Rupert Murdoch spreads his political agenda into nearly every living room in America by buying up TV stations and other media across the country. In city after city, StopBigMedia is organizing a grassroots campaign against Murdoch's takeover.
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he Audio Bone is really weird - it's a pair of bone conduction headphones. You don't actually put them over your ears - you put them on your upper jawbone right in front of your ear, and they transmit music through your skull. Bone conduction typically hasn't delivered very good sound quality, but these headphones sounded pretty decent, though they felt quite odd - my whole head was vibrating!
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When we reached passport control, we were told ’No books allowed - we can dispose for you - just pop them into this rubbish bag.’ We had the time, so we rushed back to the post office and posted them back to ourselves at home.
We moaned a lot about this and felt lost without a book for duration of our journey. I wondered what security risk a book might be. And just recently I remembered that The Book is a potential hiding place and has been used in many contexts as a place of concealment.
In Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love, the villain hides a gun in a hollowed out copy of War and Peace. In the film Shawshank Redemption, a character hides a useful escape tool in a copy of The Bible. Research should find me some more examples.
In trawling the web I noticed that a book could serve as a useful iPod case and if you need to know how to hollow out a book to hide your jewellery etc then you only need to visit how2dostuff
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Flipping Pages
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I have seen recently a demo of the British Library ‘Turning Pages’ system for displaying books. Go to their web site and take a look here. There seems to be this trend for making the sense of turning the page of an electronic book as realistic as possible and I thought I would take a look round and review the scene.
furthermore...
Back in 1996 when the ‘Lulu’ CD-ROM by Romain Victor-Pujebet was published by Hachette (and in the UK by Wayland Multimedia), the idea that a CD-ROM could ‘look’ like a book was very rare. Since then all sorts of developments have led us to this state of the art display at the British Library. Octavo have devoted their whole business to electronic publishing of rare books and beautiful things they are! They are published on CDROM as Acrobat PDFs. You can interact with several examples on their web site, but the pages don’t flip! Most ‘ebooks’ don’t flip. The reason being, that this little detail of animation adds significantly to the bandwidth required to display. It also means that bespoke software needs to be used in the authoring and display of the work. That being said; take a look at Zinio. They are an electronic publisher of journals. There are some free ones if you want to try it out but you need the special player or reader available from the web site. The interesting thing about this page flipping product is that it seems to be a kind of PDF hybrid format. The player ‘flips’ the pages in 3D and also has a dynamic ‘zoom’ feature.
There are other ‘flip players’ on the market. Flipviewer seems to be a clever looking piece of software and even makes the sound of a page turning, however, it seems to be PC Windows only. Why make an eBook look (and feel, and sound) like a real book? Maybe the lack of success in the eBook market has tempted publishers and developers to give users that familiar feeling when using an eBook. However impressive the British Library ‘Turning Pages’ pieces are, the most successful component of this is the ‘magnifying’ panel, which adds much more value than the page turning simulation.
These page turning systems make it less easy for small scale publishing because proprietry software makes it prohibitively expensive and technically complex. The British Library system uses Macromedia Director as the authoring tool.
Posted by Chris Jennings on 08 Dec around 5pm •
Tags: Ideas •
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Dec 12 2007 05:55 am | Filled under photography christopher suarez lightining photos Lightning Photography
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