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Two rather superb ideas for a different type of ereader….. The cast iron approach.
In a post some time ago on Nate’s always interesting blog (The Digital Reader), he posted a short thing about these two rather superb ideas for a different type of ereader which he had found on The New Read Blog, which so charmed me, I had to share them with you.
So, here they are in all their glory…………………….
Superb, aren’t they? Read full story »
New idea about how to use ebooks from Dutch publishers - the Delay App, or in good Dutch – Vertragings App :
A consortium of Dutch Publishers (Querido, Uitgeverij Athenaeum, Q and Nijgh & van Ditmar) have got together and come up with a rather ingenious idea, an App that has a store of ebooks already in it, all arranged on the amount of time it would probably take you to read them, rather than any other criteria. The idea being to give you an ebook to read that will take you about the amount of time you have to wait for something to happen, a film to start, a bus to come, a longish train journey or whatever.
Thus the ebooks that are built into this App are organised in sections, one section that should take you about 5 to 10 minutes to read, the next into a group they reckon will take you 10 to 20 minutes to read, and so on……..
Nice idea………
A nice idea I feel, and one that might well take off if properly developed.
At least one negative point though:
This first attempt in this direction suffers from an irritating drawback in my view, as I mentioned, it comes complete with a collection of ebooks already in it, but you cannot add any more ebooks, so once you have read the ebooks they build into it, you have to throw it away – as it were.
Their answer to this criticism is to announce that every quarter they will introduce a new version of this App stocked with a whole collection of different ebooks which you can then buy, and start all over again.
Miratech have had a good look at how people read with an iPad and a Newspaper and the results are quite surprising.
It seems that when we read a newspaper on a device such as an iPad, we skim and hardly bother to read any articles properly, and not surprisingly, we retain very little of the information that is there. On the other hand, when reading a newspaper (a real one, on paper), we actually read the various articles and what is more, equally unsurprisingly, we retain much more of the information in those articles.
This experiment was well set up, it seems to me, to give reliable results, to quote from their White Paper:
Our study analyzes the differences between iPad and newspaper reading patterns. We asked a representative sample of participants to read similar information from a printed newspaper, and from its iPad version. Half the participants were asked to read the iPad first and the other half were asked to read the newspaper first.
Participants in the study were already iPad users, so we avoided any bias associated with learning how to use the iPad (discovering the functions, playing with the zoom, etc.).
They were allowed to freely manipulate both the paper and iPad versions, and we monitored their behavior as they read. We used eye tracking technology to follow their gaze path. After reading, we measured how well they remembered the articles and ads.
An ereader or mobile phone that you can fold up and put in your pocket:
Human Media Lab at Canada’s Queen’s University have come up with a rather extraordinary and weird invention, a mobile device that has an E-Ink screen that is both floppy and actually functions.
Not the first floppy screen:
There have been earlier attempts to create a floppy ereader – the Skiff- which died a quiet death some time ago, but these good folk seem to have come up with something that is actually useful,and thus may actually make it into production as a sort of ereader, portable computer and mobile phone, all in one.
As its creator, Roel Vertegaal, who is also the director of the Human Media Lab puts it:
“This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper, you interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen.”
It has a 9.5-cm (3.74-inch) thin film flexible E-Ink display, underneath which is a flexible printed circuit incorporating resistive bend sensors. Those sensors allow it to be programmed to recognize different types of bending gestures, which will subsequently result in it doing things such as navigating menus, making calls, selecting songs, or any other function. A built-in Wacom tablet also allows users to draw on its screen – making it even more paper-like.
Chinagram, a wonderful interactive ebook for the iPad:
ToDo have recently launched a most intriguing interactive ebook for those who wish to understand and learn how the Chinese write…. All those thousands of rather beautiful but confusing characters.
I have had a look at it, and as one who has struggled to learn how to read and write in Chinese, I found it both useful, to the point, accurate and fun as well. full of background information about how all the various characters evolved over the roughly 4000 years that the Chinese have been writing, how they should be written (the order and direction of the brush strokes) and so on.
A fascinating and useful ebook for anyone interested in this intriguing language.
In the press release they sent me, they describe what this application actually is rather well, so here is how they describe it:
Chinagram is an iPad application that tells the story of Chinese writing, explaining its logic and showing its beauty, sign after sign.
Chinagram blends the fascinating story and aesthetics of Chinese characters with beautifully crafted graphics and a sleek, intuitive user interface.
Based on the book “Chinese Writing” by Yuan Huaqing, a renowned Chinese language professor and translator, Chinagram is not a dictionary, but an annotated history of Chinese writing that will show you how to see beyond the elegance of the characters to understand their origin and rationale. Read full story »
For the fun of it, here are some figures about eBookanoid:
Having been writing this blog now for about 15 months, I thought it might amuse my regular visitors to see some figures about how it has gone since I started out on this road.
In the beginning…… Nothing………..
Obviously to begin with, I had almost no readers, and it stayed that way for several months, but then happily you began to appear, slowly but steadily, and more and more of you became regular readers of my various musings on ereaders and related topics, some of you became friends, with whom I corresponded regularly – something that gives me a lot of pleasure still. Others have contributed articles to the blog, many of which have in their turn been read by a large number of people.
People from the most extraordinary list of countries visit this blog as well, some of the places, I have to confess I have never even heard of. In the case of some of these previously unknown countries, only one or two people have read the blog – which makes me wonder who they are, and what it was that brought them to ebookanoid. In the case of countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that they are probably soldiers of one army or another, trying to find some sanity in their world. But I am entranced at the idea of someone in a place such as Wallis and Fortuna or Yemen reading my words. Something rather wonderful about being able to contact unknown folk in such places like that.
So, to the numbers: Read full story »
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