The dichotomy between physical and electronic delivery of media doesn’t just strike the book world. As I’ve noted a few times in the past, computer games have also been moving to electronic delivery, most notably via Valve’s Steam system, but other companies such as GameStop have been trying to roll their own as well. Digital delivery of games can allow game publishers to do some interesting things. For instance, buying any Valve game box in the store includes a free Steam-based on-line version of it that players can download forever even if they lose the retail disks, Also,...

As Hurricane Irene approaches the upper east coast, property damage is of course a key concern—but Hurricane Irene is also, at least temporarily, knocking down some virtual walls—paywalls. Laura Hazard Owen reports on PaidContent that the New York Times and Newsday.com are both making hurricane coverage available to all readers for free. E-magazine service Zinio is also offering free issues of several electronic magazines to travelers stranded by the hurricane. Of course, the usefulness of these free services depends on people being able to keep their connectivity during the storm. USA Today has a guide suggesting ways for...

Sitting here in New Jersey, 40 miles due west of New York City, on a couple of acres of ground with a lot of trees and nature stuff, I've brought in my summer outdoor plants, secured the barbeque, filled the washing machine and bathtub with water, and done all sorts of other arcane things to prepare.  But I never thought about the horror of this, as pointed out by The Borowitz Reoprt: As Hurricane Irene prepared to batter the East Coast of the United States, federal disaster officials warned that Internet outages caused by the storm could force people to...

What can you do with an e-book on the iPad that you can’t do with a normal book? In some cases, you can enhance the book’s purpose. The novel Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta is a “non-linear book”, meant to be read in any order. The iPad version of it enhances this by building a random shuffle feature into the book: it flips through the pages faster than you can read them, and stops on a random one when you touch the screen. This echoes the physical nature of the book, which is a box of loose pages...

Last week, Slate had a piece by Jack Shafer that I only just got around to reading about a comparison between the print and on-line versions of the New York Times. Based on his own experiences, and on a paper recently presented at a journalism education association meeting, the article posits that newspaper readers read more news and retain it better when they read from print than when they read from on-line sources. The researchers found that the print folks "remember significantly more news stories than online news readers"; that print readers "remembered significantly more topics...

Miss out on the $99 TouchPad? The New York Post suggests that Amazon might just have the tablet for you in the offing. Citing anonymous sources, the Post says that Amazon’s forthcoming Android-powered tablet “will sell for hundreds less than the entry-point $499 iPad”. It’s not clear just how many hundreds less—it might be a $299 tablet or a $199 tablet; a $99 new tablet sounds doubtful just yet given how much of a loss HP is taking on fire-saling its TouchPads. Amazon hasn’t even gotten its Kindle down to that price point yet, let alone a tablet...

On PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports on some interesting findings from a Twitter discussion about e-book buyer behavior based on comments from book industry research organization representatives. The research reps suggest that limits on e-book sharing are limiting e-book adoption. The reps point out that consumers really like reading free e-books (about half of e-book buyers read free e-books) and expect e-book prices to stay low or drop lower. Half of all e-readers are given as gifts, but less than 1% of e-books are. Barriers to widespread e-book adoption are limits on sharing,...

Wired’s Gadget Lab blog reports on the state of digital textbooks, and despite the optimism of some e-textbook manufacturers it isn’t really good. E-textbooks aren’t making much of a dent in the textbook market because most of the time buying and reselling used textbooks is still a better deal. Even though the current generation of students are more dependent on digital technology and mobile devices than ever, most aren’t buying e-textbooks because they are pricier and more heavily restricted than paper books—locked down so students have only limited use of them, and sometimes even expiring after six months....

New Features News download: Add algorithms to automatically clean up downloaded HTML Add an option to Preferences->Look and Feel->Cover Browser to show the cover browser full screen. When showing the cover browser in a separate window, you can make it fullscreen by pressing the F11 key. Show the languages currently used at the top of the drop down list of languages When automatically computing author sort from author's name, if the name contains certain words like Inc., Company, Team, etc. use the author name as the sort string directly. The list of such words can be controlled via Preferences->Tweaks. Add...

The New York Observer reports on documentary filmmaker and web developer Steve Rosenbaum, who has decided to make an iPad app memorializing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The app will include both pictures and video, and go into detail about the original construction of the towers, the attacks that brought them down, and the construction of the 9/11 memorial and museum. Perhaps controversially, the app will only be available for the iPad. Rosenbaum feels that it’s simply the best platform on which the powerful nature of the photographs and media can be...

Scrolling’s good for long reads, but for TOCs it can often hide choices from readers Designers of digital books and magazines face an elemental question: to page or to scroll? Might as well ask: Android or iPhone? There is no single correct answer. Here, I’ll chip off a teensy portion of the tussle: some very specific use cases in which it feels like the content itself helps point to the right choice. I think vertical scrolling is good for long magazine articles or even chunks of a lengthy narrative (chapters in a book, for example). The...

Says the Roku FAQ: A “Private Channel” is a channel or application that a Roku channel developer distributes outside the Roku Channel Store. A developer may decide to create a private channel if they want to reach a specific audience (for example, a corporate audience) without making their channel available to all Roku customers. However, private channels can be added to a Roku by anyone if that channel's code is available.  In checking out the latest private codes I found one for the Internet Archive.  I added it and it works just fine. The categories you can access are...