cel4145's blog

21 Feb

Margaret Atwood at O'Reilly TOC: The Publishing Pie

Posted by cel4145 in authors, digital publishing, post-apocalyptic fiction

One of the more interesting keynotes at the O'Reilly Tools for Change conference was Margaret Atwood's presentation The Publishing Pie: An Author's View. View the YouTube video of her presentation.

Writers will enjoy the message to publishers to remember the importance of authors in the publishing chain, as well as the humor in her presentation. For instance, as an author of post-apocalyptic fiction, Atwood reminded her audience that  "the stupid side of electronic information includes, one big solar fare and it's gone. If there is something you really, really want to save, and you think there's going to be a solar flare or an electromagnetic pulse of any kind, get yourself a lead-lined safe, and put it in there if it's digital."

More about this topic and other discussion of her presentation is available in an interview Atwood gave at O'Reilly TOC following her keynote.

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18 Feb

The Future of the Book: Time to Learn Some HTML/CSS

Posted by cel4145 in books, epub

Among technical communication teachers, there is a long running debate regarding whether or not students creating web pages need to learn HTML/CSS. Or can they just use WYSIWYG's?

I just finished attending the O'Reilly Tools for Change conference this past week. Whether or not students need to understand HTML for building web pages aside, it's definitely now important for technical writers interested in working in the book publishing industry. The sense at the O'Reilly conference is that ebooks are about to become the dominant publication format over print: Bold Predictions: Half of US Publishers Expect E-books to Be Dominant Format by 2014

Maybe it won't happen in 2014, but it certainly does seem to be coming in the next 5 to 10 years. At the conference, Qualcomm representatives predicted 200 million tablet and ereader devices by the end of 2013. Tablets flooded CES 2010 (see a few of them). People are reading books not only on their iPads and ereaders, but their phones as well.

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05 Feb

E-Readers Catch Younger Eyes and Go in Backpacks

Posted by cel4145 in e-readers, ebooks, kindle, nook

I've been debating about whether or not to buy my eleven-year-old son a Nook (I have one). He's an avid reader already. Maybe it's time. This New York Times feature reports that e-readers are becoming popular among kids.

One advantage of the Nook over Kindle is that if I want to give my son a gift card for buying books, an Amazon gift card could be used for anything on their website. At least Barnes and Nobles doesn't have video games, toys, etc. Much more likely that the gift card would be used for either an ebook or print copy.

04 Feb

Internet Piracy Boosts Anime Sales, Study Concludes

Posted by cel4145 in piracy

What a surprise ;-)

A prestigious economics think-tank of the Japanese Government has published a study which concludes that online piracy of anime shows actually increases sales of DVDs. The conclusion stands in sharp contrast with the entertainment industry’s claims that ‘illicit’ downloading is leading to billions of dollars in losses worldwide. It also puts the increased anti-piracy efforts of the anime industry in doubt.

Well, we'll never get reports out of the US government uninfluenced by big media's cries of woe while the govt. is too busy hiring them to run our legal system.

26 Jan

LibreOffice 3.3 Released

Posted by cel4145 in libreoffice, openoffice, word processing

LibreOffice made their first official release available yesterday. If you've been using OpenOffice, now could be the time to make the jump. Here are the new features for LibreOffice 3.3 if you are interested. Or you can jump straight to the download for Mac, Windows, and Linux.