February 2007

“Free Books. Free Minds.” This is the Wowio slogan.

Wowio is an ebook service which allows registered users to download up to 5 ebooks a day. The site has an attractive design and their selection, while not huge, contains enough great title to make the offer very enticing. All the reading is done using Adobe’s ereader software.

And really, who are we to argue with free?

Well, if you’re smart, and I know all you folks who read my blog are smart, you WILL want to know what’s up with the “free” goodness. In this case, there is indeed a “catch.” In exchange for these books, you have to give up lots of personal data regarding your marketing preferences, race, education, and have your id verified by some fairly restrictive means (e.g. you can send scanned identification, give them a credit card for verification, or use a government/militray/state email address). In my opinion, the reward is worth it. I’ve got my data and preferences plastered publicly all over the web anyways. You’ll have to make the determination for yourself.

If you decide you’d like to give this service a whirl, let me know and I’ll send you a token so I get credit. Yeah, I’m a useless shill.

• 100 steps to GTD Mastery - What’s the next action
  A gigantic/wonderful/funny list which will help you figure out how far along the GTD maturity cycle you really are.
  (tags: gtd organization productivity)
• Cutting through the clutter to get things done - CNN.com
  David Allen, creator of the GTD system and author of “Getting Things Done,” was interviewed by CNN about his model for “advanced common sense.”
  (tags: gtd davidallen interview productivity)
• Seth’s Blog: Please don’t buy this book
  Apparently one of Seth Godin’s prior pamphlets/books, “Everyone is an Expert,” is being offered as a new and unauthorized, for-profit endeavor by a publisher abusing Seth’s Creative Commons’ copyright. Seth is urging folks NOT to buy it and grab it for free
  (tags: SethGodin free ebook)

I was excited to learn today that China Mieville, he of fantastical monster-fiction fame, has released a new book for a younger audience, and a female audience at that! Sure to be a late night page-turner, it comes out tomorrow (so you can still get your pre-order discount at Amazon). Buy it for one of those brainy kids you know who “read too much” and then steal it for a day or two yourself!

Without having read this book, I’m betting it’s one of those books for twisted children, the ones like me, who loved to read dark fairy tales and stories where good does not always triumph over evil.

Here’s a little quote from the Wired article where I discovered this:

The latest example is British fantasy writer China Miéville, whose Un Lun Dun follows a young girl’s quest to save a creepy parallel-universe London. And for Miéville, best known for a steampunk trilogy full of superhot, beetle-headed women and nightmare-eating monsters, it’s a new direction. He’s written something that kids, especially young girls, will devour.

The ever-interesting bloggers/developers over at 37signals have posted about an interesting book created using a technique similar to one of my favorite methods, the cut-up. In an effort to force creativity, the famous beat writer William Burroughs was fond of taking pages out of books, cutting them vertically down the center, taping them together and then scanning the word junctions down the center-line to spur his creative process and encourage the usage of entirely new words.

In the example blogged about over at 37signals, a writer by the name of Tom Phillips picked up an old Victorian novel and then altered the text by painting over large portions of it, exposing an old work in an entirely new light. The effect is both visually-pleasing and interesting, adding mystery as much of the old work becomes lost. It’s an exercise in exceeding limitations and a great way to kickstart your own creativity.

Check out the humument website to view images of the wonderful pages:

You can also purchase the book outright at Amazon.com:

• Cory Doctorow >> Overclocked » Download for Free
  Cory’s new collection of short stories is available for free.
  (tags: CoryDoctorow SciFi ebook free literature)
• When Cory Doctorow Ruled the World - 10 Zen Monkeys (a webzine)
  RU Sirius interviews Cory Doctorow on 10 Zen Monkeys. An interesting interview ostensibly about Cory’s new story collection but ranging over a broad swath of subjects.
  (tags: RUSirius CoryDoctorow interview)

How’d you like to go to a concert of a great band and have them block the way out to play you one more?

• Bokardo - Social Web Design » How to Prevent Valueless Design in Social Web Sites
  Interesting post (as most at Bokardo are) about a concept of “valueless design” and why it’s not always the best designed sites that “win.”
  (tags: design SocialDesign bokardo)
• Don Norman’s jnd.org / UI Breakthrough-Command Line Interfaces
  A new piece by Don Norman about how search engines are really becoming answer engines and inferring that it would behoove people on the development side of the fence to stop treating the parametrs in an ad hoc manner and get rigourous about their implemen
  (tags: DonNorman search information)

This video fits wonderfully with the purpose of this blog. It’s an artistic examination of the ways in which humans are providing universal content which machines (directed by humans) supply form. It’s an intelligent feedback loop which is accelerating.

• Apple - Thoughts on Music
  I’ve never known Steve Jobs to be the type to write public-facing rants. Today, however, he has changed his tune and put out a piece discussing the state of DRM and trying to apply pressure to the major four record companies to license their music DRM-fre
  (tags: Apple SteveJobs DRM music ipod business)
• TiVo, Amazon.com offer video downloads - Yahoo! News
  My favorite part of the solution (since I don’t know tons of people who want to buy giant hard drives to maintain their media collections):

  “Videos may be sent to a TiVo box or a computer and can also be used on portable devices. Videos also don’t have

  (tags: Amazon.com)
• TiVo, Amazon offer video downloads that can be viewed on TV sets - Los Angeles Times
  It’s the big new technology news today and it comes from my employer. Hooray!

  Might be time to get that Series 3 Tivo.

  (tags: Amazon.com video download DRM film tv tivo)
• [Sunspots] The appropriate edition - (37signals)
  An awesome collection of articles re: “appropriateness” collected by those folks at 37signals. These little digests they started putting out are great.
  (tags: 37signals)

Perhaps the reason I’m so excited about this is that I was already planning on purchasing a TiVo TCD648250B Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder within the next several months (please, please let the price keep coming down) and these features just increase the value proposition of that purchase, but I also think the slickness of this end-to-end implementation is seriously enticing and poses a distinct challenge for Apple and their new Apple tv - especially since Apple’s only major movie studio partnership to date is with Disney and relies on the hardware constraint of the space on your hard drive.

• While the Amazon Unbox Store does not yet support Macintosh (grrr, what is it with everyone and the single DRM’d Windows solution?), bypassing all of that and going straight to my living room is fine.
• My digital library can sit on Amazon’s Media Library, I won’t need to buy physical DVDs (my collection is pretty huge already), and I won’t need to invest in new hardware (e.g. hard drives) to hold Gigabytes/terabytes of information. This appeals to my greener sensibilities. Amazon and Tivo should drum that angle up in the marketing.
• If I were to idly speculate (which I love), this solution gives Amazon/Tivo the option of upgrading the quality of the movies fairly seemlessly to the end-user. After all, users won’t have to have the movie on their own hard drive. Amaozn/Tivo could detect when I want to reload a movie out of my digital library and give me the option as to the quality I prefer (so I can match it to my setup). Even better, I’d probably just set a preference for the highest quality possible at any given time.

Amazon/Tivo, if you give me a rental option before the rest of the market can get there (something akin to Netflix without the mailing), I’ll be yours forever!

Disclaimer: I am a current employee at Amazon.com but I had no prior knowledge of this implementation. I do not currently possess any future knowledge about this which is not public. Cheers!