Tuesday News: 7″ Tablet Phone; Library For All Kickstarter; Failure; and New discovery engine
Publishing Newsdigital lending / discovery / Multifunction-Device5 Comments
LIBRARY FOR ALL: a digital library for the developing world by Library For All – Looking for a great book related kickstarter? Library for All is a non profit (tax deductible) organization that is trying to create a digital cloud library for individuals who have little or no access to books in developing countries. All six of the major world publishers have committed to this project. I found this project on Mashable and thought the DA community would be interested in it. See, I don’t dislike all Kickstarter projects. Kickstarter
Huawei unveils mid-range MediaPad 7 Vogue tablet that can place calls – Ned mocks me about my interest in bigger screens. He specifically asked me whether I would want to hold my mini iPad up next to my face to answer a phone call. I replied that I have headphones yet, as I stare at this glossy photo, I’m not convinced that holding my mini up to my head would look *that* terrible. Engadget
Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure – The Guardian has seven short essays on the topic of failure by seven famous writers. I’m not sure how I feel that the first one is Diana Athill’s ruminations on failing as a woman to be attractive enough for men but I guess it was interesting nonetheless. She gained confidence in herself by writing and achieving success in writing. “When sometimes during those years I stood back and passed judgment on my life, I saw it as happy. And that is still true, because when love-happiness faded out, writing-happiness took over.” Books | The Guardian
No Names, No Jackets – Mike Cane tipped me off to this new book discovery site. It’s called “No Names, No Jackets” and all you see are randomized one chapters from stories without a title, synopsis or author. It’s kind of like first page but this for published books and the length is one chapter. It’s an interesting experiment and run solely on submissions of authors. You can randomize by genre. The romance ones seem to be more of the literary fiction type and there isn’t any “quality control.” You, the reader, decide what to read and what to pass over. No Names, No Jackets
Great kickstarter! I don’t do a lot of looking around at that site, because I just haven’t been interested – so I’m glad you mentioned it. I love that one.
I just can’t do a screen that big for my phone. It’s inconvenient and doesn’t fit in my pocket – that’s the deal-breaker for me. It has to fit in my pocket. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to be heading that way sooner rather than later.
I like the idea of the No Names, No Jackets. I’ll be checking that out later when I have more time to settle in and read some stuff. I’m interested to see how the execution of the idea ends up working for me.
I love the idea of No Names, No Jackets. I’ve already been caught up in four different sample chapters. Very clever and a very clean, easy-to-use interface. Much simpler than clicking through a bunch of pages on a publisher’s site for sample text or downloading samples from Amazon–though it still needs some navigational tweaks. I hope readers find it and it doesn’t become mostly a place where authors are staring at one another.
A forum on the site where people can pass along recommendations might either help or be chaos. Hard to say.
Thank you for the Kickstarter — fantastic cause, I’m really excited about it. At first I was hoping it was an actual decent searchable library of KS projects as the site isn’t… really very good for that, but I’m happier with what it turned out to be.
I don’t think it would look that weird holding a tablet up — no stranger than the people who appear to be talking to themselves on earpieces, or are talking to the tablet on the bus. I discovered one of my gadgets does Skype quite nicely, so I don’t know if I’d need a phone number for it as well.
No Names, No Jackets is promising to fill my week — I hope it grows as it’s a pretty fantastic way to discover people I’ve never heard of. Recommendations are still my first and best way, but this looks like it could be quite decent if there’s enough involvement and some polish.
If your mini is in a case, holding it up to your head might look odd. I think it’d be too heavy to hold like that very long.
At least a couple of Samsung tablet models, and I believe, some other brands’ tablets, have phone functionality. I know my friend’s Galaxy 7″ or 7.7″ is phone-capable, and it’s at least a year old, maybe more. And yes, I’ve seen people holding these devices up to their ears, although it’s more common to see them using the hands-free earphones + mic.
I’m not holding much faith in the Kickstarter, unfortunately. Much as I would like to contribute, the details are too fuzzy for me to believe – they want something “device agnostic”, then they go on to talk about phones, e-readers and low-cost tablets. I would think the 1st issue with this is that they’d first have to overcome 1) consistent electricity to use these things, 2) identification of the electronic devices these actually people own (even low-cost tablets US$40 is way above the purchasing power of the people, unless there are projects funding the devices as well as the technology, 3) language of the books. The example only talks about Haiti, where the medium of instruction may be English, but for most of the “260 million children” globally, that’s not going to be the case, so are there plans for translations or making available the local texts? I feel like a wet blanket, but there is too little information right now for me to believe that they actually think that what they are doing is going to work on a worldwide scale. If they had said “Library for All in Haiti and some other nations”, I’d be in for it, but at the moment, no, sorry.