• Waldo Hunt, 88, dies; repopularized pop-up books in 1960s – "He was such an important publisher of pop-up books who really advanced them technically. The pop-up designers who worked for him were amazing creative engineers," said Cynthia Burlingham, director of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum of UCLA.

  The first golden age of movable books began in the late 1800s, when European publishers crafted elaborate books for children, and ended with the onset of World War I. With Mr. Hunt's epiphany, the second golden age was about to begin.

  "I knew I'd found the magic key," Mr. Hunt said. "No one was doing pop-ups in this country. No one could afford to make them here. They had to be done by hand, and labor was too expensive."

  He started Graphics International, and produced a series of pop-up ads featuring zoo scenes as part of a magazine campaign for Wrigley's gum. Soon, his company was creating pop-up table decorations and greeting cards for Hallmark.

• Electronic Popable Books from MIT – Electronic popables integrate paper-based electronic sensors that allow amazing interactivity — turning on lights and moving images at the touch of a finger. Will it catch on or will the line between printing on paper and electronic media become so blurred that consumers will opt to watch the story on a screen?
• StoryCorps: National Day of Listening – On the day after Thanksgiving, set aside one hour to record a conversation with someone important to you. You can interview anyone you choose: an older relative, a friend, a teacher, or someone from the neighborhood.

  You can preserve the interview using recording equipment readily available in most homes, such as cell phones, tape recorders, computers, or even pen and paper. Our free Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide is easy to use and will prepare you and your interview partner to record a memorable conversation, no matter which recording method you choose.

  Make a yearly tradition of listening to and preserving a loved one’s story. The stories you collect will become treasured keepsakes that grow more valuable with each passing generation.
  (via BoingBoing)

• London 2009 – a set on Flickr – My London pictures from our recent visit
• Every year, The Harris Poll asks a cross-section of adults whether they think about 20 leading industries do a good or a bad job of serving their consumers. – Note that the cable industry regularly appears on this poll as doing a bad job.
• Time Warner insincerely and manipulatively asks customers to "vote" if it should "get tough" or "roll over" – Facing expiring deals with a number of key programmers, the nation's second-largest cable operator is launching a Web site, rolloverorgettough.com, which it says is designed to give its subscribers a voice in what it calls unfair price demands by content suppliers. Time Warner says those who operate broadcast and cable networks are asking for "incredible price hikes," as much as 300%. Customers will be able to vote on whether the operator rolls over, or should get tough, about price increases.

  "You're our customers, so help us decide what to do. We're just one company, but there are millions of you. Together, we just might be able to make a difference in what America pays for its favorite entertainment."

• The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg (1971???? I had no idea!!!) – Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.

  He then proceeded to type in the "Declaration of Independence" and tried to send it to everyone on the networks … which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss at creating an early version of what was later called the "Internet Virus."

  A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as

• Storylistening for consumer insight – There are many ways of collecting stories but here are three that may be new to you:
  * Anecdote circles
  * Naive interviewers
  * Mass narrative capture
  Collecting stories is not about finding the one perfect story that describes a brand or a consumer experience. Rather it is about gathering a broad spread of qualitative data. Individually a story may be seen to be banal but their power lies in the cumulative effect of many stories.

  Interpreting stories
  * Experts
  * Machines
  * Participants

  Story interpretation is best done by a range of groups (e.g. consumers themselves, a marketing department) that may have differing perspectives on the same situation. The most appropriate techniques often avoid direct analysis initially and allow different groups to immerse themselves in the stories to produce nuanced interpretations of the consumers' world.
  (via DinaMehta.com)

