A couple of further notes about Apple’s event, due to start in just over an hour. Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac has an exclusive tip from an insider who explains that the streaming process is going to serve as a stress test for Apple’s new server farm, which will later be used to stream a version of iTunes for iOS devices. Kahney notes: Some have speculated that Apple is streaming the show to thwart livebloggers, who may have sabotaged Jobs’ iPhone 4 keynote at Apple’s WWDC event in June. Problems with the venue’s...

A number of news sites, such as Engadget, are reporting that Apple has released paired updates of iTunes 9.2.1 and iBooks 1.1.1. The iTunes update is largely a bugfix issue, according to its patch notes, but Crunchgear calls the iBooks release a “major update,” adding dictionary lookup of words and improvements to in-line images and PDF viewing. It also includes support for audio and video content in e-books. Given that a lack of dictionary lookup prompted some grumbling when iBooks first came out, the addition should please some of the app’s critics. Of course, the problem...

At about 3 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, the 16-gigabyte iPad I will be reviewing for TeleRead arrived. I unboxed it, and videotaped the unboxing below. One thing I should note is that, despite what I said in the video, it turned out afterward that the iPad did indeed have a full charge when I pulled it out of the box, so I was able to get started using it right away. I will give my full thoughts on that in another post. For now, here is the video. (At time of posting, the video was still being processed. Wait...

What’s in a name? A lot, really. Take the issue of “piracy”—most commonly used in Internet circles to refer to unauthorized distribution of other peoples’ intellectual property. Its use in that sense actually pre-dates the Internet by a considerable length of time (see video at bottom). For a long time, a debate on whether this is an appropriate use of the term has raged. Representing those who do not think the term is properly used, the Free Software Foundation has this to say: Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as...

While it is true that C-Span is not a “book”, it is a living repository of history. Over 160,000 hours of video footage of our government at work, spanning 23 years of network history. And C-Span has now made all of that footage available for free, at C-SpanVideo.org. This is every bit as valuable a resource as the Internet Archive—and searchable, too. Including on e-book related matters. For instance, searching on “Digital Rights Management” brought up a number of results, including this clip of Soft Skull Books founder and Cursor developer Richard Nash (who we covered...

Starting today, the New York Times is going to stream content from its website to 850 video screens in airport newsstands, coffee shops, and other public places in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston. 850 more screens, including some in other locations, will be added over coming months. The basic presentation will show an article on the left side of the screen and pictures and video on the right, on a 14-minute cycle, with ads, and some of the content, tailored to the location. Viewers can use cellphones to download either the...

A few iPad quick-links: Remember how McGraw-Hill’s CEO blithely leaked about his company’s involvement with the iPad last night? Insiders tell VentureBeat that as a result, any mention of his company was entirely dropped from the iPad’s launch today. If true, not a great surprise. You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don’t leak on a Steve Jobs launch presentation. And speaking of Jobs’s launch presentation, Engadget reports that you can now watch it streamed in its entirety. Granted, it has been pretty much “spoiled”...

When I was in college I collected 78 RPM phonograph records, primarily jazz records from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Either I was good at collecting, or just lucky. I found and acquired several large jazz and blues collections (a total of over 100,000 records, about 25 tons, passed through my fingers), and didn’t lose a dime in the process. I’ve long since given up massively collecting the “old 78’s”, and today have only kept a few favorites. One favorite I kept, a quite rare classic jazz recording from late 1928, is shown to the right. [note 1] My experience...