If any of you from my Research In the Digital Age Class this summer are still interested, On the Media had a whole hour on Google this week. Don’t b evil!
Via the Vintage Ad Browser (which is like a free version of Ad*flip)
Amazon has made available their most Most Highlighted Passages of All Time, from Kindle books. Not to spoil anything, but it’s hilarious that a passage from Gladwell’s Outliers is in the top ranked spot.
They’ve also got the most frequently highlighted books posted.
This is a great way to see what has stuck chords with readers, and perhaps (as Shipman, Marshall, Price, & Golivchinskly investigated) to identify the best bits in a book. Craig Mod had some interesting ideas and visualizations about “overlay” in ebooks recently. But these announcements from Amazon also bring up some of the creepier points (for librarians anyway) of tracking usage statistics in ebooks.
Along with highlighting, Kindles allow for notes to be attached to books– one wonders if those will be mined for content. I’ll have to check the EULA to see who owns those notes.
If it’s Amazon: what a business model! Fledgling authors could buy this information from Amazon to learn how to write a book that people are interested in.
The good news is that the notes feature (and the highlighting feature, for that matter) are so unusable on the Kindle, I’m assuming only a small percentage of users even engage in these practices. I could be wrong. Maybe what this data really tells us is that people who read Dan Brown and Malcolm Gladwell are also more willing to put up with poor interface design.
One of my research heros, Cathy Marshall, is giving a talk at the iSchool later this week. Those of you who attended my annotation talk in April heard me mention some of her research, and I’ve eagerly awaiting the arrival of her new book, Reading and Writing the Electronic Book (which I checked out this morning!) as I revise my proposal and move forward with my dissertation research.
Her talk on Friday is on a different topic– the problems of preserving digital ephemera. Should be very interesting. Here are the details:
Friday, May 14, 2010
Brown Bag Presentation2:30-4 pm
Katzer Room 347 Hinds HallCathy Marshall “The Sustainability of Everyday Digital Stuff”
Everyday digital artifacts—email, IMs, blogs, photos, financial records, tweets, videos, and the like—are an important part of the historical record as well as essential to the intellectual and emotional lives of individuals, families, and communities. Yet maintaining these ad hoc digital collections is proving to be difficult for a number of reasons. Why is it so challenging for us to maintain our digital stuff, and what should we do about it? I’ll sort out some empirical evidence that illustrates the challenges of personal digital archiving, and explore its implications for personal information management technologies.
Grand Gargantua — a history of typography will chart the course of typography from the incunabula.
Keep an eye on I love typography, the typography and fonts blog for more than 50,000 samples of type in the history of printing over the next several years.
One of many fascinating implements in this post: A Journey Round My Skull: Of Goose Quills, Gloves, and Writing Booths.
Recent Books at Bird