Guest post: Mark Stilton, a business professor at Warwick University, discusses Apple on its fortieth anniversary. The stand-out feature of Apple’s 40-year rise to become the world’s largest public company...Continue reading
Category: Blast from the Past
Victorian Doctors Thought Reading Caused “Incurable Insanity”, Uterine Disease
As History Buff informed us on Tuesday, Victorian-era doctors were convinced that reading novels could lead to incurable insanity in women, but that’s not the only ridiculous medical claim made in...Continue reading
Pride, Prejudice and the Mutation of Zombies from Caribbean Slaves to Flesh-Eaters
When George Romero created what is now recognized as the first modern zombie flick in 1968, he hadn’t imagined his Night of the Living Dead zombies as – well, as...Continue reading
Q & A: Reviving/Recycling Old Sony Readers (and Other eBook Readers)
The following plea was posted over on MobileRead Forums yesterday, and I’m reposting it here in the hopes that we can crowd-source the best solution and help more people. Several...Continue reading
Making a Book from Scratch is More Work Than You Think (video)
Johannes Gutenberg is widely credited with making books easier to produce and thus changing society by making ideas easier to share, but as you will learn from the following videos Gutenberg merely...Continue reading
How Betamax Bit the Dust – and Other Tales of Forgotten Tech
Sony is to no longer make Betamax video cassettes – something that will come as a surprise to many people who thought that Betamax had long since bitten the dust. But...Continue reading
This Book is a Camera (Literally)
Kelli Anderson is an artist who works in paper. She’s previously developed a pop-up book which turns your smartphone into a planetarium or a speaker. Her other projects include a...Continue reading
Flashback Friday: Amazon Kindle, Generation One
Next Thursday marks the eighth anniversary of the Kindle Store and the original Kindle, and in anticipation of that anniversary I thought it would be fun to look back at...Continue reading
In Praise of the Alphasmart Neo
If you’re not familiar with the Alphasmart Neo, then check out this great overview from David Kadavy, or this historical review on Hack Education. It’s a keyboard with a screen,...Continue reading
Sony Retires the BetaMax After Forty Years – Will Epub or Kindle Last Half as Long?
The Verge reports that Sony is finally going to retire the videotape format that the Japanese tech company introduced close to 40 years ago. Of all Sony’s failed proprietary formats, Betamax has...Continue reading
Making a Book by Hand is Not a Completely Lost Art (video)
Book printing in the 21st century is so completely automated that the equipment can fit into a drug store or public library. But in spite of all the many advances and...Continue reading
Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Acceptance Letter is Going Up For Auction
How would you like an invitation to attend Hogwarts? It is nearly impossible to get into that exclusive magic school, but I know a short cut. Harry Potter’s acceptance letter, or rather...Continue reading
The End of Two Eras: Hot Metal Typesetting, and Phototypesetting (Video)
Getting a book printed in 2015 is such a simple task that it is easy to forget that the printing process used to require a staff of dozens, if not hundreds. The...Continue reading
Author Bruce Sterling Predicted the Web and World of 2015 – in 1993
In 2015, the web is a wild and chaotic place. Few could have predicted that it would come to epitomize the saying that we cannot live with it or with out...Continue reading
Why Play Half-Life on Your Smartwatch When You Can Play Doom?
There’s a story going around today about a new hack for Android Wear smartwatches, but it has me less than impressed. Kotaku reported earlier today that an industrious hacker had gotten...Continue reading