O'Reilly Media | Browse Blogs by Tag

Blogs

Tags > publishing

E-Readers Up Close: Using the Sony PRS-700

By William Stanek
November 18, 2009

The Sony PRS-700 has an internal storage capacity of 420 megabytes (MB) and two expansion slots: One expansion slot for Sony Memory Stick Duo or Pro Duo cards up to 16 GB One expansion slot for SD, SDHC, or...

E-Readers Up Close: Using the Sony PRS-505

By William Stanek
November 18, 2009

The PRS-505 has an internal storage capacity of 192 megabytes (MB) and two expansion slots: One expansion slot for Sony Memory Stick Duo or Pro Duo cards up to 8 GB One expansion slot for SD, SDHC, or miniSD...

E-Readers Up Close: Getting to know the Sony Readers, Part 3

By William Stanek
November 15, 2009

William Stanek here, continuing with the in-depth look at e-readers and e-books. The recap: In my earlier blog entries, I've explored the ins and outs of e-ink, electronic paper displays (EPDs) and e-readers. Now, I'm examining individual readers as a...

Taking a Detour: E-readers A Soap Box

By William Stanek
November 12, 2009

William Stanek here, taking a slight detour in our continuing e-reader discussion. When it comes to favorite technologies, call me a zealot because I probably am. I'm not afraid to proclaim that I love technology that works, and I think...

E-Readers Up Close: Getting to know the Sony Readers, Part 2

By William Stanek
November 9, 2009

William Stanek here, continuing with the in-depth look at e-readers and e-books. In my earlier blog entries, I introduced EPDs, discussed how the technology works, and delved briefly into ways they're being used. Now, I'm examining the Sony Reader as...

Posterous: The Copy-and-Post Revolution in (Micro) Blogging

By Mark Sigal
November 4, 2009

A friend of mine, who has achieved repeated success in high-tech startup land, said that if you want to be successful, focus on segments where <10% of the crowd currently adopts the solution, and by virtue of dramatically simplifying the approach, you can toggle adoption rates to closer to 90%. Enter Posterous, a micro-blogging tool (it's free) that does a few things really well.

Four short links: 20 October 2009

By Nat Torkington
October 20, 2009

Poles, Politeness, and Politics in the Age of Twitter (Stephen Fry) -- begins with a discussion of a UK storm but rapidly turns into a discussion of fame in the age of Twitter, modern political discourse, the "deadwood press", and The Commons in Twitter Assembled. There is an energy abroad in the kingdom, one that yearns for a new...

"He not busy being born is busy dying"

By Tim O'Reilly
October 14, 2009

I found myself quoting that great Bob Dylan line the other day on a mailing list for those dealing with the changes sweeping through the publishing industry. Michael Coffey from Publisher's Weekly wrote an eloquent and moving lament that expresses the fear of many that the book might be losing its pre-eminent position in the cultural canon. He wrote: I...

A Classic from the Archive: Tim O'Reilly interviewed in 1994

By Andrew Savikas
October 5, 2009

Unfortunately I don't remember who pointed me to this (it was a few months ago via Twitter I think), but I came across it while cleaning off my Mac...

Microsoft Press Enters Strategic Alliance with O'Reilly

By Tim O'Reilly
September 24, 2009

Today, Microsoft and O'Reilly Media announced an agreement to support and expand Microsoft Press. Under the terms of the strategic alliance, O'Reilly will be the exclusive distributor of Microsoft Press titles and co-publisher of all Microsoft Press titles, on Nov. 30, 2009. We'll be working with Microsoft to develop new books, as well as distributing both existing and new co-published books to bookstores, and, perhaps most importantly, to the emerging digital book channels that represent the future of book publishing.

Worldwide Lexicon: matching up technologies and culture to end the language barrier

By Andy Oram
September 22, 2009

Essays by Brian McConnell of World Wide Lexicon and Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices describe the technical and cultural sides of developing communities of volunteer translators.

World Wide Lexicon Toolbar changes the reading experience for the other 99% of web pages

By Andy Oram
August 25, 2009

World Wide Lexicon Toolbar meets my criterion for a piece of critical infrastructure: after two days with it I can't get along without it, and I plan to avoid any browser that doesn't have it installed.

Four short links: 25 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 24, 2009

Tineye -- reverse search engine; you upload an image and they find you similar images so you know where else it's used. Check out their cool searches. PDF Pirate -- upload a PDF and this web site will give it back to you minus the restrictions on copying/printing/etc. Flare -- an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in...

Four short links: 14 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 13, 2009

Page2Pub -- harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter) SQL Pie Chart -- an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter...

Four short links: 10 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 10, 2009

The Propaganda Newspapers -- London councils increasingly providing their own newspapers, masquerading as mass-market popular appeal newspapers but without anything critical of the council that produces it. This is an evolutionary dead-end for reinventing newspapers, and is why the non-profit/trust structure works so well. Time for Computer Science to Grow Up -- publish in journals so conferences can be...

