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Ebook News:
Web Notes: Education Curious Technology: Articles:Our mission is to use technology to benefit both readers and authors, making books extremely inexpensive, easy to use, and easy for anyone to publish.
To accomplish this goal we focus on delivering books in unencrypted electronic form, and, whenever possible, in plain text so they are readable with a wide variety of devices, and so the reader, rather than the publisher, can control type size, font, and other characteristics of presentation to suit the reader's taste and to match the capabilities of his or her equipment.
Customer comments:
Fantastic work, Richard. A great reference work, indeed. Your work
will save people hundreds of hours of searching on the net. and thank you
for an html version of the CIA World Fact book. -- William Gaughan
in Connecticut about Your World on CD ROM
"I have looked all over for CDs of great literature and you are one
of the few that carried any... and what you carry
is more comprehensive and less expensive than anywhere else I found."
-- Amy Hopkins in South Carolina about American Literature, World Literature,
and Non-Fiction
Reviews of our CDs at Large Print Reviews:
Several of her stories, and two novellas, La Hoya (AKA View from Toledo) and Stephen's Passion, have been translated into Italian and published in Italy. La Hoya received excellent reviews in major publications, such as Corriere Della Sera., and was included in a college curriculum in Italy under the title, Veduta di Toledo.. Stephen's Passion has also been included in a college curriculum in courses in American Fiction in the University of Florence, under the title, La Passione Di Stephen. Her novel, Bodmin, 1349: An Epic Novel of Christians and Jews in the Plague Years, was included twice in a college curriculum in the United States.
The full text of three of her books is available for free online now:
Justice My Brother http://www.samizdat.com/micah/justice.html
View from Toledo http://www.samizdat.com/micah/toledo.html
Orestes in Progress http://www.samizdat.com/micah/orestes.html
Please read and enjoy. (We plan to publish a CD with half a dozen or
more of her books soon. Check our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat)
Deane Rink, writer, producer, and project director, is a voracious reader with very eclectic tastes. He frequently contributes short, provocative reviews to the Samizdat Express. These reviews introduce us to fascinating books that otherwise might pass unnoticed. He has worked for PBS, National Geographic, the American Museum of Natural History, Hearst Entertainment, and Carl Sagan. From his involvement in numerous projects about science, he has remarkable insight into present-day scientific endeavors and their implications, and in-depth knowledge of specialized fields (like Antarctica from his two "Live from Antarctica" PBS productions. But he also savors provides illuminating commentary on literature, fantasy, biography, and popular fiction. So far the collection includes:
The Urban Studies Department at Barnard College has posted a guide to events in New York City which could be very helpful to anyone who lives in the city or plans to visit there. Check it out at www.barnard.edu/urban/events/nycevents.htm This guide covers Big Onion Walking Tours, Exit Art Gallery, The Gotham Center, the Guggenheim Museum, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Municipal Art Society, Museum of the City of New York, and New York Historical Society. (The page was designed by and is kept up to date by Heather Seltzer).
MindLabs has developed several fifteen-hour courses for students age 7-14, in groups of 5-8 students. MindLabs courses are offered throughout Massachusetts, particularly in the Greater Boston area, some as afterschool programs and some during summer vacation. Their courses are designed to go beyond the material that students get in a typical school curriculum, emphasizing concepts and the process of thinking and problem solving. They discuss the "why" more than the "what".
For example, to relate to Shakespeare, students act out some of his famous dramatic or comedic scenes (Shakespeare Acting Workshop). To appreciate history, students discuss Robert E. Lee's strategy in American Civil War (Military History). To learn about probability, students discover how calculating probabilities help them in Monopoly and card games (The Science Behind Game Strategy). To understand key concepts in physics and chemistry, students try to figure out magic tricks based on science (The Science Behind Magic). To learn about electrical engineering, students build their own robot (Build Your Own Robot).
