Amazon now has a Print on Demand service. The pricing is a bit more complex than the competition (namely, Lulu), but everything gets an ISBN and you can publish into Amazon. Which is pretty huge. I don’t think this is a Lulu killer, but it’ll definitely be competition, which hopefully will spur both companies to improve.
Conversely, the PC software for the Sony Reader absolutely sucks. It looks remarkably like someone was hired to clone iTunes, and did so without ever understanding the ways in which iTunes is good and bad. You can’t drag content directly onto the Reader; you have to copy it into the Library, then copy it from there to the Reader. The interface is custom and non-standard — the menus don’t look like Windows menus, and the dialog boxes aren’t Windows dialog boxes. The Preferences dialog box has one option: “Check for updates automatically”. If you sort a list of books by author, it’s sorted by first name rather than last name. The Status window doesn’t tell you the titles of the books which are being converted/added. You can’t create new collections (playlists) directly on the Reader; you have to create them in the Library and move them over. ...
The MacHeist thingiemabob is coming to an end. In this case, thingiemabob is defined as “a big publicity/marketing event for small Mac developers.” The salient information is that you can get a bundle of nine applications for $49. Of the apps in the bundle, I find Delicious Library and Newsfire to be fairly significant; that’s DVD/book/game cataloging and a very good RSS newsreader. There’s also a personal information manager, an OS level skinning application, a game of your choice, an HTML authoring program, etc. Check out the list for yourself. ...
There are no free weblog clients for the Mac. I don’t deserve a free weblog client, but I’m not sure there are any weblog clients I want to pay for, either. Hm.
The Sony Reader continues to impress. I’ve read two complete books on it now, thanks to the $50 credit you get at the store when you buy it, and the thing just works. It’s readable. When I’m reading an book on the screen of my computer, I tend to skim. With this thing? Not so much. I’ve kind of given up on using it as an RPG library for now, because PDF is not its best format. But I don’t feel a twinge of regret at that, because it’s so darned cool otherwise. Yesterday I was eating lunch and I finished the book I was on. Instinctive thought: “Oh, damn, now I have no book for the rest of the meal.” But no, I had 20 more books, and no additional weight. I mean, if you put me in a bookstore and said “you can get that book on paper or on the Reader,” I might well choose the Reader. ...
Commentary on the Sony Reader (which you can get at Borders in the Cambridgeside Galleria right now, if you don’t feel like waiting till December for it to ship online): It’s better than any e-book experience I’ve ever had. The form factor is superb; it’s a smidge larger than a normal paperback, and much thinner. There’s very little distraction from the screen. The screen is excellent — e-ink is way easier to read than an LCD screen. The only quibble I have is the flash when you turn a page. I think it’s just how e-ink works, and I think I’ll get used to it, but it’s a tad annoying right now. ...
From one of Raph Koster’s posts on GDC: Patrick Dugan asking a panel of academics whether the cultural shifts brought on by massively multiplayer games may include damaging our conception of the nation-state as a key form of personal identity. Academics don’t quite know what to say. Even I know what to say to that. “Yes.” Rambly thoughts ahead. Personal identity is increasingly fluid; the ability to put on an impenetrable mask ensures that. Hm. Rereading the quote, I wonder if it wouldn’t be more appropriate to say “tribal identity,” though. You could say that’s a subsection of personal identity. I tend to reject that as necessity, though; it’s one potential aspect of personal identity. And precision requires that we distinguish between the aspect and the whole, no? ...
A while back, I dropped any support for RSS 1.0 on this weblog. I never regret that decision.
You know, you ought to be able to comment on Google search results. Hm.
Note to self: iTunes videocasting (original) plus Lisa Rein’s Daily Show clips implies things.