Accessibility is what allows me to use things like a phone, computer, or an ATM. May 9th is all about this. -Tommy Edison, the Blind Film Critic. (previously)
Global Accessibility Awareness Day is today. It's a day to consider how people with disabilities experience the web, software, mobile devices, games and so on, targeted towards designers, developers, usability professionals and others without much experience with accessibility. There are
public events scheduled all over the world, as well as
other accessibility-related events. To participate on your own, try
one of the suggested activities: turn off your mouse or trackpad and use only your keyboard to navigate websites, try using a free screen reader, such as
NVDA for Windows or the built in
VoiceOver for Mac and iOS, try watching some streaming videos or movies with captions or
add some of your own to a video you've uploaded. Then relax with a sample of
described video:
Katniss, from the Hunger Games, goes hunting. [more inside]
posted by shirobara
on May 9, 2013 -
10 comments
"..it is refreshing to
see Jason Merkoski, a leader of the team that built Amazon's first Kindle, dispense with the usual techo-utopianism and say, “I think we’ve made a proverbial pact with the devil in digitizing our words.”
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Apr 9, 2013 -
90 comments
What’s a Readlist? A group of web pages—articles, recipes, course materials, anything—bundled into an e-book you can send to your Kindle, iPad, or iPhone.
posted by netbros
on May 23, 2012 -
43 comments
Hugh Howey was a self-published novelist of no real success. Until
WOOL, that is - a 15,000 word "little throwaway story" he uploaded to Amazon's Kindle Marketplace one day and promptly forget about. The story he didn't blog, didn't tweet, and didn't even sell on his site hit #2 on the Kindle SciFi Bestseller list and "
changed the course of e-books."
[more inside]
posted by DarlingBri
on Jan 15, 2012 -
140 comments
Do you want some Spam with your Kindle? Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc's publishing foray.
posted by Fizz
on Jun 17, 2011 -
95 comments
"
English As She Is Spoke is a broken Portuguese-to-English phrasebook written by two translators, José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino. Sort of. You see, in reality, translator Pedro Carolino wanted to create a phrasebook on his own. Not knowing English, he took José da Fonseca’s French-to-English phrasebook and then used a Portuguese-to-French phrasebook to translate that. It’s sort of like what you and your friends do on Google Translate, but with a poor, mislead Portuguese man doing it by hand in candlelight."
[more inside]
posted by item
on Apr 18, 2011 -
52 comments
A new kind of book has been created in Holland, where its sold over 1m copies since it came out in 2009. Now finding its way to England, called the "flipback", the pages are super thin Bible paper with a special lay-flat spine and small format, making it suitable for reading with one hand, thumb page-flips, and shirt pocket storage.
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 21, 2011 -
63 comments
Amanda Hocking is 26 years old. She has 9 self-published books to her name, and sells 100,000+ copies of those ebooks per month. She has never been traditionally published. ... And it’s no stretch to say – at $3 per book/70% per sale for the Kindle store... there is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all on her own. (related)
posted by Joe Beese
on Mar 1, 2011 -
244 comments
Perhaps I don’t have the allegiance to paper that I ought to because anybody who invests in The Absolute Sandman, all four volumes, is now carrying 40 pounds of paper and cardboard around with them. And they hurt and they complain, “Oh, I feel guilty.” And I look at it and go, you’re not getting anything that is quantitatively or qualitatively better than the experience you’d be getting on an iPad, where you can enlarge the pages, you can move it around, it’s following the eye, and you can flip the pages. -
Neil Gaiman on digital comics. Will this be the year of comics readng devices, as comiXology CEO
David Steinberger says? Comixology is certianly
leading the way, announcing tools for
independant comics creators that will allow them to publish their comics via the comixology store, complete with the "guided views" which are a core part of their viewing experience. One creator who is full embracing digital is
Alex De Campi, whose Napoleonic comic
Valentine is not only published across a range of devices (iOs, Epub, Android, Kindle) but also in
14 languages, something that would have been difficult-to-impossible otherwise.
Previous digital comics,
Comixology suggestions
posted by Artw
on Oct 17, 2010 -
47 comments
The web browser on the Kindle may not be the slickest piece of software in the world, barely sufficing for checking email and basic surfing, but there's one thing it excels at: web-based text adventures. Turn on your wireless connection, peck out
PortableQuest.com on those tiny little keys and prepare for a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. (You can play without a kindle as well.) [created by
edman, via
mefi projects]
posted by Vectorcon Systems
on Oct 6, 2010 -
13 comments
The announcement of the
iPad earlier this week has prompted a lot of discussion about ebook prices among publishers and their sales partners. That discussion took a major turn yesterday when
Amazon pulled the buy buttons for Macmillan's books off their site. Many of Macmillan's titles are still available through Amazon, but only through third parties. Right now, one of the largest publishers in America is no longer available from Amazon because they can not agree on ebook prices.
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on Jan 30, 2010 -
306 comments
To Marty, This bespells doom! A recent reading in Manhattan at the Strand bookstore by David Sedaris, whose most recent book is “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” may have offered a glimpse of the future. A man named Marty who had waited in the book-signing line presented his Kindle, on the back of which Mr. Sedaris, in mock horror, wrote, “This bespells doom.” (The signed Kindle was photographed, but its owner’s full name is unknown.)
posted by Fizz
on Jun 16, 2009 -
53 comments
With Rupert Murdoch
planning to start charging for access to some of the content of his newspaper's websites is this the
end of the age of
free? But will it
rescue the newspaper industry? Or is the Kindle or other
ebook reader the answer? And if free news on the web is unsustainable from advertising
what about YouTube, Twitter and Facebook?
posted by fearfulsymmetry
on May 10, 2009 -
31 comments
Some are calling it the "Kindle Killer". (Demo launch video
at engadget.) Plastic Logic's new e-reader, expected to be out in the first half of 2009, does promise to offer a lot that Kindle and most other other popular e-readers don't, like a larger display, big enough to provide a newspaper or magazine layout; touch-based markup and annotation; the ability to read standard documents and other file types without conversion; (promised) Wi-Fi connectivity (including the ability to transfer documents between readers); and last but not least,
a screen display that you can hit with a shoe, and isn't that something we've all been waiting for during these tense times?
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Sep 13, 2008 -
85 comments
