Kurt Vonnegut on the Daily Show (video).
Year / 2005
Great Moments in Reuters Photos
I’ve Got Your POD Right Here. It’s Called the Next-Generation Camera Phone
New Scientist: “Commuters in Japan already anger bookstore owners and newsagents by using existing cellphone software to try to take snapshots of newspaper and magazine articles to finish reading on the train to work. This is only possible because some phones now offer very rudimentary optical character recognition (OCR) software which allows small amounts of text to be captured and digitised from images.”
So how will the publishing industry respond to this? Digital watermarks? A new paper with some harsh reflective surface? Each book issued with a digital code? As the OCR-enabled camera phones make their way into the hands of the public, I foresee a small spike in book piracy four years from now.
One Paper’s Peer Group is Another’s Circlejerk
Editor & Publisher: “The Times-Post rivalry is unique in that it is believed to be the only one that involves two newspapers located some 200 miles apart, but with a competition that rivals any two-newspaper city. ‘This is really a peer group of two,’ explains Kaiser.”
No Love for Slow Man
Not even from Francine Prose, who opines, “The problem was that every word I was reading was not only reminding me of, but making me desperately wish that I was reading, another book that, as it happens, begins with a man struck by an automobile while riding his bicycle, and that also follows his slow, painful attempts to recover some damaged, recognizable version of his former self. That is Denton Welch’s extraordinary A Voice Through a Cloud, his last novel, published unfinished and posthumously in 1950.”
[UPDATE: The Literary Saloon has a nice overview of the Slow Man coverage thus far.]