If It Doesn't Have an API, It's Not Worth Having

Really good article from Roy Tennant on API's. Includes definitions and why they are so important. Read more about it here,

More on digital paper - with 23 photos

From:GizMag

“Even in this age of pervasive digital content, our research shows that consumers are very reluctant to read on laptops, phones and PDAs,” said Simon Jones, Vice President of Product Development at Plastic Logic. “We still carry around enormous amounts of paper. However, people are making less room in their lives for the weight and bulk of paper and are becoming more sensitive to the environmental impact of printing to read. We believe there is a substantial unfulfilled need that Plastic Logic can meet by making digital reading a comfortable and pleasurable experience.”

Paper book vendor AMS in bankruptcy

From "Publishers Weekly":

Advanced Marketing Services announced…that it has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware… In its bankruptcy petition, AMS reported liabilities of over $100 million and assets of more than $100 million. Its top unsecured creditor is Random House, which is owed $43.3 million. Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Hachette Book Group are all owed more than $20 million each, while HarperCollins is owed $18 million.

Study at M.I.T. for free!

MIT's OpenCourseware is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation , MIT, and generous support of the Ab Initio software company. It offers courseware in an incredibly wide range of subjects from astronautics and architecture to literature and music and much, much more.

Targeted promotions via RFID

While currently limited to those with access to prototype RFID readers and capable cell phones, the technology should soon be available via most cell phones and PDAs. The implications for libraries are obvious.

From CNN

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Stores in central Tokyo are set to beam news of special offers, menus and coupons to passers-by in a trial run of a radio-tagging system.

The Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Project, which launches in the glitzy Ginza district next month, sends shoppers information from nearby shops via a network of radio-frequency identification tags, infrared and wireless transmitters, according to the project's Web site.

Shoppers can either rent a prototype reader or get messages on their cell phones. The tags and transmitters identify a reader or phone's location and match it to information provided by shops.

RFID uses a tiny computer chip to store data, which are transmitted wirelessly by a tiny antenna to a receiver -- in this case, the reader or the phone.

At Ginza, visitors can access maps and tourist information in five languages by bringing the reader close to radio tags on street lamps, according to project official Hiroaki Hajota.

"There has been a lot of interest from Ginza's stores," Hajota said. "In the future, we hope the system will be able to target specific types of users with tailored information."

The trial, supported by the city of Tokyo and the Transport Ministry, is scheduled to run from January 21 to March 10.

The Online Books Page

The University of Pennsylvania is maintaing a page that facilitates access to thousands of books that are freely available on the internet. The Online Books Page was founded, and is edited, by John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. There is a handy RSS feed for notification of new additions.

Flexible display developer Plastic Logic lands $100M in VC

Flexible-display technology developer Plastic Logic won more than $100 million in new funding to build a manufacturing facility as investors pushed the company to shift its business model away from a licensing strategy to manufacturing its own products.

Plastic's funding is among the largest deals in European venture capital history and is a huge jump in the company's capitalization schedule, having raised a total of $42.3 million in previous funding.

The company expects to begin manufacturing display products midyear 2009, with products shipping by the end of the year.

The initial products will be standalone flexible active-matrix display units that will include connectivity hardware and that are designed to be thin, light and robust, capable of being used anywhere to provide a reading experience as close to paper as possible.

The implications for eBooks is enormous, but these devices not only allow reading, but writing, as well!

From cNet News

A mobile library on your phone

From The Times Online
LONDON Audio books are set to be revolutionised by a tiny card that can store up to five lengthy novels on a phone.

The card can be slotted into a mobile phone, dispensing with the need to carry up to six CDs for an audio version of a book. The technology, originally developed to store music, will be released this year by Nokia.

One title that will be available is the bestselling Looking Good Dead, by the British thriller writer Peter James. He said: “I think this will revolutionise storytelling . . . with this, you can wander off into the park, lie down and listen to a book.”

Nokia is introducing the technology initially with James’s German publisher, S Fischer Verlage. His publisher in Britain, Macmillan, is in talks for a British version. Annual sales of audio books have reached about £71 million in Britain and £435 million in America.