• Sony, B&N promise to rekindle rights for book owners – Boing Boing recently talked to Sony's Steve Haber, President of Digital Reading, about its flagship ebook reader, named the "Daily Edition." "Our commitment is that you bought it, you own it," Haber said. "Our hope is to see this as ubiquitous. Buy on any device, read on any device. … We're obligated to have DRM but we don't pull content back."
• OnFiction is a magazine with the aim of developing the psychology of fiction. – Using theoretical and empirical perspectives, we endeavour to understand how fiction is created, and how readers and audience members engage in it.
• What design researchers can learn from hostage negotiators – Interesting to look at various collaboration and communication scenarios and unpack what's going on to define some principles that can be reused. Not sure how much new about design research is brought to light here, but the framing may make it more memorable or understandable. Always glad to see the emphasis on rapport, but I don't agree with their hostage-rapport approach as a one-size-fits-all method for design research rapport building. I also think they underplay the emotional levels that good design research can uncover. Beyond frustration with products, we hear stories about cancer, divorce, infertility, hopes, dreams, and beyond. All very charged stuff.
• If you outlaw meep, only outlaws will say meep – Tthe nonsense word started with the 1980s Muppet character Beaker. Bob Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University, said he first heard students meep about a year ago during a class screening of a television show.
  "Something happened and one of them said 'Meep,'" he said. "And then they all started doing it."

  The meeps, he said, came from all of the students in the class in rapid-fire succession. When he asked them what that meant, they said it didn't really mean anything.

  But meeping doesn't seem to be funny to Danvers High School Principal Thomas Murray, who threatened to suspend students caught meeping in school.

  In an interview with the Salem News, Murray said automated calls were made to parents, warning them of the possible punishment after administrators learned that students were conspiring online to mass-meep in one part of the school building.

  (via MeFi)

• IST2010ENG/ EDEBIYAT / 40 Districts 40 Books by 40 Authors: ‘My Istanbul’ series at Tüyap 2009… – My Istanbul is a monumental project of 40 books in which 40 distinguished authors told their own districts.

  40 authors born and lived in Istanbul wrote their own feelings, thoughts and memories in their own style about 40 districts of Istanbul for this project originated from the idea that every district has a different story, a different identity and a different spirit.

  Realized in cooperation with Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Literature Directorate and Heyamola Publications the project ‘My Istanbul’ will display Istanbul’s recent history by the words of witnesses while each district is being re-interpreted by sui generis views of the authors.

• Jake Cressman – Part of the Hot Studio team that won the Portigal Consulting/Core77 1-Hour Design Challenge! Congrats, Jake!
• CONGRATS: Hot wins ‘The Future of Digital Reading’ design challenge – Designers + Beer = Fun: Late on a Friday afternoon, a group of Hot’s designers and a good-natured friend gathered in Hot’s biggest conference room. We spread books of all sizes out on the conference table, salty and sweet snacks in every corner, and several six packs of beer on ice. What more could you need? We watched segments from Portigal Consulting’s video where they outlined their findings, and paused a few times to discuss amongst ourselves. After we got comfortable with the background material, we divided into a couple teams, each focusing on a different approach

  The winning SuperFlyer concept came from a collaboration of Shalin Amin, Holly Hagen, Leslie Kang, and our buddy Jake Cressman.

• Online and on iPhone, authors read 10 pages of their latest work – Aiming to introduce readers to authors they aren't yet familiar with, zehnSeiten (German for ten pages) promotes writers through videos that feature them reading ten pages from their latest novel.

  Available both online and as an iPhone app, the videos are simple, fixed-camera affairs. No dramatic introductions or filmed scenes, just black and white recordings of authors sitting at a table and reading from their work. By eliminating frills, the focus is on the author and production time and costs are kept to a minimum.

• A Story Before Bed – asynchronous distant storytime – As Jason Kottke explains "A Story Before Bed allows you to record yourself reading a bedtime story to a faraway child…maybe you're away from home on business or a grandparent who lives in another state or just working late. When storytime rolls around, the child sees the book onscreen plus a video of you reading it to them. Slick."
• Michael Turner on authors, digital, content, and meaning – (highly edited excerpt) – The problem with seeing "digital tools" as "problems" lies in the writer's inability to see the computer and the Internet less as tools than as a medium — the analogy being that the Internet is to the palette what the computer is to the canvas. If an author identifies his or herself as a "good old-fashioned storyteller", someone of bad manners and singular genius, a romantic, a lovable eccentric whose hat is always a little bit too big for their head, then the best way to convey that fantasy — and the book it squirted from — is to complain about "digital tools."

