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Print, press & publishing’s impending seismic shift August 3, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , 1 comment so far

I have yet to see an e-paper/e-ink reader in the flesh. But I am so ready to buy one if its properly executed. And I believe many other people are as well, such that wide-take up of these devices will significantly change the way the print, press & publishing industries work.

The Sony Reader that was demonstrated at CES 2006 last January was originally slated for release in the northern hemisphere spring; before being subsequently delayed to summer and then autumn. Apparently now it will be ready for “the holidays”. Meanwhile the iRex iLiad has been released but is only being made available via specialized channels which are generally pre-loading the device with expensive vertical-specific content, such as aviation maps or medical journals. Sony have taken the bold step of asking Phil Torrone of MAKEzine to canvas his readers for their questions about the delayed product which is a welcome sign of openness after Sony’s DRM root-kit debacle. I can only hope Sony don’t attempt to encumber the device with too much loathsome DRM and is capable of rendering PDF and TXT files. There are tantalising rumours that Apple may also be working on an e-book reader. I have more faith in Apple’s ability to enter this market with a category-defining device than Sony. Maybe we’ll see one at the WWDC next week?

At the same time more technical publishers are embracing DRM-free PDF’s as a distribution format. And thank goodness, technical books are heavy man! At the moment it is mostly indie or smaller outfits like The Pragmatic Programmers and 37signals with Getting Real (from which the revenue of $215,000 is almost ‘pure profit’) that have fully embraced this idea but more ‘traditional’ tech publishers such as Manning and O’Reilly (read Tim O’Reilly’s piece on PDF distribution) are waking up as well. Not to mention many other non-technical publishers which distribute some of their catalogue, mostly in DRM-encumbered and frequently platform-specific formats, through a variety of online ebook vendors.

Savvy newspapers are also waking up. Witness the recent launch of UK newspaper The Guardian’s G24; several automatically generated DRM-free PDF’s of key articles straight from their newspaper, updated every 15 minutes. But why rely on traditional media outlets for a PDF newspaper? Check out Jonas Martinsson’s FeedJournal which generates a PDF ‘newspaper’ from the RSS or ATOM feeds you provide it. Who would like to read Techmeme in newspaper format on the bus/tube/subway to work?

As soon as we have a range of e-paper readers that are relatively affordable, support a wide-range of platforms and formats (albeit with the inevitable but hopefully not egregious DRM), the publishing business will change just as rapidly as the music business has been changed by the iPod.

Where’s the iPod of e-ink? Apple? Sony?

FlyPod June 21, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, gadgets , 2 comments

Apple needs to keep innovating in order to stay a step ahead of Microsoft’s rumoured iPod killer. Since iPod integration with your car is now passe, the next industry Apple should be trying to suck up to, errr, I mean partner with is the airlines. I want my seat to have a universal iPod dock dammit! And the ability to display video (for 5G and unreleased-video-ipod owners) on the seatback display would be fantastic for long-haul flights. So who’s going to provide it first? Groovy, funky Virgin Atlantic? Emirates? C’mon, someone get onto this quick!

Australian EPG fun and games April 25, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : gadgets , 1 comment so far

Update: Via Om. Yahoo have rebranded Meedio (a PC media centre app they recently purchased) and made it available for free download. Given the relationship between Yahoo and Seven in Australia, perhaps an EPG for 7 might eventuate sometime soon.

I recently upgraded and reconfigured DVB Webscheduler in order to be able to schedule recording of Sydney’s DVB-T stations; mostly the same as the rest of Australia, with the notable exception of Macquarie Digital. For a while I have been using D1’s EPG web service, however it didn’t initially appear to have any data for ABC2*. So I thought I would give IceTV’s EPG service a go, especially since I have been happily using their OS X Dashboard widget. The widget’s hookup to their EPG only brings down one day’s data at a time, which was fine for my purposes. But it looks like IceTV prevent anything other than their widgets from accessing single day data… so no luck getting Webscheduler to access IceTV then.

These sorts of fun and games are well known to any Australian PVR afficionado. There are other solutions of course, such as running your own TV listings scraper to pull data into an XML format, then sit back and wait until the listings are reformatted and break the scraper’s parsing. I could just sign up to IceTV’s 7-day EPG service @ $13 per month. But why don’t the networks just get over their EPG fears and start providing this data for us? At least the ABC provides an RSS feed for their primary channel, although it does not include ABC2. Interestingly, IceTV are planning an IPO in the next few months…

* I’ve since figured it out, in case anyone else is having similar issues. The default value for the Channels lookup (found in Guide Data Source Settings/Web XML Service) needs to be changed to http://d1.com.au/D1xmltv.asmx/GetChannels?region=&provider=freesd, rather than http://www.d1.com.au/d1xmltv.asmx/GetFreeChannels, which only returns analogue broadcast channels.