Print our own furniture?
After reading an article on the Dutch Cowgirl site, about 3D printing, I wonder what the potential of this device is in the future. Wouldn’t it be great to have a 3D printer that will be able to print...
Reducing the ministries’ excessive use of paper
In the early nineteen-eighties, computers became widely adopted by the Dutch ministries. Then, for a decade or so, the computer mainly acted as a replacement of the typewriter. The computer was primarily used for word processing and doing calculations....
E-readers, will they substitute educators and librarians?
The heavy task of lugging stacks of books might be seeing the end of its era, for with the expanding digitalisation of textual content, EBook readers and Edocuments ( PDF files, Word Doc, podcasts etc.) are introducing a more...
Online to Offline: review of TS2AS party in Amsterdam
Three weeks ago I blogged about Justus Bruns and the concept behind Times Square to Art Square (TS2AS). Last night was the first offline event, held in MuzyQ, Amsterdam, where Justus explained the story behind his idea, “to turn...
Is Google Going To Ruin The E-reader’s Party?
“Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis.”
The above quote is from Joseph Licklider stated in his famous article ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis’...
Are E-books just a transitional technology?
“At breakfast Sal reads the news. She still prefers the paper form, as do most of the people. She spots an interesting quote from a columnist in the business section. She wipes her pen over the news paper´s name,...
A Tale of Two Books: Digital Versus Print
Imagine the scene, it's Christmas, little Billy rushes downstairs and throws himself on the presents under the tree. He reaches out and snatches up what he thinks is the new Larry Botter book and rips off the paper in...
Book Review Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
O’Reilly published this year a new updated edition of the book Hackers: Heroes of the Digital Revolution from Stevy Levin. The book tells the history of a subculture that arose in the late fifties. The book starts in Building...
The Future
Characteristics of the digital era are: images written directly to our retinas // ubiquitous high bandwidth connection to the Internet at all times // electronics so tiny it's embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses // full immersion...
The Exquisite Digital Corpse
Year: 1925. Place: Rue de Château no. 54, Paris, France. Characters: André Breton, Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert and Yves Tanguy. Plot: A group of surrealists invents a collaborative storytelling technique called cadavre exquis (the Exquisite Corpse) named as such...
Booklistening
Late November this year Folium Partners, LLC will launch the world’s first automated audiobook and app-creation service under the name ModernBookFactory.com. The service will give the opportunity to independent digital publishers, authors and copyright owners to upload their manuscripts,...
This Post is Best Viewed in Microsoft IE
Every web devoloper runs into this problem at one point and sadly, usually very often. Markup language that doesn't get translated by certain web browsers. Negelence of the software developer to web standars etc. are still occuring more and...
E-books Should Take a Page Out of The Internet
Being a student of New Media, people I know who are less involved in the world of new media sometimes turn to me with questions on the latest technological developments that are being covered in the news. As if...
Gently Down the Stream: Advances in the Digital Distribution of Video Games
The landscape of video game distribution is changing. Despite its relative youth, the video game industry has known quite a few different distribution methods already – tapes, floppy discs, CDs, DVDs and now direct downloading and streaming services.
The E-reading Development Compared To Past MP3 Culture
Cheaper Books and Violation of Copyright?
The value added tax (VAT) for a Dutch digital book consists 19% instead of the 6% for a printed one. This results in only a minimal difference...
The value added tax (VAT) for a Dutch digital book consists 19% instead of the 6% for a printed one. This results in only a minimal difference... 
Preserving the physical book by using social networks
Some day I will read from a Kindle, Ipad or another eBook reading device. But for now, I can’t imagine how the ‘feel of a book’ can be replaced by something digital. I love to turn pages, I love...
Wired on Wired
Caution: this article is not meant for people who don’t like Wired. Offline: The Magazine I am and always have been a big fan of Wired. I like their “Californian Ideology”, their almost child-like enthusiasm and optimistic view on...
The Pirates of the Amazon project and the online discourse
In December 2008, two students of the de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam launched a Firefox extension called Pirates of the Amazon that enabled users to download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s free of charge by cross referencing Amazon’s...
The Era Of The Digital – a lineage
The Daily We ‘The principal threat to the Richmond Daily News, and indeed to all newspapers small and large, was not competition from other newspapers but radical changes in the overall ecosystem of information.’ As Clay Shirky explains the...
The BeBook Blues
Last years have been devout to digital publishing and the e-readers. The media made it seem that it was the new big thing and even my mother was considering an iPad. Because I was always annoyed by the enormous...
The e-book: it doesn’t smell or feel like a book
32-year-publishing veteran Jerry D. Simmons says that e-books will replace traditional media. Many academic libraries, including Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam are rapidly expanding their catalogs with electronic books and the digitization of their printed materials. So are libraries in favour...
Back to the fairytale, to make science? Digital publishing a new revolution, what about the truth?
While thinking of a new blog about digital publishing, I am a little bit confused. What about the impact of my writings? I can describe the influence of digital publishing with a non objective view, quote a lot of...
Digital Comics: Not as Invincible as They Could Be
As a Toronto born comic book fan, I’ve probably visited my local comic book shop, Cyber City Comix, once a week for the last fifteen years. Every Wednesday I would go by and pick up the latest issues of...