O'Reilly Media | Browse Blogs by Tag

Blogs

Tags > news

"Web-based ePub validator adds Preflight and API" (via @liza)

By Andrew Savikas
November 4, 2009

From @liza at Threepress:"EpubCheck’s lesser-known companion checks for additional issues like content documents that exceed 300K, which can’t be loaded on the Sony Reader."http://blog.threepress.org/2009/11/04/epub-validator-updates/(ps -- thanks to @liza for making...

NaNoWriMo Now Underway

By Andrew Savikas
November 1, 2009

One of my favorite keynotes from TOC 2009 was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) founder Chris Baty. It's November, which means the annual event is now underway. Check out...

Summer of Flash Episode 11 - Ed Sullivan

By Garth Braithwaite
September 25, 2009

Ed Sullivan from Adobe joins us on this episode to announce the Adobe Cookbooks website upgrade. We also talk about Adobe's recent acquisition announcements (Omniture and Business Catalyst). Panel of Experts: Leif Wells and Zach Stepek. Download this week's...

Microsoft/O'Reilly Alliance Means DRM-free Ebooks Coming from MS Press

By Andrew Savikas
September 24, 2009

Full details are in Tim's post on the Radar blog (and in the Press Release and in the statement from Microsoft ), but thought one part of this deal worth...

Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don’t Need It

By Joshua-Michele Ross
September 15, 2009

Speculation about the demise of the news business and advice about what they should do about it is everywhere. It makes for great, self-congratulatory sport but it won’t help the news industry. Why? Because the news industry doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution...

Four short links: 21 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 20, 2009

TwitterMood -- using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious). What Will Remain of Us -- The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published;...

Four short links: 18 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 18, 2009

The Making of the NPR News iPhone App -- interesting behind-the-scenes look, with sketches and all. Station streams, however, presented a larger challenge. To begin with, NPR didn't have direct stream links for any of its stations, so we built a Web spider that identified and captured more than 300 iPhone-compatible station streams. After that first pass, we worked...

How NPR is Embracing Open Source and Open APIs

By James Turner
July 17, 2009

News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing their content, National Public Radio is interested in turning it into a resource for people to use in new and novel ways as well. Daniel Jacobson is in charge making that content available to developers and end users in a wide variety of formats, and has been doing so using an Open API that NPR developed specifically for that purpose. Daniel will talk about how the project is going at OSCON next week, here's a preview of what he'll be talking about.

Content is a Service Business

By Andrew Savikas
July 12, 2009

What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.

Walking the Censorship Tightrope with Google's Marissa Mayer

By James Turner
June 15, 2009

Google sometimes finds itself at an difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. I recently had a chance to talk to Marissa Mayer, who started at Google as their first female engineer, and has now risen to the ranks of vice president in charge of some of Google's most critical product areas, such as search, maps and Chrome. We talked about some of Google's future product directions, and also about how Google makes the decision as to when information has to be withheld from the users. Marissa will be delivering a keynote address at the O'Reilly Velocity conference next week.

Google's Browser-Based Plan for Ebook Sales

By Mac Slocum
June 1, 2009

BEA '09 may be remembered as the moment when Google formally entered the ebook market. From the New York Times: Mr. [Tom] Turvey [director of strategic partnerships at Google] said...

Four short links: 12 May 2009

By Nat Torkington
May 12, 2009

Lacie 10TB Storage -- for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting, hoarding, packratting, and the search technology necessary to find what you've stashed away. Analogies to be drawn between McMansions full of Chinese-made crap...

Tim O'Reilly - Why Twitter Matters for News

By James Turner
May 7, 2009

Twitter has been used for a lot of different purposes, and one has been to report breaking news. But there's been some criticism of how Twitter deals with news, such as the Swine Flu outbreak. With that in mind, O'Reilly Week in Review talked to Tim O'Reilly himself, co-author of the new Twitter Book, about the role of Twitter in...