Four short links: 4 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 3, 2009

NASA Nebula Services/Platform Stack -- The NEBULA platform offers a turnkey Software-as-a-Service experience that can rapidly address the requirements of a large number of projects. However, each component of the NEBULA platform is also available individually; thus, NEBULA can also serve in Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service capacities. Bundles RabbitMQ, Eucalyptus, LUSTRE storage, Fabric deployment, Varnish front-end, MySQL and more. (via...

Four short links: 3 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 3, 2009

Enabling Massively Parallel Mathematics Collaboration -- Jon Udell writes about Mike Adams whose WordPress plugin to grok LaTeX formatting of math has enabled a new scale of mathematics collaboration. 2845 Ways to Spin The Risk -- introduction to the ways in which our perception of risk (and numbers in general) can be distorted by how it is presented. (via...

Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World

By Mark Drapeau
July 15, 2009

Even professional writers are prone to infrequent accidental plagiarism. But in the world of novels, newspapers, and college exams, there are rules about bootlegging others’ work that are well-established - most everyone agrees on what behaviors are unacceptable and what the consequences are. In bantamweight publishing, however, the rules are not so clear. In order for the British Army to...

Four short links: 1 July 2009

By Nat Torkington
July 1, 2009

The Onyas -- New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from "good on ya", the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give. The Year of Business Metrics: Don't make your users run away! -- wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who...

My 140conf Talk: Twitter as Publishing

By Tim O'Reilly
June 24, 2009

I spoke at Jeff Pulver's 140conf a few weeks ago. My subject was the continuity of what I do, from publishing through conferences through my presence on twitter. I tried to draw the connections, and to explain how "social media" means drawing from, curating, and amplifying the voices of a community. I suggest that the role of an editor and...

Four roles for publishers: staying relevant when you are no longer a gatekeeper

By Andy Oram
June 17, 2009

In many areas of publishing, there are enormous resources of free online material and innumerable forums where individuals can quickly and conveniently post their own observations. Since we are no longer gatekeepers, publishers have to focus on how we add quality.

New on O'Reilly Labs: Open Feedback Publshing System

By Andrew Savikas
May 21, 2009

O'Reilly engineer Keith Fahlgren has formally launched our new Open Feedback Publishing System over on O'Reilly Labs: Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the...

Scribd Store a Welcome Addition to Ebook Market (and 650 O'Reilly Titles Included)

By Andrew Savikas
May 18, 2009

The document-sharing site Scribd has launched a new "Scribd Store" selling view and download access to documents and books. As part of the launch, there are now more than 650 O'Reilly ebooks now available for preview and sale in the Scribd store, and all include DRM-free PDF downloads with purchase. (Scribd will soon be adding EPUB as a format, and...

Four short links: 15 May 2009

By Nat Torkington
May 15, 2009

Whither Sockets? -- ACM Queue article on how sockets as a model for network programming have become an obstacle to where networking is going. All of these calls have one thing in common: the calling program must repeatedly ask for data to be delivered. In the world of client/server computing these constant requests make perfect sense, because the server...

The Modern Way to Put out an Album: NYeT!

By David Battino
May 13, 2009

It would be cruel to cite this as another example of the increasing irrelevance of newspapers, but I was honestly stumped by this entry in today's New York Times crossword: Modern way to put out an album. "P2P" sure didn't fit.

Personalizing the Learning Conversation

By Simon St. Laurent
May 5, 2009

Twenty years of change are shifting technology from top-down broadcast-model documentation and training to a more conversational approach that shrinks the social distance between teacher and learner, personalizing our experience.

What Publishers Need to Learn from Software Developers

By Tim O'Reilly
March 31, 2009

There was a great exchange on the O'Reilly editors' backchannel the other day, so illuminating that I thought I should share it with the rest of you. We've been discussing the fast-track development we're using to produce The Twitter Book. (We're basically authoring the book as a presentation, after I realized how much more quickly I am able to put...

Challenges from a book sprint: the great things about ignorance and disorder

By Andy Oram
March 24, 2009

e tried to write a conventional computer manual in two days, and the experience has made me reconsider the conventions of computer manuals. The computer field is still in the kindergarten stage of exploring serious questions of how people learn, questions at the center of psychology and pedagogy for many decades. Even those disciplines don't quite get it, because they're fumbling with the instant messaging culture that gives us so many more tools today for learning together.

Free book, community gathering, Richard Stallman to write foreword

By Andy Oram
March 19, 2009

Update to my posting about a book-writing project this coming weekend in Cambridge, Mass. (March 21-22). RMS will write a foreword for the book.

Fighting the Status Quo

By Kurt Cagle
March 1, 2009

Seth Godin recently published a rather insightful blog post on how trade groups often work to stifle innovation in order to maintain the status quo. The comments are especially timely now, as industry after industry goes to Washington hat in hand in order to beg a few billion here or there to keep their particular company or even industry afloat.

