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It’s no secret that the Amazon Kindle has reinvigorated interest in dedicated ePaper-based reading devices (if not necessarily publishing industry profit margins, just yet). It’s also no secret that the Kindle is absolutely atrociously designed, and that its closest competitors, the Sony Reader and the iRex Iliad, are not much better (although aesthetically much more pleasing).
Enter Plastic Logic and their as-yet-unnamed reader. It’s got almost everything that would make me want to buy a dedicated reading device. Let’s do the checklist:

As large as a sheet of paper: Tiny is not always better. I don’t necessarily mind reading books and documents on, say, my iPhone, but it’s nice to have a decently-sized reading area. As long as I can stick this in my bag in place of reams of paper, it’s still a space-saver.

Thin as all hell, and pretty light: This baby is 0.3″ thin. I could see myself slipping this into my bag along with my MacBook Air, no problem.

Touchscreen: My iPhone has spoiled me—I want a touchscreen on everything now. I find myself reaching for the screen on my laptop all the time, especially when I’m using an application that’s also present on the iPhone, such as Google Maps. The fact that you can flip pages, use a soft keyboard, and even mark up documents with fingerstrokes is a big, big win for the Plastic Logic reader.

Full colour, high resolution display: Still lacking, but give it time. Like televisions, personal computers, iPods, and other devices, I can see this reader’s first couple of iterations be black and white, but eventually move to colour, once price and technology make it feasable.

Open platform: Here’s a place where Kindle and Sony particularly fail. They’ve locked their devices to certain formats. The Plastic Logic reader will be document format-agnostic, as it should be. The presentation at DEMOfall shows the reader explicitly handling PDFs and PowerPoint presentations.

Here’s that presentation:

This looks fantastic. Wrap it up in something other than PC beige, price it competitively with the iPod, and I’m pretty sure you’ve got a winner. I’ll be keeping a close eye on these guys as 2009 comes around.

In the future I can see a device with the guts of the iPhone, or even the MacBook Air, adopting this kind of display, and becoming a full-featured input/output device. I can has touchscreen Mac Tablet?

Wired reports that ‘file sharing’ is alive and well, despite so-called legal alternatives. Big surprise there. After all, the people who pirate want shows as DRM-free HD content in a standardized format, and that’s about the last thing the networks seem willing to give up.

He just nails it. Below are a few gems, but do yourself a favour and read the whole piece. On content:

Discussions at the networks about what’s depleting their viewership tend to focus on familiar culprits: YouTube. The internet. Xbox. The iPod. Too many options. (Capitalism can be so unfair!) This leads to brainstorming sessions about making TV more like the internet,
resulting in a lot of overexcited press releases announcing how one-minute “minisodes” of your favorite shows will be exclusively available on a network website, or Twittered to you line by line as they’re being written, or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex via Bluetooth.

Enough already. Competition from other media is real, but it’s also a convenient excuse to not focus on programming. You don’t hear American Idol‘s producers whining about how the internet is draining their audience, because they know that their audience is on the internet. Viewers go there to talk, read, kvetch, and gossip—about American Idol.

On being douches when it comes to niche, critically acclaimed, or shows with a small but devoted fan-following:

Broadcast networks routinely spend three months promoting a show that they then cancel after two airings. Or they get a few million viewers hooked on a serialized drama and then drop it midway through a season, leaving fans hanging. This simply never happens on cable, where if a
series gets a 13-episode order, those 13 episodes are damn well going to air, even if it’s just because there’s nothing else to take their place. Every time the networks reshuffle their grid in a spasm of quick-fix panic, they disenchant more viewers.

The not-so-super-seekrit project that’s been sucking down so much of everyone’s time over at Tor Books finally goes live today. Tor.com is a new science-fiction and fantasy themed community site, where a whole lot of luminaries from the SF/F fandom community will be contributing content about ‘Science Fiction. Fantasy. The Universe. And Related Subjects.’, as the tagline says.

Tor.com started as a glimmer in the eyes of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Irene Gallo, and Fritz Foy, over a year ago. With the design direction of regular badass Jamie Stafford-Hill, they’ve been working tirelessly, quietly, and sometimes not-so-quietly on it since. Tor.com will feature original content from some of SF/F’s most talented voices, such as John Scalzi, Charles Stross, and Cory Doctorow; as well as blogging from both genre authors and genre fans (including yours truly). It also features a kickass gallery of SF/F artists, with work from cover artists, game designers, conceptual artists for film and TV, you name it. Additionally, the site is a social network, so you can create a profile and connect with artists, writers, and fellow fans.

As launch date loomed closer, and it came time to recruit bloggers and beta testers, pnh and Irene approached me to see if I would be interested in contributing, to which I replied “Yeah!”. Once they realized that launch date would be the same week as Comic Con San Diego, and that they’d need people there to cover what is probably one of the largest fandom events of the year, Irene popped into my office and asked me if I wanted to go to Comic Con, to which I replied “Fuck yeah!”.