If you have any questions, please call Bob Seltzer at 617-868-6463, or email him at bobseltzer@mindlabsonline.com
I was a big fan of HumanClick, until they switched their free service to an overpriced one. (For my reaction to the free version, see my article "Going fishing -- hooking Web page visitors and turning them into customers") Now I'm testing out a similar program from SiteChatter. You put a brief piece of code on whatever of your pages that you choose, and visitors to those pages can, with a click, initiate a private chat session with you. This is a convenient way for you to answer the questions of customers interested in buying your products or for providing post-sales support. The setup is easy (takes about 15 minutes), and the cost is just $10 a month. I just added SiteChatter links to my consulting page www.samizdat.com/consult.html and to every page at my online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat (It works fine with Yahoo stores.)
Encryption schemes and ebook gadgets get in the way of people getting the full benefit of books in electronic form. Today, the best solution appears to be plain text books on CD ROM, organized in directories based on content, with file names that are the full names of the books, and with an HTML index with hyperlinks to the full text of every book.
Of course, you can read these books as you would any other book, one at a time -- with the advantage that you can adjust the type size and font to suit the size of your monitor screen and your individual taste. If you have poor eyesight, you can probably make the type large enough so you don't need to use reading glasses. If you are blind and use a text-to-voice conversion device, the plain text format of these books should work very well with your equipment.
Personally, I find that with large type and no reading glasses, I can read these texts about 50% faster than printed paper books, with less eye strain.
You can read these ebooks using whatever you like -- your Web browser (Netscape, Internet Exporer, Opera, etc.), Microsoft Word, Wordpad, Notepad, or other word processors.
You can move through the text using the Page Up and Page Down keys,
or using your mouse with the scroll bar, or whatever other navigational
tool happens to be built into the application you are using.
Not just a book -- a complete cultural context
With one of these CDs, you don't just get a book, you get an entire literary context -- all the major related works by that author, written at that time, from that country/culture. It could take half a lifetime to read all the books on a single CD; but you'll find that you use books differently when they are readily available on your PC. Even if you only read a few "from cover to cover", you may use hundreds for reference, comparison, and research, and to savor particular passages that friends and teachers recommend to you.
Reference work -- allowing you to quickly search through hundreds of great books
The electronic format makes it easy to find what you want when you want it -- a fact, a quote, a name. When you are in a document, you can use the search function in Word or in your browser to search that document. Otherwise you can use the search function in Windows and point at all the text on the CD or a particular directory. (See the bottom of this document for detailed suggestions in that regard).
Students can use this capability to check facts, quotes or a names for papers they are writing. And teachers can use it to check quotes and facts in papers they are grading.
Tool for study and research -- making it easy to make and save quotes and notes
Because these electronic books are in unencrypted, plain text format, you have great flexibility in how you use them. For instance, you can create a separate directory for each book you study. That way, it's easy to store electronic notes on each book -- which will be useful for reference when studying for tests or writing papers.
You may want to copy and paste passages from books you are reading into your documents about those books.
Or you may prefer to copy the entire text of selected books from the CD onto your hard drive and then use the highlighting features in Word or another word processor (for instance, underlining) to make important passages stand out. You could also enter your own notes in the midst of the book text, in a format that distinguishes your words from the author's original words (for instance, using brackets and italics). You can also place marks in the text (for instance, an asterisk) to indicate where you finished reading and want to start up again; or to help you get back to passages that you will want to reread.
Tool for your personal intellectual development
Using these same techniques, you or your students could build "commonplace books" (personal journals consisting of favorite passages from favorite books, with related comments). These can become contexts for saving and elaborating your own ideas -- documents that you'll want to save and build on for many years.
Source for class handouts and even teacher-created anthologies
As a teacher, you can use copy-and-paste to create your own class handouts
(that you can print out and photocopy) or
perhaps your own anthology that you can distribute by disk or email.
Tool for adapting great works to meet class and individual needs
If you plan to have the class participate in scenes from Shakespeare or other playwrights, you can copy the passages that you are interested in, and then edit them to better adapt them to your class needs.