Peter Brantley Joins Internet Archive

By Andrew Savikas
March 25, 2009

Longtime "Foo" (Friend-of-O'Reilly) and TOC Conference adviser and blogger Peter Brantley has joined the Internet Archive as its Director. From the news release: In this role, he will direct our...

Kindle Comes to the iPhone

By Mac Slocum
March 4, 2009

Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times: The move comes a...

Expectation of Fair Pricing, Not Free

By Peter Brantley
February 23, 2009

At Dear Author, a post stating that not all content should be expected to be free; rather it must be provided, free or not, in a realistic understanding of consumer...

Amazon Announces Kindle 2

By Mac Slocum
February 9, 2009

I've got just enough time between TOC tutorial sessions for a quick Kindle 2 post. As anticipated, Amazon unveiled Kindle 2 this morning. The $359 update is thinner (0.36...

Safari Books Online Goes Mobile

By Allen Noren
February 9, 2009

Like much of the publishing world, I'm eager to hear about Amazon's latest version of the Kindle. But that's not the only news today. I'm sitting here at TOC and...

Google Opens Mobile Access to Public-Domain Books

By Andrew Savikas
February 5, 2009

Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search: Today, we're making it possible for anyone...

New York Times Settles Linking Suit

By Peter Brantley
January 27, 2009

In what many of us thought was a slightly bizarre case, the New York Times Co. has settled with GateHouse Media in a suit attempting to cease the automated...

Amazon Dropping Non-Amazon Ebook Formats (Sort of)

By Andrew Savikas
January 27, 2009

Via Publishers Weekly, Amazon announced Monday it will stop offering ebooks in formats other than Kindle and Mobipocket: In the future, the online retailer says it plans to offer...

"None of this is good or bad; it just is"

By Mac Slocum
January 22, 2009

Lev Grossman takes a pragmatic look at the changing state of authors, readers, and the definition of publishing: Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate...

"Amazon Tax" Moves Forward in New York

By Mac Slocum
January 14, 2009

A judge has dismissed lawsuits from Amazon and Overstock.com challenging New York's "Amazon tax," which was enacted last year. From the Associated Press: The law applies to companies that don't...

Palm's webOS Represents Major Shift for Syncing and Data

By Peter Brantley
January 12, 2009

In an article covering the Palm Pre mobile device, Ars Technica makes a very important point about how devices utilize network connectivity, and what the assumptions are underlying their...

O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs

By Andrew Savikas
December 19, 2008

While there will always be a demand for printed books, few of those books will have a life entirely disconnected from the wider digital Web. In that sense, all publishing...

New Tech Mixes Book Experience with Sensors

By Peter Brantley
December 16, 2008

A new form of hybrid book is coming on the market -- and the inventor consults with Apple. From the Guardian UK: Lyndsay Williams -- who has already developed...

Report: 300,000 Sony Readers Sold

By Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008

The e-reader guessing game may be in its final stages. According to theBookseller, Sony confirms it has sold 300,000 Readers since 2006: So far three million books have been...

Magazines Now in Google Book Search

By Mac Slocum
December 11, 2008

Google is adding back issues of magazines to its Book Search index. From the Official Google Blog: Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging...

History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts

By Peter Brantley
December 10, 2008

A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration...

Can the Internet Prevent War?

By Timothy M. O'Brien
December 9, 2008

In his Nobel lecture Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio posited that the Internet might have prevented the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Second World War. In this post, I offer a counterargument: the decade we all lived through demonstrated the power of the Internet as a platform for propaganda.

Penguin 2.0 Mashes Up Essays and Short Texts

By Mac Slocum
December 8, 2008

Penguin's new project -- dubbed "Penguin 2.0" -- incorporates elements of customization and remixing found in Web content. Jeff Gomez, Penguin's senior director of online consumer sales and marketing,...

Knight Foundation Scholarship: Bringing Developers to the Newsroom

By Timothy M. O'Brien
December 7, 2008

Rich Gordon, Associate Professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, discusses the Knight Foundation Scholarship for working developers to attend a one-year Master's program in Journalism. Gordon discusses the current trends in news and technology, and how developers will play an important role in the continued evolution of "news".