Open Letter on Print on Demand

Official statement by Amazon.com at 31th March.

According to booktwo.org: "Yes, they’re serious, and yes, they’re bad people."

The future of the book in 1984

Nicholas Negroponte, one of the creators of MIT Media Lab, talks about the future of the book in 1984 (around the 8th minute). Then the future was the Internet, but Internet is already there for 10 years and the book keep going. How the next future of the book will look like? Maybe, the future of the book is the book itself.

"People don't read anymore", according to Steve Jobs

Via Booktwo.org

The Futures of the Book According to Penguin

"In this future everyone is a publisher, but where are the editors?"

Thanks, Janneke!

LG.Philips LCD Develops 14.3-Inch Color E-Paper Display

Via Bibliotecários Sem Fronteiras 2.0

Antipodes

The reading revolution is already happening, but not here. In Japan Half of The Top Selling Books are Written in Mobile Phones.

Via booktwo

Kindle

Amazon just released its new reader: Kindle. In the link you can watch some videos about it (scroll down for a longer one).
via booktwo.org

And also some reactions to it in the if:book.

And also an cover article in the Newsweek.

Take a seat/ Cadeiras ambulantes

Essas simpáticas (ou assustadoras?) cadeirinhas ambulantes estão em uso na Openbare Bibliotheek Eindhoven (Biblioteca Pública de Eindhoven). Quando vi pensei duas coisas:
1. Gente, não é mais fácil fazer um banco leve que dê para levar para cá e para lá?
2. A vingança das cadeiras: na hora que vc vai sentar, ela sai correndo...

Those cute (and frightening?) little chairs are in use at the Openbare Bibliotheek Eindhoven (Eindhoven Public Library). When I saw it, two things came into my mind:
1. A mundane light chair is not much easier and inexpensive?
2. The chairs' revolution: when you try to seat, they just run away!

Via Alessandro Martins

Future reading

A nice article about the reading in the digitization era in The New Yorker.

Via Print is Dead

BookGlutton

BookGlutton is a reading community that will be available to the public next month.

Via if:book


P.S.: Apparently if you register yourself in the site, after a couple of days you receive a password to use it. At least it worked for me, but I don't know if they have a limited number of passwords to give away...

Paper

Conhecida no mundo inteiro por seus pneus, a japonesa Bridgestone apresenta um "papel eletrônico" de 0,29mm de espessura. A tela flexível exibe até 4.096 cores. É a tecnologia "Quick Response Liquid Powder Display" (QR-LPD). A exibição aconteceu na sexta-feira (26), numa feira em Yohohama. (Foto: AFP)

Via Globo.com

Longtail wars: How book publishing suddenly has the upper hand with some of the biggest technology companies in the world

"... the publishing industry today is in a position rarely if ever experienced before; we suddenly have the upper hand."

By Evan Schnittman, Vice President of Business Development and Rights for the Academic and USA Divisions of Oxford University Press.

Via TeleRead

Information R/evolution

Via Booktwo.org

Bookless for a year | Sem livros por um ano

"Today is the first day of a year without buying (or reading) a printed book." Check the Alex Lee's blog.

"Hoje é o primeiro dia de um ano em que não vou comprar (ou ler) um livro impresso." Acompanhe no blog do Alex Lee.

Via Booktwo.org

The World Digital Library

"The prototype for the World Digital Library was unveiled yesterday to a group of reporters in Paris."

"O protótipo da World Digital Library foi apresentado ontem a um grupo de jornalistas em Paris."

Via Book Patrol: A Haven for Book Culture

Quick links

Gente, rapidinho:
- lista de livros mais vendidos da história na Wikipédia (confiável?) - via Alessandro Martins
- Print is Dead (via Teleread.org)
Quickly:
- list of bestsellers books in all times in Wikipedia (can you trust?) - via Alessandro Martins
- Print is Dead (via Teleread.org)

Stop Spam, Read Books

Really interesting this post from Alessandro Martins about the idea to use the CAPTCHA Technology (that one that serves to avoid spams) to help in the digitization process of old books. The post is in Portuguese, but the links that he gives not:

ReCAPTCHA
Spam weapon helps preserve books (at BBC)

Super interessante o post do Alessandro Martins sobre a idéia de usar a tecnologia CAPTCHA (aquela que serve para evitar spams) para ajudar no processo de digitalização de livros antigos.

E-books

Uma matéria interessante sobre e-books no NY Times (em inglês).

A interesting article about e-book in the NY Times.

Via fadetheory

The future of the book according to a French Publishing Group

Via TeleRead

The future of the book

Sophie é um projeto interessantíssimo do Institute for the Future of the Book:
Sophie is a very interesting project from the Institute for the Future of the Book:

Sophie's raison d'être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming. We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats. Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people.