A while ago, in my story about Route 66 and technology shifts, I mentioned Kodak’s failure to hop on the digital camera bandwagon quickly enough. In the last week or so, the Wall Street Journal reported Kodak is on the verge of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, mainly so that it can sell off 1,100 patents through a court-supervised auction. The Journal article suggests Kodak has been having trouble finding a suitable direction over the last couple of decades: Casting about for alternatives to its lucrative but shrinking film business, Kodak toyed with chemicals, bathroom...

Taiwanese researchers have developed a form of electronic paper that can be erased and reused up to 260 times. Not the same kind of e-paper as current e-book readers use, this is paper that can be printed on a thermal printer, then erased by plugging it into electrical current. "In many cases, such as transportation tickets or ID badges, it will save you from printing the same thing 259 times. In terms of environmental production, this is very meaningful." An A4-sized piece of this paper costs approximately $2. Its developers hope to have...

We've featured several stories about the web-connected print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine (EBM), which can access millions of digital books and create print versions in minutes. Most of those stories, however, are light on actual user reviews, so I was happy to stumble across this detailed summary of "the good, the bad, and the sexy" qualities of the EBM from librarian Rick Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen. His library at the University of Utah has had an EBM for two years now, and he's put together an insightful list of what works and what still needs work. You should read the full...

The Scholarly Kitchen has a well thought out article by Kent Anderson with this title today.  I recommend reading the whole thing - he makes a lot of sense.  Here is the beginning and the end: While in many ways I celebrate the introduction of e-books — for instance, they don’t take up space after I’m done reading them, I can buy them whenever and wherever I like, they’ve allowed a new breed of authors to succeed, and they tend to be cheaper than paper books — there is something deep down that makes me sad about the decline of paper books. ... So what is...

English teachers and other grammarians have long complained about the prevalence of texting abbreviations causing a corruption in the grammar of our youth. But I think there may be a more pressing new-media threat to proper grammar: desktop publishing. Think about it. In the old days, when you wanted to put a “No admittance” or “Authorized personnel only” sign up, you had to pay a fairly large sum of money to have it fabricated. When you were paying that much money, and getting a permanent artifact in return, you (and the artifact makers) would make damned sure that everything...

From the press release: Interquest, a leading market and technology research and consulting firm serving the digital printing and publishing industry, announces Lulu.com founder and CEO Bob Young will headline its annual educational forum on trends and opportunities in digital book manufacturing. According to Interquest president Gilles Biscos, "Self-publishing is one of many important trends digital printing has enabled in book publishing, so we are excited to have Bob share his unique insights and experiences at Lulu with our attendees. We've also assembled a stellar lineup of...

From the Tablet: When type designer Scott-Martin Kosofsky set out to create a new digital typeface of Hebrew characters, he and type legend Matthew Carter reached far back into history. The result is Le Bé, and it’s based on one of the first Hebrew movable types, a famously beautiful typeface—Kosofsky calls it exuberant and confident—that first appeared in 1569 in the Plantin Polyglot Bible. Letters lost and found from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo. Thanks to a tweet from @R_Nash...

eBookNewser reports that children’s author Mercer Mayer is going to be publishing books through e-publisher FastPencil in 2011. He will be publishing nine titles in 2011, and will be creating new character franchises exclusive to FastPencil in addition to the ones he already has. On ZDNet, James Kendrick has an interesting post in which he puts forward the theory that tablet computers are “impulse purchases”—things that people decide to buy because they look cool rather than out of any specific need for them. As such, he points out, they have to be priced low enough that the...

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)—best known as the organization that forced the World Wrestling Federation to change its name to World Wrestling Entertainment—has come up with a clever idea to end paper wasting through accidental or unnecessary printing: a PDF file format that can’t be printed out. The WWF format is a PDF that cannot be printed out. It’s a simple way to avoid unnecessary printing. So here’s your chance to save trees and help the environment. Decide for yourself which documents don't need printing out – then simply save them as WWF. ...

In an era of electronic publishing, it’s kind of refreshing to know that minimalist paper publishing is alive as well. And by minimalist, I mean minimalist. On The Literary Platform, Tony White posts about “Piece of Paper Press”, a very small publisher he started back in 1994. PoPP’s output thus far has consisted of 25 hand-made print-runs of 150 copies each. Each copy consists of one double-side-printed sheet of A4 paper, folded three times, stapled, and trimmed to make a 16-page booklet. White writes: Each edition costs as much or as little to print...

Within the last 60 days there has been a bevy of announcements of new ereading devices. Amazon announced what is popularly called the Kindle 3 and Sony has announced 3 new models — the 350, 650, and 950. How far behind other makers will be is hard to tell, but the upcoming holiday season should be a good one for device buyers. So the question is this: Is this the time to take the plunge and buy a dedicated ereading device if you don’t already own one? The companion question, of course, is if you own one that is more than...

Tim Carmody, late of Snarkmarket, has taken a new posting as media and tech writer at The Atlantic, and has kicked things off with an interesting article looking at ten “reading revolutions” that pre-dated e-books—major or minor events that changed the way people read or wrote, going all the way back to the dawn of recorded history (in fact, one of those revolutions is the invention of the alphabet that was used to record history). (Also worth seeing are the annotations to the photos that illustrate the article, posted to Snarkmarket.) The invention of the printing press receives...