No need to be the author as a function

Do we really need me...

If something or someone is to be important, he or it must have a function.

But what is the function of the author?

Does he read the story out to the reader?

Does he explain the ambiguous portions to the reader?

What exactly does the author do?

Basically nothing. He puts marks on paper and that's about it. He doesn't even explain what those marks mean. For example, if I wrote this in chinese, I'm sure that even it were to be about how to read chinese, the non-chinese literate would not understand. You understand? So the author, other than putting marks on paper, is really redundant.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor

Well done the paper

The biggest reason I hope newspapers survive is that they preserve the simple ceremony of morning: sipping coffee in the growing light while you riff on the fate of the world with a loved one. We give so much of ourselves to computer screens and clocks already.

I would hate to lose another tool for savoring the moment.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

On-paper printing is not dead

It's not clear that on-paper textuality has exhausted its creative possibilities.

After all, it is not yet a thousand years old. As Elizabeth Eisenstein points out, on-paper printing is not a unifying technology at all: " Concepts relating to uniformity and to diversity -- to the typical and to the unique -- are interdependent, they represent two sides of the same coin. ...

The more standardized the type, indeed, the more compelling the sense of an idiosyncratic personal self."The on-paper text has a lot in common with hypertext in that it allows for a diverse range of practices within a set of fixed conventions. Hypertext allows for a new textuality in which some conventions -- the paper page, the author -- are replaced with other, original ones. Perhaps hypertext is a new set of textual conventions and not a new textual form.

M.R. Allen

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Flexible electronic paper

Plastic Logic--a company founded to commercialize electronics built on flexible plastic substrates--demonstrated a prototype e-book reader (not yet named) and announced that it plans to ship this product in the first half of next year. You can read the press release for yourself.

Plastic Logic's prototype e-book reader(Credit: Plastic Logic Limited)
This particular gizmo is very attractive. It uses a large, flexible electronic paper display based on technology from E Ink (the same company that makes the displays for Amazon.com's Kindle and Sony's Reader), but the device overall is remarkably thin and light.
And the whole thing is somewhat flexible, so it won't break if it gets slightly bent in a backpack or briefcase. Flexible doesn't mean invulnerable, but it's a lot better than the brittle glass displays of existing e-book readers.

Check out this video from DEMOfall, in which Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta demonstrates the prototype.

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Kindle sales

Amazon's Kindle has enjoyed apparently robust popularity since it debuted last fall; the first run of the eBook reader sold out, even at the initial $399 price point, and Amazon had only limited inventory for some time.

The company later cut the unit's price to a marginally more acceptable $359, a move that must have spurred some additional sales. But how many units was Amazon actually moving? Newly-reported data suggests that Amazon's Kindle has enjoyed apparently robust popularity since it debuted last fall; the first run of the eBook reader sold out, even at the initial $399 price point, and Amazon had only limited inventory for some time. The company later cut the unit's price to a marginally more acceptable $359, a move that must have spurred some additional sales. But how many units was Amazon actually moving? Newly-reported data suggests that Kindle sales over the past nine months may have exceeded Amazon's expectations, and made the company a killing in the process.
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Exact data on Kindle sales figures has been hard to come by. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped on such topics, and although CEO Jeff Bezos did give some Kindle-related information back in July, the company has yet to break out how many readers it has sold to date. Sitting on that information may not be an option any longer; TechCrunch claims to have spoken to a source close to Amazon, with direct knowledge of the company's sales figures.
According to this unnamed source, Amazon has sold some 240,000 Kindles to date, for an estimated revenue between $86 million and $96 million dollars.
Kindle's strong sales have galvanized the eBook market, and Amazon itself is developing a new series of Kindle products. The details of the update, however, have yet to be announced, which means we don't know yet if we'll see a hardware/software refresh of the existing Kindle, a new "Kindle 2.0" hardware design, or a new, student-oriented Kindle aimed directly at the textbook market.
Priced properly, Kindle could become an overnight sensation in the education market, even at the current initial price of $359. College textbook prices can easily hit $500 or more in a single semester; a one-time fee for Kindle that lowered total book bills would be the ultimate no-brainer for a gadget-loving college freshman.


Dead tree not quite dead

As we noted in our initial review, Kindle isn't perfect, and hopefully Amazon will address some of the device's shortcomings in whatever update it releases. But even as it plows ahead with plans to mainstream and then conquer the e-book market, Amazon isn't done with dead tree yet.
Amazon, meanwhile, appears bent on increasing its own library of titles. The company on Friday bought Canadian used bookseller AbeBooks, which claims to list over 110 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books. Indeed, my own first experience of the site came years ago when a roommate discovered that he could order bizarrely obscure missionary documents from Pakistan, India, and Africa, and he proceeded to do so at great expense. His dissertation, however, was better for this new trove of data, and the rest of us were educated about what postage from the far parts of the globe looked like.

AbeBooks will remain a stand-alone operation headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia.
Already a force in used bookselling, Amazon's acquisition of a major player in the field means the company wants to solidify its hold on that market even as it adopts digital features like Search Inside the Book to hawk new books and pushes a new device in order to dominate e-books sales. Is it any wonder that book publishers simultaneously love and fear the company?

Textbooks via Ebooks for universities

With the announcement that universities in the US are looking to distribute textbooks via e-books rather than the tower of paper we were all used to, is it time for the e-book to make its way into the mainstream?

But who are the runners and riders, what does the future hold, and it is the end of the paperback as we know it? Let's quickly look at what an e-book is before we go on to see which e-books are leading the pack in the market. All the devices here use a technology called E Ink. E Ink is a type of electronic paper manufactured by E Ink Corporation.

