Search

It was the end of 2008, October, right before the holiday shopping season. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey released her highly anticipated Favorite Things list, with the Amazon Kindle topping the gadget category. • This is the moment that the concept of electronic paper, or e-paper, went mainstream. • But this black-and-white, reflective display that always appeared to be on was invented well before the Amazon Kindle made it famous. Its story began a decade earlier, in 1997, at the MIT Media Lab, when it was created by two students, J.D. Albert and Barrett Comiskey, who were inspired by their professor Joseph Jacobson. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

September 14, 2000, is a date which will live in, well, "nonfamy," if I may be permitted such a neologism. That day, Microsoft released Windows Millennium Edition, its most forgettable operating system. It was also the day I posted the entry p-book to my Word Spy site, along with the following prognostication: "Within a few years, using the word 'book' without any kind of modifier will be confusing because people won't know if you?re talking about a book printed on paper or one that's printed on electrons (so to speak). So I predict that 'p-book'...will become a common noun that will help us distinguish between the paper and electronic formats." · For a while it looked like I couldn't have been more wrong. The number of citations for "p-book" (as well as "pbook") in the Nexis media database went from 20 in 2000 and 19 in 2001 to just 1 in 2003 and 2 in 2004. But as e?books have become more popular, the word p-book has been showing renewed signs of life, with 20 citations in 2010, 24 in 2011, and 28 in 2012. · Language prediction is a mug's game, but it's certain that digital books (as opposed to printed analog books) are here to stay. Sales of e-books (also known as ebooks or eBooks; there is much hand-wringing in the industry over the correct spelling) have slowed down recently, but they remain the fastest growing (or, for some companies, the only growing) segment of the publishing industry. The past few years have seen a steady increase in the number of writers?amateurs as well as professionals?who are getting into digital publishing (or e-publishing). For many writers, breaking into DIY publishing is a simple matter of saving a word processing document as a PDF, then putting up that file on a website along with a PayPal donation form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses a paper published by Daniel and Sally Wiener Grotta in this issue about online publishing of books by authors.

The article reports on the major upgrades in the IEEE Spectrum web site. Aside from the technical improvements, the magazine web site now offers more Web-only audio, video and graphical content as well as several blogs related to information technology. There will be blogs about current technical events, gaming and gadgets, venture capital, software systems and software engineers, robotics as well as Microsoft research. The web site is in continuous development because "Spectrum" knows that the readers expect their web site to be increasingly interactive and not just a place where they can read text on screen instead of on paper.