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NASA releases eBook on communicating with aliens
NASA‘s just published “Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication” in MOBI, EPUB and PDF. I think I know how we’re all spending this long memorial day weekend! Addressing a field that has been dominated by astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, the contributors to this collection raise questions that may have been overlooked by physical […]
Free Government eBooks Now Available From GPO
The Government Printing Office (GPO) announced today that it is now making eBooks available in the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP). Catalog records include descriptive information, as well as Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs) and the ebooks are available in .mobi, (Kindle) .epub (most other eBook readers) formats as well as other formats such […]
CIA publishes its first audio book
The audiobook "Getting to Know the President" was recently released by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI). It's available on GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys) in MP3 format, broken into several chapters. It's also available in PDF on the CIA site.
CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) has released its first audio book, Getting to Know the President (Second Edition). The audio book takes listeners inside the history of CIA briefings to presidential candidates and presidents-elect from 1952-2004, all through the eyes of former CIA Inspector General and Director for Intelligence John Helgerson. This second edition of Getting to Know the President updates Helgerson’s 1996 book with reflections on the transition to President George W. Bush in 2000 and the briefings provided to his Democratic challengers in 2004. The book offers a look into the interactions of political figures and intelligence professionals across 10 presidential transitions. Helgerson relies on internal documents, public memoirs and interviews with four former presidents, several former Directors of Central Intelligence and Directors of National Intelligence. The result is a highly engaging account, providing both anecdote and analysis.Continue reading
Interesting: Provenance of eBooks
This is a bit off-topic, but so interesting that I couldn't resist mentioning it. James Moushon did a little investigation into the absence of basic provenance information in eBooks and what he discovered was not encouraging. He discovered that almost none of the eBooks he examined had any indication of "where the book's content originated from or how we got to the digital format." He asks, rhetorically, how we will be able to accurately cite eBooks and differentiate between editions.
- eBook Publishers: Are eBook Copyright Pages Missing Information?, by James Moushon, The Self-Publishing Review (February 15, 2011). I picked 30 ebooks and analyzed their copyright pages. Somebody must have missed the memo about what information is required and what format it should be presented in because we had a variety of formats and information, to say the least. Although 30 ebooks is not a very big sample, only one of them came close to what is needed to ID the source.
Incompatible DRM for ebooks
Digital Rights Management (DRM) techniques are bad enough when applied to digital content, but this article notes that when there is not even a standard for DRM, the difficulties and problems that DRM creates are multiplied:
- E-books need a common language, By Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News, (02/14/2010) I never need to worry about whether I can read a book. As long as a book's a book, that is — printed on paper, in English. I know I can pick it up and read it no matter how long it sits on my shelf after I bought it. But as we move into the era of e-books, that assumption no longer holds.
- Digital handcuffs for Apple ebooks?, by Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times "Jacket Copy" blog. (February 16, 2010) Apple's old digital rights management software (DRM), FairPlay, is slated to make a comeback with the e-books it will be selling on its iBook Store. While music users have been free of these "digital handcuffs" for the last year, Alex Pham reports that readers will not be.
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