• Books in the Age of the iPad [Craig Mod] – I propose the following to be considered whenever we think of printing a book
  * The Books We Make embrace their physicality — working in concert with the content to illuminate the narrative
  * The Books We Make are confident in form and usage of material
  * The Books We Make exploit the advantages of print
  * The Books We Make are built to last
  The result of this is:
  * The Books We Make will feel whole and solid in the hands
  * The Books We Make will smell like now forgotten, far away libraries
  * The Books We Make will be something of which even our children — who have fully embraced all things digital — will understand the worth
  * The Books We Make will always remind people that the printed book can be a sculpture for thoughts and ideas;Anything less than this will be stepped over and promptly forgotten in the digital march forward. Goodbye disposable books. Hello new canvases.
• In Our Parents’ Bookshelves [The Millions] – A virtue of digital books is hey take up no space at all!—but even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf. What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life: that you bake bread, vacationed in China, fetishize Melville, aspire to read Shakespeare, have coped with loss, and still tote around a copy of The Missing Piece as a totem of your childhood. What can a Kindle tell you about yourself or say to those who visit your house? All it offers is blithe reassurance that there is progress in the world, and that you are a part of it…To the extent that bookshelves persist, it will be in self-conscious form, as display cases filled with only the books we valued enough to acquire and preserve in hard copy. The more interesting story, the open-ended, undirected progression of a life defined by books will be lost to a digital world in which there is no such thing as time at all.

• Things I Would Rather Read On Paper – I recently built up a hefty backlog of unread articles, and the prospect of reading them all on a laptop or iPhone screen seemed like more of a chore than a pleasure. I should really get around to actually reading some of these things that I'm saving to Read Later. Something had obviously gone wrong. I had personally curated a series of articles, blog posts and essays that I was genuinely interested in, but somehow the resulting collection felt like a to-do list, yet another inbox on my computer waiting to be un-bolded. What I really wanted was a nicer user interface to these articles. So I copy-and-pasted the text of my unread articles from Instapaper into a PDF, uploaded it to Lulu.com, and ordered a single book.
• As innovative products are introduced, category boundaries are continually shifting and new categories emerging – Lexar Media, a digital photography start-up founded in 1996, sold memory cards. They used a variety of signals to persuade early adopters, especially professional photographers, to classify the memory cards that store pictures as similar to the silver halide film used in analog cameras.

  Lexar Media’s product was put in gold packaging similar to Kodak’s film cartridges, given a speed rating to create an analogy to ISO ratings, labeled as “digital film” on the package and in advertising, and placed in the camera section of retail stores.

  Sony promoted a competing categorization, labeling its cards “Memory Stick” and advocating their use for many of the company’s consumer electronics devices, including digital music players, handhelds and digital camcorders. Other companies also adopted this broader memory classification, so Lexar Media’s success in establishing memory cards as analogous to film was short-lived, and the company stopped promoting the cards as digital film.

• Will Piracy Become a Problem for E-Books? – Until now, few readers have preferred e-books to printed or audible versions, so the public availability of free-for-the-taking copies did not much matter. But e-books won’t stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens. So, too, are computer tablets that can serve as giant e-readers, and hardware that will not be very hard at all: a thin display flexible enough to roll up into a tube.

  With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.

• Books, Printing, and Self-Publishing » Lone Gunman – In an age of increasing digitization, objects become more valuable. And that value is the reason print media will not die, even if it does shrink. My prediction for print media, therefore, is two-fold: you will see small run, local editions of hardbound books and quick, cheap paperbacks. Couple this with our new attitudes on the democratization of content online and you are going to find quite a number of people self-publishing books. In fact, there are number of folks doing interesting things already:
• Hybrid Books Add Video and Web Features to Reading – In the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment.

  Simon & Schuster is working with a multimedia partner to release four “vooks,” which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read ­ and viewed ­ online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

  Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the television series “CSI,” released “Level 26: Dark Origins,” a novel ­ published on paper, as an e-book and in an audio version ­ in which readers are invited to log on to a Web site to watch brief videos that flesh out the plot.

  Some publishers say this kind of multimedia hybrid is necessary to lure modern readers who crave something different. But reading experts question whether fiddling with the parameters of books ultimately degrades the act of reading.

• New York Art Book Fair Bustles at P.S. 1 Arts Center in Queens – If you harbor even a speck of doubt about the continuing viability of hold-in-your-hand-and-turn-the-pages print publications, check out the New York Art Book Fair this weekend. You’ll find thousands of new books — smart, weird, engrossing, beautiful — that will never be Kindle-compatible. They’ll make you feel good.

• BusinessWeek looks at how Steelcase went from user research data to insights to opportunities – "But most innovations depend on nontraditional research methods—ethnographic studies, customer-created collages, and so on—that can't easily be sliced and diced in Excel. That means synthesis can be one of the most challenging steps in the innovation process." This is an issue I'll be addressing in my upcoming workshop at EPIC 2009 "Moving from Data to Insights to Opportunities"
• The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies – Not technically a museum (or even an Internet museum) as they've really just aggregated images that represent tools and ways of working that have or are in the process of obsoleting.

Daisy Sour Cream has supposedly been offering Fresh Thinking on their foil seals for several years, but I just noticed it, and was pleasantly surprised. They took an opportunity to create a front-of-house experience when I was expecting a back-of-house experience. They’ve used printing technology to enable a richer experience: they aren’t simply reinforcing their logo after you’ve already purchased; they are providing content that plays emotionally at the most emotional point of usage – when the product is first opened (I’d suggest the multisensory stimulus and associated anticipation is more emotional than eating it, even).

The foil seals on our containers do have a functional purpose – to keep our products their absolute freshest and safest for our consumers. But we wanted them to do more than that. So a few years ago, we created our “Fresh Thinking” foil seals, featuring uplifting, positive thoughts from Daisy. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we do creating them.

Previously:

• Observational Ephemera
• Swallowing innovation
• What Is The Loon Smoking?
• Fruit 2.0
• Vernacular design – where form ignores function

Snausages Fortune Snookies™ are dog treats with canine-centric fortunes printed on ’em. It doesn’t matter that dogs can’t read, I guess. We’re taking the whole projection/pets-as-family thing really really far; I’m sure it’ll go further, but this is awfully silly.

I have no idea of Google Maps is in Beta or not, but man, is it broken. In Firefox and in IE, I can not print a map. It’ll generate a nice print preview with all the directions and so on, but the all-important IMAGE is absent. Argh.

Do you ever find yourself screwing around with some semi-working website (especially one you trust and expect to work, like Google) for a ridiculously long time, only to have to completely throw up your hands and go onto another method? It’s nice that it’s free and all, but what a waste of time! This used to work only recently. Very annoying!

Newspaper Printing Kiosk

We saw this in Hong Kong. From this kiosk, you could download and print (reformatted) recent versions of many different newspapers from around the planet.

[via Pasta and Vinegar]. Technology is clearly the mother of invention here. What else can we customize? How’s about mouthgards!