As part of its show interviewing Steve Jobs’s biographer, CBS’s 60 Minutes took a good look at the way iPad apps can help autistic people communicate. (We covered this in June of last year.) The video segment is 13 minutes long, but for people who don’t have that much time 60 Minutes also posted the script in the form of an article. The story covers both adults and children, and shows ways that the iPad provides communication tools to let parents and teachers learn things about autistic children that they never knew before. One ten-year-old autistic child was thought...

 Yesterday we received an email from the University of Chicago Press alerting us that their free e-book of the month was a replica of the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style from 1906. TeleRead reported the news. TeleRead Writes: Of course, as with all University of Chicago Press free e-books, this book comes wrapped in Adobe Digital Editions DRM—even though, since it was originally published in 1906, this book is well within the public domain by now. (Oddly, I can’t seem to find any public domain version of it on-line, at least not in...

The Kobo honeymoon is officially over---the verdict is, the device is cute and adorable and has potential, but this potential is increasingly being compromised by niggling techie issues, some of which are user-fixable and some of which will need some firmware tweaking. So, what are the concerns? And what is my prescription for setting things right again on the good ship Kobo? 1) THE FONT SCALING ISSUE Users continue to experience frustrations with a known glitch involving some files not permitting font 'scaling'---the book will render with a teeny-tiny font, and the font size changer has no effect on it. Whatever it...

For those of us who've been around the Internet for quite a while, are you starting to feel old yet? From BBS's on a slowwww dial-up modem to the hyper-crazed, graphics-intensive, social-media world of today, it's been quite a wild ride. I remember hanging out in the computer lab on campus with rows and rows of the old IBM machines staring silently back at me, with nary a web browser on them! However, today's post isn't about me getting all teary-eyed about scratchy modems and spaghetti piles of network...

Last month, I wrote about using mobile hotspot solutions to “retrofit” 3G coverage to wifi-enabled devices such as the wifi-only iPad or third-party wifi-equipped e-book readers. It would seem like the ideal solution: not as difficult as tethering, compatible with any wifi-enabled device, and remarkably convenient to wherever a user might be. However, Kevin C. Tofel reports on GigaOm that sales of personal hotspots such as the MiFi fell 28 percent in 2009 over the previous year, according to a recent Infonetics Research Report. The report does expect sales to return in 2010 and beyond. One problem Tofel cites is that...

George Santayana said “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Certainly e-book history has been repeating—the iPhone/iPod Touch and the Kindle are standing in for the Palm PDA and the RocketBook as a new generation discovers e-books just as the early adopters did ten years ago (only a bit more successfully this time). But the history that people have been forgetting (or perhaps not knowing to begin with) is that there was a thriving electronic fiction community years before even the earliest commercial e-books were around to be adopted. Over the last four columns, I have...

This is the second in my “Paleo E-books” series looking at Internet writing communities that were producing electronic literature well before “e-books” were first popularized in the late 1990s. In this entry, I will look at the Legion of Net.Heroes (and, to a lesser extent, rec.arts.comics.creative). Like Superguy, the LNH is a shared universe centering on comic book superhero parody. However, perhaps owing to its different origin, the approach it takes is very different. The Legion of Net.Heroes The LNH had its genesis in April, 1992, in one of the free-wheeling discussions that took place on Usenet newsgroups (forums) at the height...