Lightspeed Illuminati

I devoted a good portion of this cloudy, humid Sunday morning digging through the attic, collecting and boxing ancient electronics gear to take to the recycling center on Monday. Ancient, in these days of accelerating product releases, is anything more than about six years old. If you’re talking about cell phones or MP3 players, you [...]

Jason Perlow’s Tech Broiler blog offers a nice rundown on the reader apps available on Apple’s iPad, including the strengths and weaknesses of each. Besides the native iBooks reading application (which runs on iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch), other major players with apps targeting the tablet include: Kindle for iPad, Barnes & Nobel eReader, Kobo [...]

Blio, Ray Kurzweil’s free software designed to overcome page display shortcomings of other ebook formats, is a dark horse running in a race that’s been going on for some time. Nonetheless, the package shows some competitive promise in the heated market in which Kindle and iPad are setting the pace. Projected to be available to [...]

In stark contrast to high-tech approaches to reading—like the iPad and the Kindle—these residents of Somerset, England came up with their own refreshing low-tech solution: a book exchange hosted in a vintage English phone booth, As reported by Offbeat Earth, villagers line up to swap books they’ve read for books they haven’t. At any one [...]

Traditional book publishers are very nervous—at least as nervous as recording industry executives were nearly a decade ago as Apple’s iTunes burst upon the scene and overturned conventional wisdom about who really controlled sales and distribution of songs. Amazon’s success with the Kindle was a friendly tap on the shoulder for publishing executives. Apple’s iPad [...]