  Some authors have taken to [publisher requests to use digital to promote] better than others…using their books as a device by which to cast shade, create depth, movement, hopefully leading them to new places, new ways of making meaning.
  (via kottke)

• Electric Literature Magazine Offers Fiction in New Media – The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days.
• French Government Offers Free Newspapers to Young Readers – Under “My Free Newspaper,” 18- to 24-year-olds will be offered a free, yearlong subscription to a newspaper of their choice.

  “Winning back young readers is essential for the financial survival of the press, and for its civic dimension,” the culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, said.

• In praise of the single-use device – 1) The over­all trend is clearly towards media devices with mul­ti­ple (but dis­crete) func­tions.
  2) There’s still room for a solid hand­ful of dedicated-use devices who do their job really, really well; for read­ing plain text, a device like the Kin­dle could fit into that cat­e­gory.
  3) A lot of what we read isn’t plain text. It never was.

  Poten­tial solutions:

  1) When­ever pos­si­ble, tear down the walls between the “sep­a­rate” func­tions on multi-function devices. It should feel like a device that has one func­tion — just that the func­tion is com­plex, mul­ti­lay­ered, inte­grated.
  2) Within the con­tent, too, stop treat­ing text as if it could be fully iso­lated as a sep­a­rate data chan­nel from every other kind of media.
  3) The end of the multiple-function device, and per­haps even the multi-media object; the birth of the inte­grated–func­tion device, and the inte­grated–media object. These last two were made for each other.

• Kottke: People read more than books – E-readers — are all focused on the wrong single use: books. The correct single use is reading.

• The Day It All Changed: The BookServer project – BookServer is a framework of tools and activities. It is an open-architectured set of tools that allow for the discoverability, distribution, and delivery of electronic books by retailers, librarians, and aggregators, all in a way that makes for a very easy and satisfying experience for the reader, on whatever device they want.

  The Internet Archive expanded the availability of books to millions of people who never had access before, bringing knowledge to places that had never had it. Who knows what new markets that will create, or more importantly what new minds will contribute to our collective wisdom as a result of that access. In the same motion, Brewster demonstrated a world where free can coexist with the library borrowing model, and with the commercial marketplace. Protecting the interests of both of those important constituencies in this ecosystem. He also portrayed every 'closed system' including our big retail friends and search engine giants, as small potatoes.

• Stack America: Freedom from Choice + Surprise + Curation – Stack America is the subscription service that brings the best in hard-to-find independent magazines directly to your home or office. Based in New England and created in response to the huge demand for Stack from American subscribers, it exists to offer a targeted selection of independent magazines for anyone subscribing in the USA and beyond. (via DesignObserver)
• ANONthology – The Anonthology is an experimental project to assess the importance placed on name and reputation over quality of writing. Amongst the writers contained within we have Orange and Genius Prize winners, Booker and Pulitzer Prize nominees. We have one author who’s sold over half a million copies, another who’s written over fifty books. But can you tell which is which? And how does it change the reading experience, not knowing if the author is young or old, male or female?

  (via Springwise)

• The Book Industry Turns A Page on Talk of the Nation (NPR) – The Kindle, the iPhone and other electronic book readers have changed the way many people read — and left some in the publishing industry desperate for new ways to make money. A new venture from the TheDailyBeast.com, will soon upend the traditional publishing model. With Peter Osnos, Founder of Public Affairs Books and Former Vice President at Random House, Tina Brown, founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, and ZZ Packer, author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
• Google to launch online electronic book store – Google plans to launch an online store to deliver electronic books to any device with a web browser, threatening to upset a burgeoning market for dedicated e-readers dominated by Amazon's Kindle. They will be initially offering about half a million e-books in partnership with publishers with whom it already cooperates where they have digital rights. Readers will be able to buy e-books either from Google directly or from other online stores such as Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com. Google will host the e-books and make them searchable.

