Thomson Acquires ePublisher

Atomic Dog was notable in the publishing world because it gave away online versions of textbooks with its paper products — a strategy to blend paper and electronic products.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Thomson Learning Buys Atomic Dog

In another ebook move by Thomson, Foundation Press is using Zinio technology to make electronic versions of law casebooks available to professors for them to review.  Looks like the ebook arena is heating up.
 

Publishing a Book With RSS

RSS4Lib: RSS Book Publishing Timeline – This reminded me that you could use RSS to handle the time release of complex material like a casebook, or course material generally.  Profeessor would create the feed and add material to it based on the syllabus.  Students would subscribe to the feed and receive the material in their aggregator on a day determined by the professor.  Thie needs to be an eLangdell feature.  Prof creates online syllabus, adds course material to the syllabus, cases ,statutes, etc. for reading.  Dates are selected to release the material via RSS feed.  Students get an aggregator and subscribe to the feed.  The aggregator grabs the materials on the selected date and makes it available to the student.  No need to visit a website, follow a blog  or anything.  Coolness.

 

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More Sony Reader Info Emerges

Sony inked a deal on Monday to sell its new Reader device in Borders bookstores across the United States, including some airport locations. The Sony Reader, demoed at this year’s CES conference in January, offers a high-contrast, high-resolution (800×600) electronic paper display for viewing e-books and text documents.

BetaNews | Borders to Sell Sony Reader Device

Borders will also sell prepaid cards for the Sony’s CONNECT service where e-books and such can be purchased online.  The reader will also display PDF and JPEG files.  Internet material such as RSS feeds will be available through CONNECT.   This is from the Sony website:

The Sony Reader isn’t just about reading eBooks. Using
the included CONNECT™ Reader PC Software, you can easily transfer
Adobe® PDF documents, BBeB Book, and other text file formats to the
Reader. Seamlessly search, browse and download user-selected RSS Web
content from CONNECT™ Store to the PC and transfer to your Sony®
Reader. Take along your favorite Web newsfeeds, blogs and more to read
where ever you are.

 

Sounds like a text-centric version of iTunes, which is OK by me.  Of course, I can also run Linux on my iPod or just use it as a giant disc drive and get at data w/o iTunes.  One would hope Sony would have learned its lesson with the Libre and make the Reader more accessible. 

links for 2006-03-31

Your Very Own Time Machine

Wayback – Home Page – OK, now you can run your very own Internet archive.  This is an open source version of the Internet Wayback Machine that powers the Internet Archive.  First reaction – why?  But think about it from an archival point of view.  There is real value ion being able to maintain an archive of your older sites.  And there could be value in an organization like CALI spidering law school sites to maintain archives.  Think disaster recovery.

 

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