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A video from 1947 demonstrating how a book is made:

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This New York Times article from 1982 writes about a National Science Foundation study speculating on the impact of internet technology. Some interesting – and not too far off – predictions:

• The home will double as a place of employment, with men and women conducting much of their work at the computer terminal. This will affect both the architecture and location of the home. It will also blur the distinction between places of residence and places of business, with uncertain effects on zoning, travel patterns and neighborhoods.

• Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly, ordering exactly what they need for ‘‘production on demand.’’

• There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.

• A new profession of information ‘‘brokers’’ and ‘‘managers’’ will emerge, serving as ‘‘gatekeepers,’’ monitoring politicians and corporations and selectively releasing information to interested parties.

• The ‘’extended family’’ might be recreated if the elderly can support themselves through electronic homework, making them more desirable to have around.

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Yun Xie at Ars Technica interviews Vikram Savkar, who is the Senior Vice President and Publishing Director at Nature Publishing Group. According to Savkar, there is large demand for digital textbooks (and rightfully so since it’s a multi-billion dollar market profiting on material that, on average, costs a single student $700 per semester while a digital book should costs far less):

Ars: How will you introduce digital textbooks to university professors and instructors? They’re the ones who will ultimately choose textbooks for classes.

Savkar: California State University is the first to adopt the interactive textbook, so they’ve helped spread the news. We only announced our plan for the textbook about a month ago, and 800 faculty members from colleges signed up the first day to get a demo.

[…]

Ars: Would a student be able to read these interactive textbooks on laptops, iPads, Android phones, and other devices?

Savkar: Our textbooks are born digital, which means we created it for what digital can do. As I said before, we didn’t write a regular textbook, make PDFs, and put it online. Our textbooks will be available for iPad, smartphones, Androids, and other devices. These textbooks are born accessible.

Hatip: Shawn Blanc.

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New York Times:

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down on First Amendment grounds a California law that barred the sale of violent video games to children. The 7-to-2 decision was the latest in a series of rulings protecting free speech, joining ones on funeral protests, videos showing cruelty to animals and political speech by corporations.

[…]

“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

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Aaron Mahnke:

If you had any doubts about whether you should publish through a traditional publisher, or take your destiny in your own hands and do it yourself (as I have happily done), today’s news should calm any fears that it’s a “real” option.

According to Wired Magazine, JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series of books (which, as of yesterday, had no sign of ever hitting the eBook market), has decided to skip her publishers and release the 7-book series on her own in digital format. If you need help processing the news, let me help; this is huge.

Is the self-publishing model an option for academic work?

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Rosa Golijan:

Let’s say that it takes you exactly one minute to read through this post. In that time, over 6,600 photos will be uploaded to Flickr, about 70 new domains will be registered, over 1,200 new ads will be created on Craigslist, and more. Here’s what happens on the Internet every 60 seconds.

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Matt Richman crunches the numbers:

Apple makes more money from the sale of one Mac than HP does from selling seven PCs.

Andrew Richardson goes even further:

If the average selling price of a Mac runs about $710 more than a PC (ASP of a Mac - ASP of an HP machine), and about $320 of that is profit, then the remaining $390 must be those higher costs. Apple’s computing hardware, and the software development behind OS X, actually cost more to manufacture. Given the volume their manufacturing partners are turning out and the squeeze to contain costs put on them by Apple, one has to wonder why.

The answer is fairly obvious to anyone coming to Macs after years of using commodity PC equipment: better design and build quality costs more.

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Jason Kincaid at AOL/TechCrunch:

First, the good news: the scale of the attack affected “fewer than a hundred accounts” out of Dropbox’s 25 million total users. But according to the letter, those accounts were all accessed by a single individual. In other words, these weren’t accidental logins due to typos — someone discovered the hole and actively used it to access files that were not theirs. That’s obviously very alarming.

A small number, thankfully, but still unsettling. Dropbox is starting to fall out of favor after this episode and the recent change in Dropbox’s terms of service. I’m not quite on the bandwagon yet – after all, I use Dropbox for convenience not security – but I am paying attention to some alternatives. See David Parry’s recent post Why I Might Be (although I would rather not be) Leaving Dropbox.

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David Zax:

All historians encounter them, at some point in their careers: Vast troves of data that are undeniably useful to history—but too complex to make narratively interesting. For Stanford’s Richard White, an American historian, these were railroad freight tables. The reams of paper held a story about America, he knew. It just seemed impossible to tell it.

Impossible to tell in a traditional way, that is. White is the director of the Stanford University Spatial History Project, an interdisciplinary lab at the university that produces “creative visual analysis to further research in the field of history.” (The images in this post are taken from the project’s many visualizations.) Recent announcements on the project site announce “source data now available” (openness is one of the project’s tenets) on such topics as “Mapping Rio,” “Land Speculation in Fresno County: 1860-1891,” and “When the Loss of a Finger is Considered a ‘Minor’ Injury.”

That last, bizarre, entry is part of the spatial history that White specializes in: railroads in the American West (the injury in question is part of a data set on railroad-related accidents in Colorado, 1884-1885). “Shaping the West,” as White dubs his project, is about “developing tools to represent and analyze visually how and to what degree the railroads created new spatial patterns and experiences in the 19th-century American West.”

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Jennifer Howard:

There’s no shortage of fabulous archival material lurking in college and university collections. The trick is finding it.

Without good metadata—labels that tell researchers and search engines what’s in a photograph, say—those archives are as good as closed to many students and scholars. But many institutions don’t have the resources or manpower to tag their archives thoroughly.

Enter Metadata Games, an experiment in harnessing the power of the crowd to create archival metadata. A team of designers at Dartmouth College, working with archivists there, has created game interfaces that invite players to tag images, either playing alone or with a partner (sometimes a human, sometimes a computer). Solo players think up tags to describe the images they see; in the two-player scenario, partners try to come up with the same tag or tags.

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