- BitCoin in 2012, By The Numbers — Over the past year Bitcoin’s value when compared to the US Dollar, and most other currencies, increased steadily, though there was a large spike and subsequent dip in August. Interestingly, the current market cap is actually at a peak for 2012, exceeding the spike in August. This can be attributed to the fact that tens of thousands of Bitcoins have been introduced into the economy since August, though now at the slower rate of 25 per block.
- Man-Computer Symbiosis (JCR Licklider) — In short, it seems worthwhile to avoid argument with (other) enthusiasts for artificial intelligence by conceding dominance in the distant future of cerebration to machines alone. There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association. Fascinating to read this 1960 paper on AI and the software/hardware augmentation of human knowledge work (just as the term “knowledge worker” was coined). (via Jim Stogdill)
- Papyrus — simple online editor and publisher for ebooks.
- howdoi (github) — commandline tool to search stackoverflow and show the code that best matches your request. This is genius.
"ebook" entries
Four short links: 9 January 2013
Bitcoin Numbers, Augmenting People with Computers, EBook Creation, and Answering Your Questions
The sorry state of ebook samples, and four ways to improve them
A good ebook sample can turn a browser into a buyer.
Joe Wikert: "My gut tells me the revenue missed by not converting samples into sales is a much larger figure than the revenue lost to piracy. And yet, the publishing industry spends a small fortune every year in DRM but treats samples as an afterthought."
It's time for a unified ebook format and the end of DRM
Proprietary ebook formats and rights restrictions are holding consumers back.
The music industry has shown that you need to offer consumers a universal format and content without rights restrictions. So when will publishers pay attention?
Now available: Best of TOC 2012 anthology
The free "Best of TOC 2012" collection charts the digital evolution of publishing.
"Best of TOC 2012" explores the ideas that are shaping the content world, including: the adaptation of publishing, digital's legal issues, new tech and tools, and thoughts from the edge of publishing.
Research and restraint: Two more things to add to your digital publishing toolkit
"Breaking the Page" author Peter Meyers on the tools, tech and future of digital publishing.
Since 2009, Peter Meyers has immersed himself in the tools and companies in the digital publishing world. Here he shares what he's learned, who's doing digital publishing well, and what's surprised him.
Top Stories: November 28-December 2, 2011
Info overload vs. consumption, how big data is shaping business, and why we need the "paperless book."
This week on O'Reilly: Author Clay Johnson explained why information consumption, not overload, is what needs to be managed. Also, Alistair Croll looked at the relationship between business intelligence and big data, and Todd Sattersten made a case for the paperless book.
The paperless book
The problem for publishers is that customers don't know what a book is anymore.
The publishing world needs some new language that describes what happens and, more importantly, what is possible when the words are separated from the paper.
Top Stories: September 19-23, 2011
True data over big data, community building through data, and the choreography of digital design.
This week on O'Reilly: Alistair Croll explained why true data is more important than big data, we looked at how BuzzData is building community around datasets, and Liza Daly explained the connection between digital content and choreography.
Four short links: 7 September 2011
Waning Interest, Infrastructure Changes, eBook Stats, and Retro Chic Peripherals
- Comparing Link Attention (Bitly) — Twitter, Facebook, and direct (email/IM/etc) have remarkably similar patterns of decay of interest. (via Hilary Mason)
- Three Ages of Google — from batch, to scaling through datacenters, and finally now to techniques for real-time scaling. Of interest to everyone interested in low-latency high-throughput transactions. Datacenters have the diameter of a microsecond, yet we are still using entire stacks designed for WANs. Real-time requires low and bounded latencies and our stacks can’t provide low latency at scale. We need to fix this problem and towards this end Luiz sets out a research agenda, targeting problems that need to be solved. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- eReaders and eBooks (Luke Wroblewski) — many eye-opening facts. In 2010 Amazon sold 115 Kindle books for every 100 paperback books. 65% of eReader owners use them in bed, in fact 37% of device usage is in bed.
- VT220 on a Mac — dead sexy look. Impressive how many adapters you need to be able to hook a dingy old serial cable up to your shiny new computer.
Why an ebook still needs an index
An index in an ebook offers a level of discovery search can't touch.
Why should digital publishers invest in index creation? Because ebooks that give readers efficient ways to access what they need are ebooks that will sell.