Here I go, turn the page. On the NY Times Bits blog, Nick Bilton gleefully reports that the patent office has seen fit to award Apple a design patent on, of all things, the digital page turn used in iBooks. Bilton uses this as proof of the ridiculousness of the current patent system, as well as a reminder of the obnoxiousness of Apple’s recent patent litigation practices. But is this patent really as silly as it looks? As some people point out in the comments under Bilton’s article, the patent is narrower than Bilton makes it seem—it doesn’t cover any page turns,...

Here’s an amusing little blog post from the New York Times about reading and guilty pleasures. It seems to be saying that people feel guilty about reading modern (allegedly inferior) stuff they like instead of reading all those old hard-to-plow-through “classics” that (they feel) aren’t much fun to read. The article is kind of amusing because the way it starts, by questioning whether one genre can or should be considered inferior to another, you assume it’s going to say that modern stuff isn’t necessarily any worse than older stuff—then it takes a screeching 180-degree turn when it suggests that,...

You wouldn’t think that you would find page-flipping on tablets. But many e-reading apps have it. iBooks has a page-turn animation, which it actually lifted (along with its wooden bookshelf display) from the iPhone e-reader “Classics”. Instapaper recently added page-flipping as an option instead of scrolling. Flipboard uses its own stylized page-flip, too (from which it takes the “Flip” part of its name, come to think of it). So why do developers use it so often? Because readers seem to like it. “Pagination is obviously an artificially bolted-on construct on the iPad and iPhone,...

I came across a rather interesting pair of posts on BookRiot today. Cassandra Neace opined that there’s no point in reading “the classics” anymore, because they are essentially boring—no four-letter words or sex and violence (because those classic writers were far too couth to include any such things), and too many dead white males. (Ah, how Roger Mifflin would cringe.) Amanda Nelson wrote a longer and amusing rebuttal, pointing out that a lot of classics became classics because they pushed the boundaries of couth for their day. (Indeed, some of them, such as Huckleberry Finn, continue to be controversial...

When news broke earlier this month that the publisher Gollancz had stepped up to sponsor an all-digital third edition of the "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction," an executive hinted that it was part of a bigger, profit-minded plan to be announced soon. This week the publisher announced SF Gateway, which will launch in September with over 1,000 classic and out of print SFF novels in ebook form, with plans to offer 5,000 titles by 2014. From The Guardian: A complete list of the authors already signed up – they're negotiating with many more – is here (warning: PDF). Tanith Lee is...

The Literary Platform has a look at a new publishing project called “Booksurfers”. Booksurfers e-books consist of classic, public-domain works (such as Treasure Island or The Wizard of Oz) paired and hypertextually interlinked with a newer work based on the older one. The article goes into further detail about the ways the narrative is interwoven, and how the publishing company behind it hopes that this will get kids more interested in reading the classics. But more interesting to me is the way that this shows, once again, that there is still current value in the public domain—even for...

The publishers' long-running line of early childhood reading books, featuring characters such as the Berenstain Bears, Frog and Toad, and Splat the Cat, have been converted into digital versions with professional narration and word highlighting. The ebook editions are only avaiable through Apple and Barnes & Noble. Here's more info from their press release: HarperCollins Children's Books announced today the launch of the I CAN READ program on Apple's iBookstore and Barnes & Noble's NOOK Bookstore. I CAN READ is the first complete early reader program available digitally, with eighty titles out now and many more to come. I CAN READ...

Here’s a weird bit of news. In a patent application filed in January, 2009, Microsoft laid claim to the idea of virtual page-turning, the way iBooks does it—creating a visual facsimile of a turning page, complete with transparency to see through to the words on the back of the page as you turn it. Obviously, Microsoft originally intended to use this with its Courier tablet, which it recently axed. But could Microsoft go after Apple for infringement if this patent is granted? I find it hard to believe that the patent would stand up to challenge,...

Classics ($2.99) was a great-looking iPhone app for its day. An extension of the “appbook” concept in which programmers took public-domain books, built an app framework around them, and sold them in the app store (see my review of the appbook of A Princess of Mars from this post), it bundled a number of the most well-known public domain titles together and prettied them up for iPhone-screen reading. As an implementation of that idea, it worked all right. In fact, it looked nice enough that Apple featured it in a TV commercial—and subsequently proceeded to steal its...