Masters of Media

We shuffle into the queue of people leaving the plane and I notice my neighbour’s Jonathan Franzen paperback peeking out of the seat back. “Hey, you left your book behind,” I say. She winks, “That’s the idea”. In 20 minutes or so 150 new passengers will stumble on the airbus and maybe the one person who sits in seat 3B will pick up The Corrections and fall in love with it. My neighbour will never know what happens to her book but she liked the story. And now perhaps the next person will too. The book becomes an unconscious player in a game of tag that may or may not leave some impression behind on its readers. Sadly, this version of tag is not supported by iPad.

Since 13 juli in the Netherlands the battle between the long expected iPad and several e-readers has started. But what are actually the downsides of the iPad as an e-reader or the downsides of an e-reader as an iPad? Let's find out!

Digital publishing is trying to replace centuries of ink printed publishing, however many people are still skeptical to this idea of digital publishing, and remain loyal to the ‘old’ book, mostly because they don’t like reading off a computer screen. Could electronic paper be the saviour?

When I saw my little niece getting read aloud by my uncle’s iPad, I wondered how this could affect the way she is being raised. If iPads and other digital devises take over the task of parents, would it cause the alienation of children from their parents?

Global debates are being held about the emergence of machines in our…

As a Toronto born comic book fan, I’ve probably visited my local comic book shop, Cyber City Comix, once a week for the last fifteen years. Every Wednesday I would go by and pick up the latest issues of Batman, Green Lantern, and the Avengers. The owner of the store, Darryl and I would shoot the shit, discussing our…

Alternative title:  How can the eBook be the future?

Only a few days ago I came across this video, produced by IDEO, narrating this particular organization’s vision on the future of the book. By presenting three different designed interfaces on e-book, each one serving a distinguished purpose, IDEO portrays the…

“Swiftboaters beware!”

The battle to control Congress is on and this election year the truth is about to get Truthier. Twitter – the social media network, twenty-four-hour news site, conversation and blogging platform, wedding and death announcement site, gossip patrol, and the general online information center that…

While thinking of a new blog about digital publishing, I am a little bit confused. What about the impact of my writings? I can describe the influence of digital publishing with a non objective view,
quote a lot of researchers, convert my blog to a pdf and publish it on the internet. The next time you are searching…

Being a student of New Media, people I know who are less involved in the world of new media sometimes turn to me with questions on the latest technological developments that are being covered in the news. As if I personally were responsible for the launch of every new device, I get subjected to a barrage of questions (I do…

The landscape of video game distribution is changing. Despite its relative youth, the video game industry has known quite a few different distribution methods already – tapes, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs and now direct downloading and streaming services.

Some day I will read from a Kindle, Ipad or another eBook reading device as well. But for now, I can’t imagine how the ‘feel of a book’ can be replaced by something digital. I love to turn pages, I love to feel a slight dispair when the last paper of the book approaches end the end of a…

Caution: this article is not meant for people who don’t like Wired.

Offline: The Magazine

I am and always have been a big fan of Wired. I like their “Californian Ideology”,  their almost child-like enthusiasm and optimistic view on life and I like how they think technology can change the world in a techno-deterministic way. And because I am a…

In December 2008, two students of the Academy Hogeschool  in Rotterdam launched a Firefox extension called Pirates of the Amazon that enabled users to download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s free of charge by cross referencing Amazon’s product pages with torrent files from the Pirate Bay. If the content could be found on the Pirate Bay’s…

The Daily We

‘The principal threat to the Richmond Daily News, and indeed to all newspapers small and large, was not competition from other newspapers but radical changes in the overall ecosystem of information.’ As Clay Shirky explains the upcoming competition of USA Today and the threat this brought to regional sources. ‘The idea that someone might build four-colour presses…

Last years have been devout to digital publishing and the e-readers. The media made it seem that it was the new big thing and even my mother was considering an iPad. Because I was always annoyed by the enormous spillage of paper during my studies, I too thought it might be time for some digitization of my personal life:…

32-year-publishing veteran Jerry D. Simmons says that e-books will replace traditional media. Many academic libraries, including Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam are rapidly expanding their catalogs with electronic books and the digitization of their printed materials. So are libraries in favour of the e-reader, and what about…

Characteristics of the digital era are: images written directly to our retinas // ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the Internet at all times // electronics so tiny it's embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses // full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality // augmented real reality // interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface.

Cadavre Exquis (André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy)

Year: 1925. Place: Rue de Château no. 54, Paris, France. Characters: André Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy. Plot: A group of surrealists invents a collaborative storytelling technique called cadavre exquis (the Exquisite Corpse) named…

Late November this year Folium Partners, LLC will launch the world’s first automated audiobook and app-creation service under the name ModernBookFactory.com. The service will give the opportunity to independent digital publishers, authors and copyright owners to upload their manuscripts, select narrators and receive professionally produced audio. ModernBookFactory also produce  the books as self-contained audiobook apps within 30 days.…

Every web devoloper runs into this problem at one point and sadly, usually very often. Markup language that doesn't get translated by certain web browsers. Negelence of the software developer to web standars etc. are still occuring more and more. The browser wars of the late 90's between Netscape and Microsoft are now named the first browser wars. In this era of the world wide web it still seems logical that all the parties involved were still trying to define the rules of the playing field and therefor not entirely sharing the same web standards because of differing interpretations of what would be most efficient. Remember I'm talking about the period from 1995 onwards, when the World Wide Web was still up for grabs and nobody had heard of Google yet and most people didn't even own a PC or were not connected to the internet.