Tim O'Reilly Makes the Argument for Open Publishing--Just Pick the Hat to Fit the Head

By Sara Peyton
February 25, 2009

At TOC, Tim O'Reilly, the founder and CTO of O'Reilly Media, eloquently answered a question posed by Matthew Bernius, the co-director of the Open Publishing Lab at RIT. The question: "Why should publishing be open?" Tim's answer: "We have found through experiments that we can make a living when we give our content away." It's simple, Tim insists. All you have to do is pick the hat to fit the head. Watch the video to learn more.

Managing monopolies and dominance in the Net age

By Mike Shatzkin
February 23, 2009

Guest blogger Mike Shatzkin is Founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company, where he has focused on supply chain and digital change issues since 1979. Mike has spoken at and organized publishing industry conferences all over the world. He recently launched The Shatzkin Files blog. One of Mike's several books, The Ballplayers, forms the core of BaseballLibrary.com. Our thinking...

Radar Interview with Clay Shirky

By Joshua-Michele Ross
February 16, 2009

Clay Shirky is one of the most incisive thinkers on technology and its effects on business and society. I had the pleasure to sit down with him after his keynote at the FASTForward '09 conference last week in Las Vegas. In this interview Clay talks about The effects of low cost coordination and group action. Where to find the next...

The Kindle and the End of the End of History

By Jim Stogdill
February 10, 2009

Bezos' vision to make every book ever printed in any language accessible within 60 seconds could save history.

For-Profit, Non-Profit, and Scary Humor

By Michael Jon Jensen
February 7, 2009

Tim was kind enough to suggest that I expand on a longish comment I made on his recent post (Stuff That Matters: Non-profit to For-profit). Two threads wove my argument: first, I pushed back at his conventional framing of the non-profit vs. for-profit sectors. But what I think caught his attention most was my description of a project that's trying to "find the funny" in the grinding, slo-motion collapse of our natural world. An easy knee-slapper, eh? I'll get back to that second theme after some musings on non-profit vs. for-profit...

Neat TOC-Inspired Videos on the Future of Learning

By Andrew Savikas
February 3, 2009

Last May, Rutgers Univeristy English Dept. Chair Richard E. Miller sent in a nice note about how the 2008 TOC Conference had inspired him and his colleague, Paul Hammond:...

Webcast Video: Essential Tools of an XML Workflow

By Mac Slocum
January 30, 2009

Below you'll find the full recording from the TOC webcast, "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow," with Laura Dawson....

Four short links: 27 Jan 2009

By Nat Torkington
January 27, 2009

Fantasy, feedback, facts, and flies, all will be revealed in today's links of loops and life: Blueful - a story told in text, but delivered through the medium of web sites. It's like an xkcd cartoon embodied in the web. Interesting, artistic, and makes you look at web sites in a new way. From Aaron A. Reed. The Case Against...

"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...

Making Site Architecture Search-Friendly: Lessons From whitehouse.gov

By Vanessa Fox
January 22, 2009

Guest blogger Vanessa Fox is co-chair of the new O'Reilly conference Found: Search Acquisition and Architecture. Find more from Vanessa at ninebyblue.com and janeandrobot.com. Vanessa is also entrepreneur in residence at Ignition Partners, and Features Editor at Search Engine Land. Yesterday, as President-elect Obama became president Obama, we geeky types filled the web with chatter about change. That change of...

Spots Still Open for TOC Roundtables

By Andrew Savikas
January 20, 2009

Despite a grim few months for the industry, attendance for the 2009 TOC Conference has remained consistently ahead of last year's numbers (and remember -- we sold out last...

The Price of Fame? About $750

By Kurt Cagle
January 8, 2009

I spent about an hour yesterday morning on the phone (at Canada's rather obscene cell phone rates) speaking with an "editor" for Continental Who's Who. The pitch is pretty typical (and I had an idea what was going on, so I decided to follow through with it) - you get an email congratulating you on being selected for inclusion in the Who's Who directory of "famous people", please send in the email in order to confirm your selection.

iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season

By Andrew Savikas
January 7, 2009

Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice...

Analysis 2009: The End of Traditional Publishing

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

For publishing, 2009 is shaping up to be truly ugly. The publishing industry has faced a number of factors that, individually, provided quite a challenge, but collectively they may end up likely significantly altering the industry profoundly over the...

Conversation is the New King

By Mac Slocum
January 5, 2009

Kate Eltham calls out publishers who blog through a PR lens and points the way to publisher blogs that fully embrace the medium: It used to be common wisdom...

Wikipedia and Nature

By Nat Torkington
December 21, 2008

I love the RNA Biology journal's new guidelines for submissions, which state that you must submit a Wikipedia article on your research on RNA families before the journal will publish your scholarly article on it: This track will primarily publish articles describing either: (1) substantial updates and reviews of existing RNA families or (2) novel RNA families based on computational...