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Markets of Amsterdam. An e-book about the colourful and lively market scene of Amsterdam

Markets of Amsterdam. An e-book about the colourful and lively market scene of Amsterdam

As a final project of the New Media Research Practices course, the New Media & Digital Culture MA students of the 2014 class were asked to develop free-form new media projects. The class was divided into 9 groups of...
A New Kind of Pop-up Book

A New Kind of Pop-up Book

Early pop-up books are made out of pure paper. Each time the kid opens a page, an architectural piece of art jumps out of the book. In 2014, it looks much different. Bridging Book established a new mixed-media book for children and presents...
The Digital Book: curating emails via the EPUB format

The Digital Book: curating emails via the EPUB format

During the first block of the Spring semester, a group of MA New Media students took part in the elective The Digital Book. This course aims to contextualise the rise of digital publishing in theoretical terms, focussing on themes...

Twitternovels – More Twitter than novel

“Paradoxically, it is this very immutability of paper which is now increasingly proving to be an advantage rather than a weakness, particularly in the context of an ever-changing (thus ephemeral) digital publishing world.” (Ludovico 10, 2012) Though this by...
Is piracy democratising education?

Is piracy democratising education?

Piracy, be it of software, music or books, is rarely spoken of in a positive light (Liang 356). Governments and organisations around the world are scrambling to stop copyright infringement from eating into profits. My relationship with piracy started...
Apple’s textbooks – too cool for school?

Apple’s textbooks – too cool for school?

.ibooks is Apple’s proprietary ebook format based on the EPUB standard, created with the free iBook Author layout software for publishing ebooks. Due to some dissimilarities between CSS tags used in the iBooks format file, it isn’t compatible with...
Please, let’s take book out of e-book

Please, let’s take book out of e-book

The e-book, threat or treasure, is definitely a hot topic within the book industry . As we all know, there is still quite some room for improvement and innovation. But how to approach the e-book? That remains the central...

Subverting the System: How to Annoy Amazon in Five Neat Little Steps

It’s a disquieting idea: everything you do on the web, on your smartphone and on your tablet is being tracked, and all that data is gathered somewhere in the void of the internet. Thankfully, most of that data is...
Is HTML the solution for digital reading?

Is HTML the solution for digital reading?

As you may have noticed, we live in quite an interesting time regarding publishing. As the digital revolution evolves, new publishing forms are coming up. At this point we can not yet say which format we will be using...
Digital books: The end of private reading?

Digital books: The end of private reading?

Digital books are touted for their new possibilities: portability, searchability, durability and ubiquitous notes and bookmarks, to name a few. But while readers benefit from this, so do third parties. The thought of someone reading over your shoulder feels...
Collages by Broken Kindle Screens

Collages by Broken Kindle Screens

A collaboration between artists Sebastian Shmieg and Silvio Lorusso, this project examines and documents 56 images of broken Amazon Kindle display screens that result in quite astonishing pieces of collage art. In an era of highly advanced computing technology,...

Out with the old, in with the new?

The emerge of a new medium often raises the question: what will happen to the old medium? The e-reader can be seen as a remediation of the traditional printed book. But has the e-reader changed the way we buy...

The Yoza Project : Cellphones and ‘mlearning’ in South-Africa.

Storytelling is the conveying of narratives, an idea as old as human history itself. The origins of narration are difficult to grasp, and because this phenomenon plays such a prominent role in most of our lives, no one is...

E-books: que sera, sera. (but that’s ok, as long as we’re still reading)

One of the main challenges that the emergence of e-books has brought upon us is linked to the idea of ownership, be it the ownership of copyright or the actual feeling one gets when purchasing a book. Some argue...
The Shelfless Bookstore

The Shelfless Bookstore

What is the difference between a traditional bookstore and an online bookstore? You could say it’s in the opening hours, the delivery time and number of employees, but let’s focus on one of the main differences. A traditional bookstore...

Digital Publishing in Education

In this new era of digital publishing, we should not only be concerned with the things we can can do in our leisure time, moreover, we should try to find the boundaries of what digital publishing can mean to...
Alice in iPad, the New Wonderland.

Alice in iPad, the New Wonderland.

Will fairy tales live happily ever after in the digital publishing era? Once upon a time, electronic signatures didn’t designate us as individuals, passwords didn’t determine if we would be denied or not the access in data and emoticons...

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....
Is Google Going To Ruin The E-reader’s Party?

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 Clay Tablet Is Not a Book

Mcluhan believed the medium to be the message. When we are trying to understand the effects of the medium, we ought to analyze the medium. And when the medium changes, the message is bound to transform. Who’s utopian vision...
The Future

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...

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...

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...