Chumby - personal wireless interactive companion

Chumby is a compact device that uses the wireless internet to fetch information from the web: music, the latest news, box scores, animations, etc. It can also exchange photos and messages and it’s always on. Chumby isn’t a product per se, it’s a feature enabler. It’s a blank canvas that you fill with whatever you want. It’s made to be hacked, modded, and what I find especially interesting - integrated into other objects. Object design is evolving at a rapid pace with new materials, rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing. The next frontier is embedded intelligence (see how RFID is evolving here) and interactivity. Chumby is a very open platform for interactivity that in my opinion object designers should look at and start to play with. The best part - it’s free if you can convince them. Information and objects are converging.

From BoingBoing

NYT 100 Notable Books of the Year

The New York Times has posted what it feels are the 100 most notable books of 2006. If you need some holiday reading, you might peruse their list.

Found on Librarian in Black

Audiobooks in French, German, Chinese and other languages

Librivox has posted quite a few titles read in languages other than English. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Their goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. They are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

Google launches patent search site

Google has added another piece of search software to its arsenal, with the launch of Google Patent Search.

The patent search site, launched as a beta on Wednesday night, is designed to sift through the approximately 7 million U.S. patents by a variety of parameters including filing date, issue date, patent number and inventor.

Thanks c/net News

Mozart Catalog Is Now Available Online

The database available at http://dme.mozarteum.at also contains more than 8,000 pages of critical commentary published since 1954, said Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the International Mozart Foundation.

The launch of the Web site this week comes as a year commemorating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth complete with thousands of concerts, opera performances and exhibitions across Austria draws to a close.

WEB 2.0 and Its Technologies for Collaborative Library Communication

RedOrbit.com has posted a very informative article by Robert Lackie on the free web-based interactive communication tools that can help librarians and other educators seamlessly access, create, organize, and disseminate information for their library, themselves, colleagues, and friends. Discussed in depth are:
• Social Collaboration
• Blogging
• RSS and Bloglines
• Social Bookmarking with del.icio.us
• Wikis and pbwiki, and more. There is also an extensive bibliography.

Thanks Librarian in Black

State of Florida launches book drive for kids

State agencies are marking the holidays with a massive book drive for the kids.

Gov. Jeb Bush is touting “A Season of Reading,” a program that encourages the donation of new and “gently used” books to mentoring programs throughout the state.

Last year, 11 state agencies gleaned 80,000 books for Florida students and families, according to a written release issued by Bush.

Coordinated by Florida Mentoring Partnership and managed by the Volunteer Florida, the program encourages state agencies to serve as drop off points for the books, which are donated to mentoring programs in the communities where the donations are made.

"In this season of giving, I encourage all Floridians to open their hearts and give the most precious gift we can give our children -- the gift of reading,” Bush said.

The program coincides with National Mentoring Month in January. The deadline for book drop offs is Jan. 19.

For more information, and drop off locations, go to www.myflorida.com or www.volunteerfloridafoundation.org.

New chip type may replace flash memory, disk drives

A group of companies led by IBM have announced a new chip technology, dubbed phase-change memory, that could someday replace flash memory and tiny hard-disk drives in portable devices. InfoWorld reports: “The companies on Monday announced the results of their latest research into the technology, which they say will do a better job of storing songs, pictures, and other data on iPods and digital cameras than current flash memory, and could someday replace disk drives. Among the advances, the companies have built a prototype device that runs 500 times faster than today’s flash memory while using half as much power to write data to a memory cell, they said.”

From iPod Lounge

Swivel - a place where curious people explore data

Swivel lets you explore data and share your insights with others. Swivel has data about politics, economics, weather, sports, business and more.
You can:

• Explore popular data or obscure data. Search for it or have fun cruising all the colorful graphs, data sets and opinions.


• Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. You might find a crazy coincidence or something more.


• Share your insights by posting a graph to your blog or emailing a link to your friends and coworkers.


• Upload the information you care about, describe it, pick a color scheme and even pick a cool photo to bring it to life.

Microsoft launches a book search service

Google Books got some competition (sort of) today as Microsoft launched Live Search Books (wtf!). Seems rather slow and only offers older, public domain stuff. Also looks remarkably like Google Books. How long has it been since Redmond had a really original idea?

BioMed Search - Biomedical Image Search Engine

Alex Ksikes just unveiled his latest project, BioMed Search, with the aim to “organize figures, images or schema found in biomedical articles.” Over 1 million illustrations have been indexed so far.

Ask.com launches AskCity local map search

Search engines are the #1 online most-used resource for local information, ahead of yellow pages and local newspaper sites, and local searches account for about 10% of all searches on major search engines. Yet local is the category with the lowest user satisfaction in search. There is this gaping need for better local search. AskCity thinks they have it.