Basically electronic ink displays are made up of millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. Each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule to become visible to the reader. This makes the surface appear white at that spot.

At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot. To form an E Ink electronic display, the ink is printed onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry. The circuitry forms a pattern of pixels that can then be controlled by a display driver. This in the real world means a number of things, but most importantly that you don't get the glare normally associated with LCD displays, and additionally battery power is only needed to change the microcapsules on the display you can achieve greater battery efficiency.

So what are the players (or should I say readers) in the market?

The Sony Reader Digital Book .

The iRex iLiad reader

The Bookeen Cybook Gen3

The Kindle

The Readius

The HP e-book reader

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Books as dead things

The Guardian,
Tuesday June 17, 2008

"Books," John Milton observed nearly 400 years ago, "are not absolutely dead things." What he would make of the new lease of life they are taking on now can only be guessed at. They are starting to migrate in earnest to electronic reading devices, and the interesting thing is that early adopters are surprised at what an agreeable experience it is. So-called "ebooks", such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony eBook and the iLiad, enable you to read on a device lighter than a paperback but with electronic ink. The ebook can be read comfortably in almost any light conditions, including on beaches. It has no need for a backlit screen that fades away at inopportune moments.

In important ways they are better than traditional books: they save paper and can be reproduced at low cost; users can increase the type size and read while eating, using a finger as a page-turner; hundreds of books can be downloaded from the web. On the downside, they are expensive, difficult to lend, easier to steal and could be destined for oblivion if formats change in the future.

More worryingly, as with so many innovations, manufacturers try to build a walled garden around their products in the hope that they will become the standard for the world. Thus Sony's impressive eBook offers the books Sony wants to sell (without internet access so far) and Kindle, which has been well received despite problems with some screens, aims to sell books that Amazon stocks. That is an extremely large library, and already ebooks account for 6% of Amazon sales of books with dual formats. Both of these ebooks are only sold in the US at the moment. The main European competitor, the iLiad, is based on open source software (built by volunteers) and has web access, but is more complicated to operate than the others. Users can download anything from the vast free library of Project Gutenberg on the web.

It would be nice to think that ebooks will avoid the format wars between the likes of Apple and Microsoft that have dogged the development of digital music players, but that seems unlikely. An ebook without a proprietary walled garden would offer the best opportunity for books, not least because it could provide an outlet not just for mainstream works but also for self-published books. This would create an online marketplace in which they could be sampled and voted on by peer groups, as digitised music is. This doesn't mean that the writing is on the wall for the traditional book. Its texture and the ease with which it can be browsed makes it almost perfect for purpose. But in future books will have to welcome a new member to the family with which they will share more similarities than differences.


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How to read on line

That's Jakob Nielsen's theory. He's a usability expert who writes an influential biweekly column on such topics as eye-tracking research, Web design errors, and banner blindness. (Links, btw, give a text more authority, making you more likely to stick around.)

Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an "information scent." We move on if there doesn't seem to be any food around.

Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)
Also, I'm probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.

Screens vs. PaperWhat about the physical process of reading on a screen? How does that compare to paper?

When you look at early research, it's fascinating to see that even in the days of green phosphorus monitors, studies found that there wasn't a huge difference in speed and comprehension between reading on-screen and reading on paper. Paper was the clear winner only when test subjects were asked to skim the text.
The studies are not definitive, however, given all the factors that can affect online reading, such as scrolling, font size, user expertise, etc. Nielsen holds that on-screen reading is 25 percent slower than reading on paper. Even so, experts agree on what you can do to make screen reading more comfortable:

Choose a default font designed for screen reading; e.g., Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia.
Rest your eyes for 10 minutes every 30 minutes.
Get a good monitor. Don't make it too bright or have it too close to your eyes.
Minimize reflections.
Skip long lines of text, which promote fatigue.
Avoid MySpace.

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What is Hypertextual.net

Since Hypertextual claims that writing in this medium demands new ways of writing and inevitably produces an amplified, extended text, adapting the book to hypertext requires not only that one add hypertextual features, such as linking sections of the book and reconfiguring the endnotes, but also that one include materials, such as reviews, seminaire's comments, or longer sections of primary materials than one could include in a print version.
Le prétexte dérobé therefore contains not only original texts but also more than nine parts of a Proem, all the reviews the book received by the time we went into production, portions of works by Jacques Derrida's answers, parodies of literary theory, and a main text ending the whole thing: La Métabole Des Grecs.


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See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Constraints of paper-print technology

The ease of cutting, copying, and otherwise manipulating texts permits different forms of hypertextual composition, ones in which the researcher's notes and original data exist in experientially closer proximity to the text than ever before.

According to Michael Heim, as electronic textuality frees writing from the constraints of paper-print technology, "vast amounts of information, including further texts, will be accessible immediately below the electronic surface of a piece of writing. . . . By connecting a small computer to a phone, a profession will be able to read `books' whose footnotes can be expanded into further `books' which in turn open out onto a vast sea of data bases systemizing all of human cognition", The manipulability of the scholarly text, which derives from the ability of computers to search databases with enormous speed, also permits full-text searches, printed and dynamic concordances, and other kinds of processing that allow scholars in the humanities to ask new kinds of questions. Moreover, as one writes, "The text in progress becomes interconnected and linked with the entire world of information".

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Paper-based book

Several essays provide information about the history and development of the book. They remark that the paper-based book, like the alphabet, was once the latest technological rage and was met with resistance, like the computer, from the establishment because books are more than delivery systems for information. They are a way of life developed over centuries. Our concepts of authors, readers, the canon of texts, and texts as intellectual property were not inevitable but were the cumulative results of part social and political choices....

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts.