold it for 10x as much, but that's because I know if you read it, you'll make 100x as much with a href=http://go.lockergnome.com/527AdSense/a as you are today. I've got a few more ideas I'm kicking around, including doing an AdSense afternoon seminar up here in Seattle. I'll keep you posted. Until then, read the eBook: /p blockquote p This is a real, recent screenshot of my a href=http://go.lockergnome.com/527AdSense stats page/a. With Google's permission, I'm able to reveal how much I'm making with AdSense. But they've asked me to keep details of my CPM and CTR private, so I have blacked them out in order to comply with Google's terms of service. I'm not a renegade and I value my relationship with Google too much! /p /blockquote p And if you haven't yet signed up for Google AdSense yet, get going - a href=http://go.lockergnome.com/529sign up for Google AdSense now/a. /p

Free Ebook For Your Website


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Roger Lee is the author of three poetry books, Poems of Praise, Streams of Light and Christmas Poetry. The books are of the Christian genre, reflecting God's grace being manifested in nature. As well as, reflecting upon man's relationship with God. [PRWEB Mar 11, 2005]

Audio Ebook Project


Audio Ebook Project 06/17/2005 07:17 PM

I’m still pulling together an announcement so I don’t have a detailed write-up yet, but I wanted to note that I’m putting together the-most-incredible-offer-ever for audio ebooks for Illinois libraries (not just MLS libraries). It’s one of the other Really Big Projects I’m working on right now.

If you’re thinking about signing a contract for digital audiobooks, DON’T commit to anything until you hear this offer. If you’re dying for more info, call or email me at MLS, but I should have some info up here soon. I promise you won’t find a better deal anywhere else!


MacLifestyle launches new Panther eBook


MacLifestyle launches new Panther eBook 10/29/2003 12:10 AM
Me and the rest of the gang over at MacLifestyle are happy to report that we've launched our first title--Panther Tips & Tricks. It's an eBook which you can download for $5.95 and is targeted at the average Mac user who wants to get up to speed with Panther without having to wade through big huge books, or waste a lot of time. Hope you guys enjoy it!

Like Pixels? Check out MacDesign

New ebook focuses on AirPort networking


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TidBITS Electronic Publishing on Friday released the latest edition in its ebook series, "Take Control of Your AirPort Network." Author Glenn Fleishman gives users step-by-step instructions in the 89-page book, offering advice on buying equipment, setting up a base station, Apple's new AirTunes music streaming technology and more. The ebook costs $5.00 and is available from the TidBITS Web site.

New Clone Wars eBook: The Hive


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Ecora Sponsors Patch Management eBook


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ADV: eBOOK - Unlease the Marketing and
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The Definitive Guide to Enterprise
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04/11/2004 10:43 AM

An extremely beautiful Free Culture
eBook


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04/09/2004 04:06 PM
There is an extremely beautiful ebook version of Free Culture here. I continue to be astonished at the creativity free culture (the idea, not the book) inspires.

Sharps Shows Prototype Color eBook


Sharps Shows Prototype Color eBook 07/06/2004 10:07 AM

sharp_ebook.jpg imageNot content to let Sony be the only company to fail to bring a proper eBook to market, Sharp has shown a prototype eBook reader with a screen that is only 1mm thick -- inside the transparent plastic case that is obviously much thicker. Although they don't plan to have the technology in saleable form until 2007, they already have one major leg up on Sony (and I'm not just talking about the color screen); since eBooks have already been a major part of Sharp's Zaurus campaign, their library already has around 7000 titles, compared to Sony's meager 100 or so.

Links, and I wrestle a squid to its death, after the jump.


'iPod + iTunes Quick Tips' eBook
released


'iPod + iTunes Quick Tips' eBook
released
12/22/2004 01:51 AM
Digimi Publishing today announced the release of "iPod + iTunes Quick Tips," a new US$5 eBook packed with "easy, concise and all-around cool tips meant to make your experience with Apple's digital music duo more fun and more efficient."...

Microsoft Brings Free Ebook Promotion to
a Close


Microsoft Brings Free Ebook Promotion to
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11/20/2003 12:42 AM
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Open eBook Forum Courts Controversy Over
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Open eBook Forum Courts Controversy Over
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12/22/2003 02:57 PM
Brad Rigby writes "TeleRead's David Rothman is calling for [1, 2] the replacement of the Open eBook Forum by "an honest trade association" and a related ...

Review: Start to Finish Guide to
Becoming a Consultant ebook


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Becoming a Consultant ebook
02/10/2004 02:50 AM

New Attack on Computers - Pharming- New
ebook fights back


New Attack on Computers - Pharming- New
ebook fights back
04/05/2005 09:12 AM
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'Take Control of Buying a Mac' ebook
released


'Take Control of Buying a Mac' ebook
released
08/20/2004 08:23 AM
The latest release in the "Take Control" series of ebooks from TidBITS publisher Adam Engst is now available. In the newest ebook, 'Take Control of Buying a Mac,' Adam helps people determine which Mac best meets their needs; which add-ons are useful (and which are a waste of money); and how to choose a Macintosh vendor, including details on which provide the best service and three little-known ways to buy below retail cost. The latest ebook is available from the TidBITS Web site for US$5.

First User Review of the Sony Librie
eBook Reader


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eBook Reader
04/26/2004 07:40 AM
Dottocomu has a user review of that yummy new Sony eBook, the EBR-1000 'Librie,' but it's not all sunshine and starfish. Despite an amazing screen and comfortable weight, the buttons are unresponsive, the screen refresh makes seeing what you've typed frustrating, and the Sony DRM'd ebook system only has 400...

Sony's Electronic Paper eBook Bound For
Greatness


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Greatness
04/22/2004 12:13 PM
Sony’s Librie ebook reader launchs Saturday in Japan, but J Mark Lytle gets a sneak preview in this captivating peek at the technology Sony hopes will change how the Japanese—and eventually everyone—reads books. The Librie EBR-1000EP is Sony’s first ‘electronic paper’ technology, essentially a scaled-down PDA with a highly-readable reflective...

SpamSieve Coupon Reduces Effective Price
of Ebook to $0 (14-Jun-2004; 1.1K)


SpamSieve Coupon Reduces Effective Price
of Ebook to $0 (14-Jun-2004; 1.1K)
06/14/2004 09:07 PM

File Sharing Tips from the Newest Take
Control Ebook (09-Feb-2004; 9.6K)


File Sharing Tips from the Newest Take
Control Ebook (09-Feb-2004; 9.6K)
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Grok Description matches for It's a Bird, a Plane…a Hybrid Tablet/eBook
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It's a Bird, a Plane…a Hybrid Tablet/eBook

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