I’m doing a little informal survey. I’d like to know what you think are the three most important books about the web, the digital, and its cultural implications. These could be books about technology, about sociology, about philosophy; but generally books that have helped, and will continue to help us navigate the future as it [...]
Ever since Book Oven shifted focus in November 2009 to Bite-Size Edits, I have been wanting to write about one of the major reasons for the shift: my realization that:
a) the world needs an open book-publishing platform
b) rather than building from scratch at Book Oven, we should have started with Wordpress, and built atop it.
I [...]
I just posted this to Twitter, but I think it might be important enough to commit in the hard stone of a blog. And the thought is the following:
The distinction between “the internet” & “books” is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.
When I first started closely following the big changes in the publishing industry, James Bridle’s blog BookTwo was one of my first stops. And since then I’ve continued to watch with great appreciation as James has pushed and poked at “publishing.” The passion that drives his endeavours – passion for books, for words, for writing, [...]
We’re starting a new feature here on Book Oven, a Friday interview series, every two weeks. We’ll be talking to people who are doing interesting things in the bookish space. Our first interviewee is Liza Daly, of ThreePress Consulting, and the woman who knows all about ePub. Liza, along with Keith Fahlgren, recently launched the [...]
A recent study, done by Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, estimates that the average American consumes about 36,000 words of text per day, during leisure hours. That number includes print, email, the web, and text messaging. That’s a lot of text. At that rate the average American could read Moby Dick every week.
The question [...]
There have been a host of complaints about the iPad – it doesn’t do this, it doesn’t have that, why can’t it, I wish it would, it’s closed … Even Hitler was disappointed.
But the iPad represents a fundamental shift in the metaphors and language of “computing.” Or rather it extends that shift that was tested [...]
I can’t recall where I found this, but it’s very very cool:
Intense day of discussion today about truly making a web of books, at the Internet Archive-sponsored event, Making Books Apparent … which is also the launch of the BookServer:
The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model [...]
On the most recent Media Hacks, Mitch asked, “what is a book?” We had one of those semantic debates: a book is pages with text on them, bound together, vs. a book is the stuff in those pages, displayed however you like, and maybe much more besides (see Enhanced Editions, for instance).
As a recently-published book [...]
