Steve Jobs was seen attending the Academy Awards last night (his second company Pixar’s movie Up won Best Animated Feature and Best Score), and the first TV commercial for the iPad was screened twice over the course of the show. iBooks was a fairly large part of the commercial’s focus.
A decent commercial, though I couldn’t help but notice the clip from Star Trek during part of a montage of screenshots and images was in full-frame and looked rather cramped.
Speaking of the iPad, CNet has an iPad FAQ that sums up what is generally known about the device. A good summary, though not much in the way of new information.
And speaking of FAQs, here’s a story I found on Nate’s Ebook News: Educause, a thinktank dedicated to “the intelligent use of information technology” in education, has come out with the latest in a series of articles called “7 Things You Should Know About…” The subject of this article is e-book readers (PDF download).
It’s a good basic summary of e-books in education, focusing largely on their utility for holding college textbooks, and their advantages and disadvantages compared to paper books.
The Google Books settlement gets another examination in the pages of the Mercury News. The article is a good summation of the key issues of orphan works, privacy, and competition surrounding the settlement, just in case anyone here doesn’t already know what they are by now.
And in a follow-up to Saturday’s story about Ubisoft’s consumer-unfriendly DRM, BoingBoing and Slashdot are reporting that Ubisoft’s DRM authentication servers went down yesterday—and had been down for ten hours as of the time the article on The Escapist was posted. That’s a ten hour outage on a weekend, during which time no one who purchased the game legitimately and did not crack the DRM could play even a single-player game of Assassin’s Creed II.
Of course, people who pirated the game or who broke the DMCA by breaking the DRM didn’t have any such problem. What are we paying these game companies for?