Inspiration for creative writing
For a class in creative writing or literature, you can use etexts to
give the class passages that they can work from and
rewrite. For example, they can rewrite a passage to reflect a
different point of view, or a new time context
Adding variety and choice to literature classes (at no extra cost)
You no longer have to assign the same reading to every student in the class, because you are working from a limited number of text books. If you wish, you could, for instance, assign a different Shakespeare play or a different book or story by Mark Twain or Charles Dickens to every student in the class, and have them report back to the class. Or you could have one book that everyone reads and let each student choose a different book by the same author or another contemporary author to read and report on.
Tool for teaching research skills
You could use the Non-Fiction CD -- which has an extensive History section, including a large American History section -- to teach research skills. Instead of the whole class battling for the few relevant books in the school library, each student could have a copy of the CD, which contains all the works they would need to write a significant essay or term paper -- including major US historical documents.
Source for important, but rare and hard-to-find books
Personally, I find that about 90% of the books I am interested, especially literature originally published before 1920, are out of print. It can be very difficult, time-consuming, frustrating, and expensive to locate and obtain just one of these. One of these CDs might have dozens or even hundreds of such books that would be of interest to you.
A library for the price of a book
A single CD contains far more books than the personal library of the typical book lover. Buy the full set Classic Collection books on CD ROM and you have more books than the typical school or small-town library.
A portable feast
Take your CDs with you with your laptop when you go on vacation, and you can have a complete reading feast -- sampling all the great works you've meant to read for years but have never gotten around to, and without having to lug hundreds of pounds of books around with you.
Encourage your students to do the same -- exploring and experimenting
and tasting works and authors that they probably never heard of before,
developing new interests and satisfying their natural curiosity.
Back in 1995, in the early days of the Web, I delighted in the ability to put an entire book in a single document. With plain-vanilla static HTML and no graphics, very large, textually rich pages loaded quickly. And with internal links it was easy to have a detailed table of contents at the top of a large "page" from which you could click to any chapter, and footnote numbers in the text linked to the list of footnotes at the end, and links from there back to where you were before in the text. But then along came search engines.
Thanks to the search engines, people could now find your pages even though you did nothing to advertise/market them. That was a very valuable and important free service. So we began to pay close attention to how they worked and how they ranked the pages they indexed, because changes in the ways we designed our pages could make a big difference in traffic.
When I was researching my book The AltaVista Search Engine, back in 1996, when I was at Digital, I was surprised and annoyed to discover that AltaVista only indexed the first 100K of the Web pages it found. It would pick up links from the rest of the text, but only the beginning of a large page was fully indexed. On the one hand, AltaVista gave extra value to large, text-heavy pages, as opposed to short ones that consisted of just a few sentences and graphics and links. But on the other hand, they set this arbitrary limit. Knowing that, I went back and broke up my biggest, most useful pages into series of shorter ones -- watching that 100K limit. So instead of presenting books as single documents, I broke them into chapters. The result was less useful to my visitors, but the difference in terms of search-engine-generated traffic was important. Later, without making this information public, AltaVista changed that limit to 67K, so people, like myself, who had redesigned pages to comply with their arbitrary limit were unintentionally penalized.