  "We're not focused on a dedicated e-reader or device of any kind," Tom Turvey, Google's director of strategic partnerships, told journalists at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

• Barnes & Noble Taps Kindle Designer For Its AthenaNook e-Book Reader – Ammunition supposedly did the original Kindle and is now supposedly doing the Barnes & Noble device. Meanwhile, stay tuned for the Core77 1HDC Reading Ahead results!

• Amazon adds over 18,000 free public domain titles to Kindle Store – "It would have been nice if Amazon had thought of this tactic before launching the Kindle. But the rapid growth of the public domain library in the Kindle store is more likely a response to the fact that Sony eBook readers can access Google's massive collection of scanned public domain works. So while Amazon's 18,000 public domain downloads are a good start, Google has over half a million titles, which means Amazon still has some catching up to do."
• Phil Patton asks about Google’s book scanning process – Nowhere in Google’s FAQs or anywhere else is there a clear answer to the question of how books are physically scanned. Whether the books are disassembled in the process of scanning. What measures are taken to avert damage to scanned books, especially to older, more fragile ones with dry bindings and acidic paper. What sort of action readers or authors can take if they encounter errors in the scanning, dating or classification.
• One Hour Design Challenge: The Future of Digital Reading — School of Visual Arts — MFA in Interaction Design – Interaction Design students teamed up to participate in the One Hour Design Challenge: The Future of Digital Reading for Jason Santa Maria’s Communicating Design Class.

• Inside User Research at YouTube – "One of the most important findings has to do with the difference between the large group of users who are on YouTube simply to watch videos and a smaller, but very important, group of more engaged users — often uploaders." [This is such a "real" user research finding; to those of us on the outside it just drips "duhhh" but of course the discovery of the depth of this truth was probably a significant a-ha moment for the team and more importantly, their internal clients, who may have had this as a notion but hadn't really taken on how to build that insight into the design. Now it's a marching order inside the organization!]
• Kill the Kindle: Charles Brock’s 60 second video from AIGA Make/Think 2009 – Being a book designer, Charles has an (*ahem) unique perspective on the Kindle.

Last week we presented Reading Ahead at the UC Berkeley Design Futures speaker series. Since we conducted this study without an external client, this was our first time sitting down with a group of people and talking about what we found and what the opportunities are. In most client situations we’ll meet people from across departments within the same organizations; here we met people who represented many different aspects of the book industry, from antiquarian booksellers, to experts in the digital reader space. Since our emphasis had been on the consumer side, this exposure to the diversity of the producer side was really enlightening, and the result was a really provocative discussion.

Thanks, Liz, for the opportunity. We look forward to the next opportunity we have to share this work with a live audience!

• 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.

• Slot Music – it’s more than just a new format – Here's SanDisk's ecosystem approach (for digital music, not digital books, but still, it's illustrative). Leveraging their technology, they've begun putting digital music on solid state media (i.e., SD cards and what-have-you) that will go into multiple devices. They are piggybacking on the ecosystem of slots that already exists. I think it fully matures as an ecosystem when other other plays start making products, services, and accessories to support this standard.
• New Yorker cartoon – “This one, when you open it, smells like the Times.” – Cartoon by Leo Cullum showing a sensory-enriched Kindle. Thanks to Tom Williams for the pointer!
• Book Display Norms – Jan Chipchase – To what extent does the form, peruseability of books facilitate the behaviours around where they are sold?
• San Franciscan Reads Finnegan’s Wake Aloud, In Public – In the aftermath of the Finnegan's Wake Book Club dissolution.