Mssv

Like a gamer to Starcraft 2, I can’t help but be attracted to articles about the death of books, and even better, the death of long-form reading. There’s something about the desperate handwringing that pushes almost every intellectual button I have, from impassioned but futile appeals to the past, to lurid depictions of how new [...]

The iPhone 4 may be the last major advance in mobile phones we’ll ever see. There’ll still be plenty of incremental and useful improvements, but it’s hard to see what kind of attention-grabbing features are left:

The Retina screen, at 326 pixels per inch, approaches the limits of human vision; it’s the end of the line [...]

Reading on the iPad is fantastic. I don’t care what other people have said, I just know that after using it for a fortnight, I can tell that it’s changed the way I’ll read forever.
I used to spend several hours a day in front of my iMac at home, using a combination of Google Reader [...]

In Publishing: The Revolutionary Future, an article in the New York Review of Books, Jason Epstein talks about the massive changes that are in store for publishing and books with the advent of digital content and devices. The article begins well, summarising the revolutionary changes wrought by Gutenberg’s press, and quickly reaches the present day [...]

My current desktop is a 2006 iMac – the first generation of Intel desktops, with a Core Duo 2.0ghz processor and ATI X1600 card. Strip away the numbers, and what you get is a computer that still handles everyday tasks like watching videos and browsing the web with perfect ease. Unfortunately, when it comes to [...]

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
- Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the [...]

“You’re better off reading a bunch of blogs than most columnists.” – me, earlier today.
Every time I open the Guardian, or the Times, or any other newspaper, I am disappointed by the poor quality of the columns and editorial. For the most part, they’re barely-informed polemics that are constrained by word limits and motivated by [...]

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, Director of the University Library at Harvard, writes about Google’s efforts to digitise the world’s books and create a new universal library. For the most part, the article is really very well-written and enlightening.
However, when comes around to criticising Google Book Search [...]

Naomi Alderman, Perplex City lead writer, author of Disobedience, etc, wrote an article in the Sunday Times about the future of books. I’ve talked to Naomi often about eBooks and was quoted in the article:
Imagine, for example, a novel designed to take advantage of the features of the new must-have geek hipster accessory: the [...]

Imagine a device, similar in appearance to the iPhone, that you could point at a street sign in a foreign language, and it would display that sign on the screen – translated. I described this dream device to some friends a few weeks ago, explaining that there was nothing technically insurmountable about it – optical [...]