I’ve talked about scan-induced typo problems in e-books before. For whatever reason, a lot of publishers don’t seem to have the manpower to devote to making sure their scanned e-books properly mirror the quality of their printed books. But they could take a lesson from on-line retailer Zappos, who determined that having higher-quality reviews of products on their site led to more sales of those products. So Zappos used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system of distributed low-cost labor to examine and edit five million reviews on their site, having the Turk workers correct spelling and grammar errors they found while...

Lately I’ve been pondering reimmersing myself in Tolkien: I’ve been rereading The Hobbit in e-book form, and am considering going on to Lord of the Rings—it’s been a while. Perhaps after that I’ll watch the twelve-hour extended-length movie adaptations again, by way of getting ready for Peter Jackson’s prequel, which just recently began filming in New Zealand. Out of curiosity, I peeked at the listing for the Blu-Ray versions of the movies on Amazon, and noticed something rather interesting. It seems that the 1-star protest review has spread beyond the realm of overpriced or windowed e-books, and is...

In my last post, I quoted from a Publishing Perspectives post covering The Big Money’s “Untethered 2010: Profitable Media in the Tablet Era” conference, about how e-reader manufacturers were confident their devices still had a place in a post-iPad world. But reading further in that post, I found more interesting material. The rest of the article seems to suggest that those manufacturers, and publishers, may be living in an ivory tower—exemplified by this passage: “As long as we have a competitive marketplace, ultimately consumers will tell us what they want,” [Brian Murray of HarperCollins]...

Here’s another roundup of some of the more interesting iPad news links I’ve noticed over the last day or so. First of all, here’s a fairly unusual iPad review. Most of them have been either overwhelmingly positive, or negative because of the rights issues involved (i.e. Cory Doctorow’s). Here is a humorous negative review from Macworld Senior Contributor Ben Long who finds that most of what he needs to do are things the iPad does not do well—and most of what the iPad does well are things he does not need to. The movie...

We’ve given a great deal of coverage to the iPad lately, but another tablet device has come out at about the same time. How does the much-anticipated Fusion Garage JooJoo, nee TechCrunch CrunchPad, do? Engadget has a pretty comprehensive review, including an 8-minute video walkthrough that puts the device through its paces. The results are not encouraging: when compared to the iPad, the JooJoo consistently comes up short. It has a much shorter (as in, 2.5 hours under average use) battery life (and the device gets quite warm under load), heavier weight, screen not viewable from...

The other day, our point of contact at our parent company NAPCO contacted Paul and me and asked if we would be interested in reviewing a 16-gigabyte iPad NAPCO had received. Paul suggested I should be the one to review it, and you could have knocked me over with a feather when I learned that I would be taking delivery of an iPad early next week. Plans I plan to do a series of review posts, just as I did for the Sony PRS-700 and the Astak 5” Pocket Pro, focusing on different aspects of...

As the iPad launches, so too do the tech-maven reviews. Here’s one from the Wall Street Journal and AllThingsD’s Walter Mossberg, who makes no bones about the fact that he really likes the gadget. My verdict is that, while it has compromises and drawbacks, the iPad can indeed replace a laptop for most data communication, content consumption and even limited content creation, a lot of the time. But it all depends on how you use your computer. Mossberg found it excellent for viewing media (including reading e-books), surfing the web, and light typing...

Remember when we covered the New York Times article about Macmillan’s pricing change, with a quote from author Douglas Preston about the “sense of entitlement” present in readers who want $9.99 e-books? TechDirt has a link to an io9 article talking about the backlash Preston has experienced from those remarks. Readers reacted to being told they were “entitled” about the way one might have expected: with angry one-star reviews on his book Impact (which is being windowed by the publisher, so no e-book is available yet) and lots of angry e-mail. (Of course, given e-book readers’ reactions to...

The New York Review of Books has a jealousy inducing piece on Wikipedia, it's that well written. OK, technically it is a review of John Broughton's "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual," a book that describes how to write Wikipedia entries that last. But Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold, talks mostly about Wikipedia itself, and his own experiences with the internet phenomenon. Baker does not feel the need to attack or pre-emptively defend Wikipedia, and that---together with the appearance of books such as Broughton's---seems to signal a turning point for the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia is no longer in need of definition....

Dear patron. The book you requested from this library, an HTML-version of Old People and the Things that Pass, is now available at the Internet Archive. Please accept our apologies for our tardiness; the transcription took a little longer than expected. I made no efforts to get a correct transcription---that would have taken 20 hours more of time I don't have. Let's hope Project Gutenberg or similar pick up the ball. You will especially come across the following errors in my transcription: "scannos", missing italicization, and missing paragraph breaks. If you would like to see these corrected ASAP, your best bet...