Mike Masnick on TechDirt links to a Slate review by Jack Shafer of an interesting-looking book: I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain are Being Creatively Disrupted, by Nick Bilton. (We’ve mentioned Bilton a few times in the past, such as when he was told he couldn’t read an e-book at a a coffeeshop, or when he got into a discussion with fellow writer George Packer about whether the Internet affects attention span.) The review, and Masnick’s review of the review, focuses on predictions of techno-apocalypse throughout history: ...

You know that “print vs. e-books” debate we’re always covering here? The New York Times has an interesting article looking at it from a novel new angle: what happens in households where one person favors print and the other prefers e-books. In looking at these little “toilet seat up or down” style disputes, the article is often rather amusing. “[My wife] talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium....

We’ve mentioned ReCAPTCHA a time or two—the security effort by Carnegie Mellon researchers that took two problems and made them solve each other: how to make a “CAPTCHA” (an automated Turing test meant to prove that a human wants to access the website rather than a spambot) that couldn’t be solved by a computer optical character recognizer, and how to digitize words in old documents that a computer’s OCR couldn’t puzzle out. By feeding these unrecognizable words to web users, paired with words the computer knew already, it both tested whether they were real people and told...

The Australian reports that the developers of the Pulse RSS reader app for the iPad were invited to address News Corp App World, a private news industry conference held two weeks ago in California. The Pulse reader, you might recall, sparked a minor controversy last month when the New York Times complained about it using the NYT’s feed while charging $3.99 for the app. The article quotes an unnamed News Limited executive making a similar complaint about paid news aggregator apps: "It's quite controversial when someone takes the RSS feed and sells the app,"...

Here’s an odd reversal. We’ve written a number of times about Apple pulling or rejecting apps from its store for fairly shaky reasons, but yesterday a story broke about Apple actually standing up for an app when the New York Times wanted it pulled down. The app in question is Pulse, an iPad RSS feed reader that has been getting good reviews, both at our sister blog Appletell and elsewhere. Steve Jobs praised it at WWDC yesterday, and even the New York Times itself gave it a glowing review. But apparently someone in the New York Times...

Because kids are adept at adopting new technology before they’re even old enough to talk, does that mean the next generation is going to grow up using that kind of technology in different ways than we do today? It’s a good question, and it’s one that I’ve seen a number of articles addressing. Most recently, this piece from Advertising Age talks about how the writer Mike Henry’s 18-month-old son is already actually using the iPhone and iPad. Not just hitting buttons at random, but actually choosing the specific apps he wants to play with. ...

The Gizmodo “4G” iPhone prototype story continues to get play in the blogosphere. Dan Gillmor posts a look at Apple’s behavior—apparently prompting a police raid on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house—and New York Times columnist David Carr’s editorial about it. Gillmor quotes Carr casting the raid as only the latest of a number of hostile actions by Apple toward journalists, then Gillmor asks the same questions he did in another column I covered a month ago: When I read that, I thought, Aha, now he’s going to address his own organization’s flagrant questions of...

Gawker’s “Valleywag” section reports on an intriguing development in the world of iPad newspaper applications. When the iPad launched, one of the first applications to be spotlighted was an early version of the New York Times iPad app. Jobs had a Times executive come up on stage and demonstrate it. But almost nobody is happy about the final version of the app that the New York Times ended up producing—“NYT Editors’ Choice”, which leaves out much of the paper’s content, including content available free on-line. One of those unhappy people, Gawker says, has been Steve Jobs, “and...

It’s been just over a year since Amazon bought Lexcycle, makers of Stanza, and as I reviewed Stanza the other day I glanced back over some of the old blog entries TeleRead writers made back then. I thought it would be interesting to look at a couple of those predictions or opinions in light of how the past year has gone. David Rothman wanted Washington to see the acquisition as a signal to investigate the e-book industry for possible monopoly practices: Washington often bungles things, but at least we can vote the bastards out...

This is an update to the earlier Amazon plays hardball to keep lower pricing option which gives a lot of details with sourcing of statements. Today, FAIR (a media-watch organization established in 1986) comments on the New Yorker article by Ken Auletta titled "Publish or Perish: Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and Save the book business?" That title will give a clue to the focus of the New Yorker Magazine's article (or maybe The New Yorker itself, which is sharing the financial plight of other publishing organizations). "Can they... CAN they? "topple the Kindle" (Keep Hope Alive?) followed by, can they...

Back in December, David Rothman speculated that a tablet might be a good next move for Google. In February, Google showed some conceptual images of what a Google tablet might look like. Now the New York Times reports that a Google tablet is imminent: Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, told friends at a recent party in Los Angeles about the new device, which would exclusively run the Android operating system. People with direct knowledge of the project — who did not want to be named because they said they were unauthorized...

Last week, we covered Cory Doctorow’s rant against the closed nature of the iPad. Lately, a number of responses have emerged to Doctorow and others who hold similar opinions: “You may not like it, but it’s progress.” Steven Johnson, author of a forthcoming book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, has an essay in the New York Times in which he considers the matter. Johnson points out the strange contradiction that, in a world where open development platforms are regarded to be the best “generative” environment for diversity and innovation, the closed...