eBook Revolution?
Amazon is reporting that on Christmas it sold more Kindle books than physicals books. At the moment, because it insists on charging no more than $9.99 for books, even for best-sellers, and despite publisher protests, Amazon loses money on each Kindle book it sells.
Now, we may find this impressive or not in and of itself -- and, speaking in my capacity as an author, I'm perfectly happy to sell e-books to those who prefer to read in that format; and I see the value in selling a high volume of individually cheaper books -- but I'm skeptical about this statistic and its importance. To understand why, look at the list of Kindle bestsellers.
At the time of this posting, 7 out of 10 of the bestselling books for the Kindle cost $0.00. That's right, lots of authors are giving Kindle books away, and consumers predictably prefer free books to books that cost them money. I mean, really, is it any surprise that people are willing to download lots and lots of free books?
Mind Reading, Writing
The Singularity-loving transhumanist guys over at h+ magazine have an interesting article on technologies that allow people to interface with machines via thought.
A brain wave study presented at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society shows that people with electrodes in their brains can “type” (input data into a computer) using just their minds.... The patients were asked to say or imagine words flashed on a screen while their brain activity was recorded. Schalk’s team then used specially designed decoder algorithms to predict the vowels and consonants of the word, using only the pattern of brain activity. They found that both speaking and imagining the word gave roughly the same level of accuracy.
The article emphasizes the active aspects of this technology, what it allows users to do with/to their computers, e.g. writing, tweeting, moving a cursor across the screen. What Surfdaddy Orca -- the author of this article; I'm not joking... -- doesn't talk about are the obvious ethical/philosophical/political counterparts to all the active things this technology lets us do or will let us do someday.
I.e., helping quadriplegics communicate is vitally important and wonderful, but to work in the first place, this set of technologies needs first to be able to read minds accurately and reliably. If we can do that (read minds), can we also read them from a distance? If we can read minds from a distance, should I be ordering myself up a tinfoil hat?
That thin and flimsy fiberboard wall separating our outside from our inside may just have gotten a little thinner.
DFW @ MLA II
I'm still working on trying to figure out how to restore my older blog postings. I think my XML export file might've been corrupted during export. In the worst case scenario, I'll manually restore my old posts, though that'll screw up the dates and mean all comments on these posts will be forever lost.
On an unrelated note, I want to put in a plug for the special session I helped organize at the upcoming MLA Convention in Philadelphia. If you're around, please stop by "The Legacy of David Foster Wallace," which is at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, December 30th, in Independence Salon I at the Philadelphia Marriott.
We have a distinguished group of panelists including Stephen J. Burn (North Michigan U.), Marshall Boswell (Rhodes C.), Sam Cohen (U. of Missouri, Columbia), John Conley (UMN, Twin Cities), Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona), Mary Holland (SUNY New Paltz), and -- very fortunately -- Wallace's Little, Brown editor, Michael Pietsch.
I'll be talking about how Wallace's interpretation of the role of the avant-garde shaped his literary projects.
From Google Goggles to Omni Science
Google has created an interesting new product for Android-based mobile devices called Google Goggles, which allows you to do visual searches based on images your phone's camera captures. Needless to say, this is just one more step on the long road to the visual search revolution, as described in Pop Apocalypse. It's all happening right on schedule, and each incremental step will seem -- as this does! -- real neat when it happens.
Repairs Forthcoming
I've managed to import my old blogger postings to WordPress, but I still can't quite import my XML export file containing everything I've written since I switched to this site. I hope to resolve this problem shortly, and restore all the shiny design elements while I'm at it.
Site problems
Please excuse the blankness of this page as I fix some errors with my site. We'll be live again, ASAP.
From Google Goggles to Omni Science
Google has created an interesting new product for Android-based mobile devices called Google Goggles, which allows you to do visual searches based on images your phone's camera captures. Needless to say, this is just one more step on the long road to the visual search revolution, as described in Pop Apocalypse. It's all happening right on schedule, and each incremental step will seem -- as this does! -- real neat when it happens.