So I’ll be going to and blogging from Comic Con San Diego this week. Don’t hate me too much.

Aside from reportage, I’ll also be posting about other SF/F-related stuff on Tor.com, including a regular column which was originally planned for this site. A while ago, the crew in the art department at Tor realized that there really was no SF/F-specific book cover review blog out there, and we felt there should be. After all, SF/F book design is a very particular thing: we are much more illustration heavy than other genres, we have a particular visual language and ideosyncracies that may be beyond (or beside) the scope of traditional book cover reviews. I shot off an email to my co-workers proposing to start something up, and it became incredibly obvious that the perfect home for a feature like that would be Tor.com. So there you go. Here’s a link to the initial post for that, outlining all the ins-and-outs of how it’s gonna work.

And by ‘live’, I mean ‘online, for your streaming pleasure’, of course. I’d embed it here, but the idea is for you to check out their site, and prove, via the power of your mighty and unique view, that this is a viable method of delivery for entertainment. That, and it’s on Hulu. They don’t allow you to embed video elsewhere. Bastards. But it’s also on iTunes, which is a promising step (except that, even after buying the Season Pass, priced at $3.99 for all three 15 minute episodes [see? I'll pay for something I support, it's not all piracy around here] the downloads won’t start. Double bastards).

Regardless of a few day-one hiccups (and despite the fact that it’s on Hulu, which I don’t like simply because they pulled Battlestar Galactica away from the iTunes store–yes it’s a grudge thing, so sue me), it’s funny, precious, witty, self-deprecating, and sing-along-y, just like the Whedon your mama used to make ya on the teevee. I’ll review in full once all three eps are up, probably on Tor.com (yes, we’re getting closer to that July 20 launch date…).

The senate passed that bloody FISA bill. Sonovabitch. Not unexpected, but still damn depressing. Of note, McCain was MIA (again), Obama voted ‘Yes’ (grrrrr.), Hillary voted ‘No’ (meh), after voting against a filibuster (huh?).

As an aside, please direct your attention to the stock image of the cellphone on the CNN.com news item I linked to (there’s a reason why I linked to a MSM site instead of to something like Talking Points Memo.). It’s a terrorist phone! It’s a terrorist phone! Way to be bigots, CNN.

Today the U.S. Senate votes on the amendment to the FISA bill, which, in essence, guts the fourth amendment to the Constitution, thus enabling the U.S. Government to eavesdrop on regular citizens without a warrant from a judge. Additionally, the bill grants retroactive immunity to telecom companies who have been aiding the Bush administration in their illegal wiretapping program. Let’s hope the Senate has a little more spine than the House, which passed the bill not too long ago.

Check out this interview by Tim Ferriss with Daniel Ellesberg, who released the Pentagon Papers back in the 1970s. In it, Ellesberg explains why the proposed legislation is so dangerous, and why it’s so important that the Senate votes this bill down.

What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Wed., July 9th from Tim Ferriss on Vimeo.
EDIT: The Senate has decided to postpone the vote until tomorrow, because they want to honor some old, southern racist who croaked.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.
I can’t wait to see this. The fruits of extra-curricular (as in, not within the studio system) efforts from Joss Whedon during the writer’s strike, Dr. Horrible promises to be the beginning of a slew of independent productions from established old-media talent, taking their toys and playing elsewhere, away from the profit-crazed monolith that is Hollywood. The plan is to release three episodes for free streaming on July 15th, 17th, and 19th. They’ll keep them online for a short while, then take them down in order to sell downloads and an extra features-packed DVD. Sounds like a good idea to me. From the Dr. Horrible youtube site:

The story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to. Featuring Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny and a cast of dozens.

Fillion. Whedon. The intertubez. Doogie Howser. Full of win. The cast and Whedon will be on a panel at Comic Con San Diego later this month, I’m going to try to catch that, and grill ‘em with questions. In the meantime, here’s a fansite which has been keeping everyone up to date on Dr. Horrible-related happenings.

Here’s an oldie but a goodie. I’d read this before, but came across it again last night while reading the comments on a BoingBoing post. Charles Stross on the future of history, the future of lifelogging, and the future of privacy. Utterly fascinating stuff.

EDIT: And by ‘Tuesday’, I mean ‘Wednesday’, of course. Slow down, week! I’m not done with you yet!

Matt Mason has finally been cleared by his publishers to make The Pirate’s Dilemma available as a pay-what-you-wish download. The PDF e-book is available here.
I’ve already snagged my copy; I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while now, but my to-read stack of physical books has been pleading with me to not add to its bulk. However, a PDF which I can read on my laptop? Full of win.
I can’t wait to get started. From what I’ve been able to read so far, via various excerpts online, the book should be chock-full of good, forward-thinking insight. I’m sure a close reading will engender one or two posts here, so this won’t be the last time I mention it.