Masters of Media

Digital Comics in the face of DRM

With the dominating presence of smartphone and tablet technologies within todays current market, it is clear to see why major comic book publishers have placed large amounts of focus and resources into the digital publishing frontier. Both interactive elements...

By Joseph Jackson on 03/04/13 1

Spam books: How Amazon is selling you 35 Shades of Gray

Amazon’s Kindle has become somewhat of an industry leader for digital books or e-book consumption. With millions of digital books selling through the single platform reader as well as garnering a general mainstream acceptance, there is a growing concern...

By Geoff Kim on 03/04/13 Comments Off

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...

By Vicentiu Dinga on 03/04/13 Comments Off

EPUB – A Book Pirate’s Go-To Format

EPUB, short for “electronic publication”, is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It was initially developed in 2007 as a way to streamline digital publishing. What the IDPF didn’t consider back then, is the...

By Bozhan Chipev on 03/03/13 Comments Off

More than the written word

As a former literature student, one might expect me to be on top of all the new, digital developments in the book business that are happening as we speak. Unfortunately I am not. My technical knowledge is quite limited;...

By Myrthe Bösensell on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Does Adobe Digital Editions replace the paper book? A consumer’s report.

Although I’m only 25 years old, I sometimes feel like I should join my 80-years-old uncle Wim. He lives in a peacefull retirement house called Aar en Amstel, which means as much as ear of corn by the river...

By Marijke van Leeuwen on 03/03/13 Comments Off

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...

By Doris Zevenbergen on 03/03/13 Comments Off

DjVU – Something old, something new

“I’m an e-book nitwit and frankly I don’t care”. About a year ago I still could not believe e-books could be anything but miserable. I was sure that I would never feel the same way about reading from a...

By Maaike Hansen on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Privacy in the era of Amazon Kindle

Privacy. According to The Oxford English Dictionary it is a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. When we were young, we were taught that it is not polite to read over someone else’s...

By Monika van Dijke on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Goodreads: share what you’re reading.

In his article ‘The abuses of literacy: Amazon Kindle and it’s right to read’ Ted Striphas talks about the e-reader gadget Kindle, one of the many devices that allows readers all over the world (in Kindle’s case, Amazon customers)...

By Steff van Dorp on 03/03/13 1

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...

By Crispijn Sleeboom on 03/03/13 2

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...

By Sebastiaan Andeweg on 03/03/13 Comments Off

Now for Some Light Reading: A Bibliofile’s Review of the Sony PRS T2 e-reader

For a long time, I felt an aversion towards e-readers and electronic reading. How could reading from a screen ever top reading from paper? How could one simple, small device triumph over bookshelves crammed with beautiful books? Of course,...

By Ingrid van der Mooren on 03/03/13 Comments Off

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...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 03/03/13 Comments Off

What VHS and PDF teach us about the e-book format

Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the most well known computer formats in the world. It can be used to read electronic books. PDF is also very interesting because it’s developed into the standard document file. I will...

By Tomas Blansjaar on 03/01/13 Comments Off

From brick-and-mortar to eCommerce… and vice versa

Being able to buy your Ikea sofa online and going to a retail store to get your Google products. It may seem odd when stated like this, but we are seeing more trends of companies making a turn in...

By Leonie Nijenmanting on 03/01/13 Comments Off

[Event] Unlike Us #3 | Social Media: Design or Decline

This March, the Unlike Us conference is taking place in Amsterdam for a second consecutive year. Hosted by Amsterdam’s Institute of Network Cultures, the event gathers academics, artists and activists to discuss ‘social media monopolies and their alternatives’. Unlike...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 02/28/13 Comments Off

Amazon starts removing ‘questionable reviews’

What do you do when you are one of the biggest online department stores and the review system that once seemed like an effective tool for customers to share experiences turns out to be used for fake reviews, through...

By Leonie Nijenmanting on 02/18/13 Comments Off

Data Art: From the Aesthetic Conceptualization of Data to Information Critique

The current ubiquity of data populating every aspect of an individual’s digitally connected existence, alongside the computational possibilities of harnessing the same to convert it into distilled information, has introduced the theme of data as one of the most...

By Ana Crisostomo on 02/12/13 Comments Off

Web Aesthetics ‘book adaption’ on Facebook

By: Basri Hoogstrate, Jeroen Rademakers, Jules Mataly and Juliana Marques The Wild Card Symposium, part of our Master Degree at the University of Amsterdam gave us the occasion to read a book as a group, discuss it and came...

By Juliana Marques on 11/20/12 1

Web historiography of MuchMusic.com

“Just as video killed the radio star three decades ago, the Internet has killed music television in the new millennium.” – Greg Quill The Role of Music on MuchMusic.com from 1996 to 2012 Before MTV’s arrival in Canada, the...

By Jolien Siemerink on 11/18/12 Comments Off

Virality through Facebook

Facebook is now more than nine years old and it is very interesting to see what changes Facebook is going through. It started out with Facemash in 2003, developed into thefacebook.com and now we all know it as Facebook....

By Jaimy Quadekker on 11/15/12 Comments Off

Fake Identities in Social Media

The popularity of social media networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, has resulted in new forms of user performance and identity. Each new online account creates a new identity in which users must negotiate issues of disclosure, security, and...

By Joe Mier on 11/14/12 4

The Attractive Symbols of the Web

At the beginning of the twentieth century, photography was considered to be the most neutral expression of optical data (Lupston 1986). This changed the perception and according to the Austrian philosopher, economist and sociologist Otto Neurath this development demanded...

By Lauressa Ford on 11/14/12 1