On the plus side -- at least from my perspective -- the fact that search engines indexed every word on every page meant that you could create Web pages designed to be found by particular people or particular sets of people -- as a research tool or a marketing ploy. All you had to do was include the people's names (if they were unique) and the names organizations and activities that you knew they were interested in and likely to search for. I started writing articles about that technique, which I call "flypaper", back in 1996 http://www.samizdat.com/search.html#fly ; and I recently wrote another article telling about the amazing results that flypaper brought in my research into the Sergei Solovieff mystery: a variant of the Spanish Prisoner Scam http://www.samizdat.com/solovieff.html
Also, back in the early days of the Web, "anchors" were insignificant. The anchor is the set of words that is highlighted in an HTML page to indicate that it is associated with a hyperlink. Click on the anchor words, and you go to another page. Many sites would use something innocuous and meaningless like "click here" for all their links. I preferred to write out the complete URL and have that as the anchor, so visitors could know where they were going when they clicked, and also so they might remember the address itself for future reference (and for that reason, I kept my URLs as short and simple and logical as possible). Then along came Google, which treated anchors in an unusual way. Like other search engines, Google filled its index by sending out crawlers which followed trails of links. But Google also paid special attention to anchor text, and "remembered" the anchor text associated with particular links, and used that text in its ranking algorithm. They even added to their index pages that they had not yet crawled to, but only knew of indirectly through the anchors that linked to them. So if hundreds of different Web sites all had anchors that read "tyrannosaurus rex" and all those anchors linked to the same page, that page would likely come up very high on a search for "tyrannosaurus rex" regardless of what was on that page or whether Google had ever visited it. Over time, Google covered more and more pages directly and added an algorithm for estimating the relevance of a page to the text in the anchors pointing to it. But still they include many pages in their index that they know of only indirectly by anchors. And because of this practice of theirs, my practice of using the URL itself as anchor text means that my links to useful and important pages at other sites probably give those sites less benefit than if I used catchy phrases as anchors instead.
Worst of all, in terms of distortion of Web site design and encouragement of non-productive practices and business models, has been the concept of "popularity." Google and other search engines decided to define "popularity" in terms of links to a page from pages at other sites and decided to give that "popularity" lots of weight for ranking in search engine results. Before, links to your pages from other sites were helpful because visitors might click on them, giving you extra traffic. Now such links were even more important -- not for the clicks, but rather for the unwarranted interpretation that the search engines gave to them. Pages with lots of links to them got high ranking on searches, and hence got lots of traffic -- even if no one ever clicked on those links.
This mechanism gave a boost to businesses that helped mediate link exchanges among sites that had never heard of one another and might have nothing at all to do with one another. It also led to the creation of many Web pages that consisted of nothing but links -- useless links to other sites with content that had nothing in common with the linking site. Eventually, search engines like Google caught on to this practice (which they had unwittingly encouraged) and figured out how to estimate the relevance of links. Hence, those links no longer provide the traffic boost they used to; but those useless pages and link exchange programs linger on.
The value of link-based "popularity" also meant that if you were going to create a set of sites -- either by yourself or by recruiting others to run them for you -- you would be better off buying a separate domain name for each, rather than running each in a separate directory of the same site or a separate sub-domain of the same domain. If you used separate domain names, Google and other search engines using a similar algorithm, would interpret the numerous links from one of your sites to another as if those were independent sites, and hence would give you a big boost in the rankings for "popularity". For instance, Webseed built a business with a couple thousand volunteer-run Web sites, each with its own domain name. The links among these sites made these sites very "popular" by Google's algorithm, which led to substantial traffic, and (in the days when banner advertising was viable) helped generate revenue. From Webseed's final messages to its volunteer Webmasters (of which I was one), I gather that, eventually, Google caught on, and figured out how to discount incestuous linking (at least in the case of Webseed); hence, Webseed's traffic dropped precipitously, and their business model collapsed.
So why should we care? Millions of Web sites and Web-based businesses are dependent on one another. What one business does in pursuing its own best interests can affect other businesses in unintended ways. For instance, a company sending out a spam email with a subject line intended to fool people into opening it immediately trains the recipients to doubt any future message sent with a similar subject line. The more spam messages sent, the more words and phrases become "tainted", limiting more and more the vocabulary available for legitimate communication. We're all drinking from the same waterhole, and when one person pollutes it, we all suffer.
The people who make the rules and formulate the algorithms for the major search engines should take into account that their decisions affect more than the internal working of their systems and more than the satisfaction of their visitors. Those decisions can make an enormous difference in the traffic to the sites that they index (and that they don't index), bringing some companies sudden success and destroying others. Those decisions can also lead to strange, unintended distortions in Web page design, as companies, in their struggle to survive, do their best to understand the underlying mechanisms of search engines and make changes intended to boost their search-engine-generated traffic.
