Last week, Grant McCracken suggested that Apple’s next big product might be an Apple TV enabling telecommunications and telecommuting so good it would revolutionize business, travel and education.
This week, I saw this in the TV Guide:
The headline says “Easy, conversation via the TV.”
Maybe he’s on to something.
I’ve been waiting for quite some time for Drive by James Sallis to come to the Swiss iBookstore. From time to time, I run a check for items on my wish list. A few days ago, I was surprised to see that Drive is now available. In fact, it now has two listings.
One of the listings is priced at 6.00 Swiss Francs and the other at 6.50. What’s going on here?
Last week I had a little time to catch up on some of the articles I had saved to read later in Instapaper. I came upon this piece from Robert Darnton in The New York Review of Books. Darnton talks about the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which launches this week.
Given the way the US is portrayed in the media here, Europeans could be forgiven for thinking that all Americans are like Gordon Gecko. So how ironic that in the US, the DPLA revives the ideals and spirit of the enlightened Founding Fathers, while in France the Bibliothèque National is operating hand-in-hand with publishers to digitize unavailable books with public money and let publishers offer them for sale.
By rejecting the “monopoly of knowledge” that would have accompanied a commercial offer for access to these digitized works, the DPLA sounds like what every citizen should expect from public institutions. Except that it was not a government-funded project but an initiative by individuals and private institutions that grew into a public-private partnership that has recently become a non-profit entity.
The story of the creation of the DPLA sounds like a fine example of mass collaboration supported by networked communication systems,
Reaction to the launch of ReLIRE from writers and readers was strong this week, but publishers and the Bibliothèque National de France were rather quiet. François Gèze, director of the publishing house Editions La Découverte and member of the scientific committee established to oversee the ReLIRE registry left a long comment on Lionel Maurel’s blog, which led to a lively debate and prompted a new post, Réponses à François Gèze, membre du conseil scientifique du registre ReLIRE, (Response to François Gèze, member of the scientific committee of the ReLIRE registry, link in French) several days later. Clearly publishers and other actors behind ReLIRE were watching.
Today, by chance I noticed that two of the anthologies containing works of prominent foreign authors in translation had been quietly removed from ReLIRE.
Starting with the book I discovered containing stories by Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. Le Guin, La frontière avenir, here is the page that ReLIRE now displays for this title,
The reactions to the launch of the ReLIRE registry in France last week were fast and furious.
Team AlexandriZ published a list of disturbing observations (link in French) about the registry. As more examples of translations and anthologies contained in the registry came to light, my post pointing out translated works in the registry including two award-winning authors also known for their defense of authors’ rights, Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. Le Guin, was cited in quite a few articles.
Helène Pedot started a petition (scroll down for an English translation of the French text) for readers wishing to show their support for authors and publishers refusing to participate in the ReLIRE program by opting out of what they view as an abusive system,
While waiting for my flight at the airport this evening, I noticed this man who seemed to be using an iPad for a conference call.
I didn’t recognize the application, but he seemed to have a second window on the screen in addition to one for taking notes. I couldn’t tell if he was using his phone for the call itself or if he was doing everything with his tablet.
This is the first time I’ve come across someone using a tablet this way.
While rooting around on the ReLIRE site, I discovered some big names among the English-language writers whose translated works may be found on the list. For those of you just tuning in, the ReLIRE registry is the official list of “unavailable books from the 20th century” that will be digitized under new French legislation and the rights to them transferred to a collective licensing agency. The registry went live on March 21st with a list of the first 60,000 books to be processed.
Among the authors I found in the registry are Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and R.A. Rafferty. You won’t find them by searching for their names in the author field, but the anthology in question shows up in a free text search using their names. Although ReLIRE doesn’t present the catalog details, apparently it does use them to present search results. Here is the catalog listing from the Bibliothèque National de France.
From there I started to wonder which of these authors’ stories were included and how to notify them. The list of titles in the anthology wasn’t available in the library’s catalog, so I tried Google and found the information on the site of a bookseller specializing in rare French books. Unsurprisingly, several other well-known authors are also included in this anthology, including Roger Zelazny, James Sallis and Vonda McIntyre. Here’s the complete list along with the translated and original story titles:
Yesterday we went to the movies to see Möbius, but the showing was sold out, so we ended up going to see Cloud Atlas instead. We weren’t disappointed. The story was subtle enough to be intriguing, without being so obscure as to be confusing. The acting, costumes and makeup were superb, although it was somewhat distracting trying to spot all the actors as they moved through the different story lines.
After being turned away from Möbius, while we were trying to decide whether to see another film or just go home, I opened up TweetBot to see what people were saying about Cloud Atlas on Twitter. I couldn’t help but notice how many people said they had seen the movie and now wanted to read the book.
I bookmarked the following tweets:
It’s been a while since I’ve had a weekend free in downtown Lausanne. Yesterday I had a chance to do some shopping, and I decided to visit Payot to see how eReaders were doing since the last time I checked.
I went straight to the second floor where I had last seen eReaders on display in a glass case near the center of the store. I found the case not far away, but it was practically empty, and there were no eReaders. I walked around for a while and was about to conclude that Payot wasn’t offering eReaders at all anymore. Then I saw them. At the back of the store, beside the service desk, in a glass case behind a sofa where no one would ever notice.
In fact, even if someone were looking for them, like I was, they wouldn’t have an easy time finding them. The case was just next to the emergency exit, ironically fitting, and since it was behind the sofa, it was difficult to see exactly what was inside. There were two models: a Cybook Opus, which was on sale for 99 Swiss Francs and a Cybook Odyssey with front light for CHF189. There were a total of about 4-5 readers in the case.
Not far away was a discount bin.
