The Little Professor notices something odd going on with Google Books. I’m going to have to remember this, as I deal with GB quite a bit these days.
7/12/2010
3/9/2010
A Few Observations About The Nook
We got a Barnes and Noble Nook for Christmas. Here are a few thoughts about it:
1) The home button needs to be an actual button. As it is, it provides no feedback, so it is possible to press it and then the unresponsive Nook does nothing, so you press it again only to find that it now registered TWO presses.
2) The glossy borders/casing reflects light and distract from reading.
3) For my hands, the buttons could stand to be about 1/2 inch higher up on the sides of the unit.
4) You cannot zoom PDFs or resize the image, which makes many of the Google books useless. This is what Plastic Logic understands about ereaders that the other producers don’t seem to care about: there’s a (small) market for a portable PDF viewer.
5) The swipe-to-turn-page feature is too easy to make use of unintentionally.
6) The black bezel around the edge of the screen should be white so that it looks like the margin of a page. Because it is black, it creates a sense of an abrupt border on the edges of the print.
7) The screen itself is a little too reflective.
The Nook should sync with every other reader that the book is being read on. It should do this automagically.
9) Everything on the Nook needs to be more responsive.
10) “The Daily” is a good idea but is poorly executed. If it would allow for RSS feeds, it would make more sense. As it is, it is the Nook’s junk drawer, considering it is constantly filled with stuff I don’t want.
11) The Nook distinguishes between content I have loaded onto it and content I have purchased from B&N. There should be no distinction between libraries.
12) The “enter” button needs to be wider.
13) It should be easier to put the Nook in airplane mode (i.e. turning off the 3G antenna). A switch on the top would be ideal.
2/9/2010
No One Could Have Predicted
… that the music labels would screw this up, too. Apple dictated that iTunes had a strict pricing policy that was uniform across the board. This worked well. Apple did well. The music industry did well. iTunes was a hit.
But Apple didn’t want DRM on the music and the music labels decided to make variable pricing a condition of removing it. Apple stuck to its guns and the industry gave the non-DRM stuff to Amazon as a way of reducing Apple’s marketshare, since Apple’s dominance was becoming a threat to their stupidly-run industry. Apple gritted its teeth and agreed to the variable pricing and got the non-DRM music.
In short, the stupid music industry, in an effort to make more money and to hurt Apple’s iTunes marketshare, raised prices on music during a recession. The result is predictable: industry-wide, growth of digital sales was 5%—down from 11% in June.
Hey, book publishers! You see this right here? You notice how the same issue is facing you? Maybe you should do something different than it looks like you’re doing?
10/17/2009
Curiouser and curiouser
How to parse this? Does this mean that the Plastic Logic reader will be particularly suited to reading news? Does this mean that the Plastic Logic Reader has news forthcoming—such as the Barnes and Noble announcement next week?
9/17/2009
Automated Backups
I tend to back up my course spreadsheets to Google Documents whenever I remember to do it, which is sometimes weekly and sometimes, um, less. I started thinking the other day that it would be awesome if I could somehow have my Mac automagically do this. I didn’t think very hard about it, because I figured it would require Applescript and several of my coder friends to figure out how ot do it.
I forgot about Automator.
It took about 10 minutes to compose a script, which is triggered by an iCal event on Fridays at 7:00, that launches my email program, creates a new email message to Google Documents (for email/batch uploading), attaches a specific set of files, and then sends the email.
Even though Google Documents can’t, at the moment, import spreadsheets via email, the files still get placed in my Gmail inbox, which is fine for now.
How cool is this?
It’s triggered with this:
Cool.