But while standards get publicly aired and debated by bodies with representatives of the interested parties, the details of search engine design and their ranking algorithms remain shrouded, as proprietary trade secrets; and the designers can make changes whenever they please, without telling anyone beforehand or even afterhand. And those secret decisions can have enormous repercussions throughout the Web.
We have here a case where private business interests can collide with
the good of the overall community, a case where the normal rules governing
"trade secrets" need to be modified. That could happen by the search engines
themselves recognizing their responsibility and sharing such information
in ways they never have before, and seeking input and feedback from affected
companies and individuals. They could do that publicly and individually
as a way to enhance their image, or privately through participation, say,
in the Worldwide Web Consortium, where design changes might be openly discussed,
without full disclosure to the public -- giving an opportunity for experts
to probe and seek to understand the business and technical implications
and the possible unintended consequences, without giving away crucial proprietary
information.
Our guest for last week's chat session, Ken Ingham from Amazability talked about his company's efforts to develop a set of speech-based office products. These applications let you use voice -- and voice alone -- for writing, reading, email, web browsing, storing contact information, etc. The applications use middleware for automatic formatting for voice output and to improve voice recognition to up to 100% accuracy for command-and-control.
The primary target for this software is the blind and visually impaired. Ken himself -- the president -- is totally blind. But this software is designed to run on small machines, portables, and even wearable computers. The software is written in native mode. In other words, instead of taking existing office applications and adapting them for voice input and output, the applications are designed from scratch for voice.
As Ken put it, "We do not forget the ink/print forms/styles and have mechanisms to permit the user to learn about them or to specify these during composition or post-composition. However, the key is the efficient imparting of information, which in voice is best done by providing the best possible voicing -- like that in a normal conversation. Such voicing should be done without the need to reference a two-dimensional format or styles."
Ken and his Chief Technical Officer, Peter Olson, are also designing these products based on Linux, rather than Windows, which means much less disk space is needed and the cost of a complete system would be far less. (One of the participants -- Bob Zwick -- pointed out that Fryes Electronics sells Linux systems complete and Internet ready for under $300.)
Ken noted that high end handhelds can support some of Amazability's voice-based applications. But, initially, they are targeting laptops and above.
Longer-term, the possibilities are intriguing.
As Ken put it, "We are replacing the monitor and keyboard with a completely equivalent voice 'console'. Thus, anything that would be displayed on the monitor is sent to our voice output, at which point we filter it."
In other words, these applications -- that enable you to do just about everything you need a computer for -- could run on a computer that had no keyboard and no monitor: a computer that uses voice and voice alone for input and output.
As Bob Fleischer noted, "Voice input and control is considered by many
'wireless and mobile' people (including myself) to be the 'killer app'
or at least the key requirement for the killer app." As it is today, the
smaller the computing gadget, the more awkward the input and output, because
of the dependence on keystrokes and visual display. Take away that need
-- make it easy and effective to do everything with voice -- and a very
powerful computer could be very small indeed. In addition, you'd no longer
have to use up disk space for software to handle keyboard or stylus input
and visual display. "If a PC can be controlled completely without the use
of a keyboard, we are approaching StarTrek," observed Bob Zwick.
"A handheld without a screen could be very small indeed," added Bob
Fleischer.
Ken emphasized that important problems still remain to be solved. Even with the best fully integrated software, it is easy for a user to get lost, even when things work right. This puts a high burden on the accuracy of the voice recognition and on effective recovery tactics -- like reset buttons.
Basically, by approaching the whole range of common computer applications from the perspective of a blind person -- dropping the assumption that you need a screen or a keyboard -- you can totally avoid design barriers and human usability limits that previously seemed insurmountable.
Seven years ago, I suggested in an article,
that in cyberspace, the blind should be considered as a special resource.
"Companies that want to be on the leading edge in that field should go
out of their way to recruit the blind -- not to conform to laws about hiring
the handicapped and not because it is politically correct, but rather because
their minds are not totally dominated by visual paradigms. They could imagine,
and with computer technology could simulate, what to the sighted is unimaginable."
The work of Ken Ingham and Amazability seems to be an instance of that
kind of breakthrough.
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