E-ink Hits the Newsstands

Coming in September, according to a story in the New York Times, the first e-ink magazine cover will grace our newsstands. Esquire has designed an e-ink cover that will flash the words, “The 21st Century Begins Now” from an e-ink […]

The Foldable E-Book

The New York Times recently profiled the Readius, a foldable reader that uses e-ink and wireless communication so you can read books, magazines, and emails on a 5″ diagonal screen, from a device about the size of a cell phone […]

The Age of the Blog

Michael Bhaskar at theDigitalist.net has written an interesting two-part rumination on the place of blogs in the publisher milieu. In it, he neatly slices publishers away from the technological aspect of blogs — wisely dismissing publishers as possible creators of […]

Versions — NISO’s New Recommendations

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has released its recommendations on versioning of journal articles. It is a document worth looking over, for a great deal of careful thought has gone into it. The document also reflects the schizophrenic relationship […]

The Efficiency of Peer-Review

Recently, Cambridge Economic Policy Associates completed an analysis trying to assess the “hidden” value of peer-review, according to a story in the Times Higher Education. They estimate the value to be £1.9 billion (or about US$3.8 billion), with the UK […]

Book Digitization Will Continue

The recent announcement by Microsoft that it is canceling its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic doesn’t mean that book digitization initiatives are coming to a halt, states Joseph Esposito in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. […]

Howard Ratner — A New Cook in the Kitchen

Please join me in welcoming Howard Ratner, Chief Technology Officer and EVP for the Nature Publishing Group, as a new contributor to the Scholarly Kitchen. Howard will be writing occasionally. I’m personally thrilled to have the help, especially from such […]

Short Attention Span Publishing

Are you ready for the era of “short attention span publishing“? As noted in a previous post, usability around “task completion” or “success rate” is the real measure of a Web site’s value, and this is only going to be […]

easY readiNG thanKS to XML

A fascinating article in Publishers Weekly details changes in large print books and magazines, enabled by the broad utilization of XML and more custom and e-publishing options. One of the groups profiled is ReadHowYouWant. Not only are new type sizes […]

20% Is All You Can Hope For?!

I knew he was right when I found myself printing it out. Jakob Nielsen has a new report on how much users read online. The report is only 1,068 words long, but this is apparently beyond the point most readers […]

A Twitter Experiment

Life is an approximation of reality. What we know and what is possible are two different things. Experiments help test and bridge the gap. With that spirit, I’m experimenting on this blog with Twitter now. You can find a link […]

ShopText Melds Magazines With Digital

Image via Wikipedia Hearst Magazines recently announced it’s rolling out ShopText, a system that uses text messaging to link print products with online. Readers of print can text a keyword to a number, and receive samples, buy products, or access […]

Wikidemia — Scholarship and the Internet

“Wikidemia” is a term I hadn’t heard before I read this very interesting roundtable discussion from the UPenn Department of Romance Languages. At the heart of the discussion is the notion that scholarship without the Internet and its collaborative tools […]