Category Archives: Linked List
Slate Magazine’s Tom Scocca writes: Microsoft Word is cumbersome, inefficient, and obsolete. It’s time for it to die. A choice quote:
I know only one person who loves working in Word: my 4-year-old. It’s valuable to him to be able to put the names of subway lines in their correct colors, or to spell out “autumn” with each letter a different falling-leaf hue, or to jump from Times New Roman to Comic Sans to Chalkboard in midstory. He also loves to write things on my old manual Smith-Corona. A tool that’s lost its purpose makes a great toy.
I pity the technologists who still have to convert from Word. There has to be a better way. # (4)
Saturday, 31 March, 2012
- On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent a letter to Charles McCarthy, the head of the board of Drake High School, North Dakota. Charles McCarthy had, a few weeks previously, ordered the burning of all 32 copies of Slaughterhouse-Five.
If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.
Worth reading in its entirety. # (0)
Tuesday, 27 March, 2012
- In the easy-to-use eBook tools department: Vook Relaunches as E-Book Publishing Platform. Produces ePub and mobi files:
The Vook platform is meant to be easy enough so that aspiring self-publishers can use it, but robust enough for enterprise use. It was designed to be able to create and automatically distribute both text-only books and multimedia enhanced e-books to the Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iBooks e-book stores.
It’s not free, though. But definitely interesting, and much better than their previous business model (making multimedian eBooks called ‘Vooks’) # (0)
Sunday, 15 January, 2012
- L.A. Times interviews the Moonbot Studios, makers of 'The Numberlys':
Q: The iPad is so new. What is it like working in such uncharted territory?
Oldenburg: It harkens back to the early days of film. It’s still very Wild West and experimental right now and it is really exciting.
Enochs: The first movies were a locomotive and a guy running and that was it, and everyone was thrilled. We are still a little bit in that stage, I’m sure.
Moonbot Studios are the same people behind ‘The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore‘. # (3)
Sunday, 8 January, 2012
Wednesday, 21 December, 2011
- Boris Kachka from New York Magazine on How E-books Have Become a New Literary Form:
The great hidden virtue of e-books—hidden beneath the chatter about their effect on the bottom line—is that they allow stories to be exactly as long as we want them to be. It turns out that many of them work best between 10,000 and 35,000 words long—the makings of a whole new nonfiction genre occupying the virgin territory between articles and hardcovers.
(Thx, Johnnypat) # (0)
- Seth Godin on How much should an ebook cost?:
This is the wrong question. The right question is: How much will an ebook cost? Because the answer isn’t up to one author or one publisher or even a price-fixing cartel. It’s up to the market, which is a far more complicated entity. There are no shoulds in the market, just reality.
He makes an interesting argument for dynamic pricing: that unknown authors should release their ebooks for free, and then scale the prices up. # (3)
Tuesday, 20 December, 2011
Friday, 16 December, 2011
