So I have been reviewing an eBook device, the eBookWise-1150, for an upcoming issue of eContent Magazine, and I have to say that I am sold with the reading experience. More detail to come in the actual review of course, but I tried reading in a few settings–indoor evening light, on the subway aboveground and below, outdoors a bit–and I could read comfortably in each setting. I also like the size. This picture is my crude attempt to show the screen size of the eBookWise device against the other devices I often read on–my notebook, a desktop computer in the Gilbane office, and my tiny Motorola cell phone.
Author: Bill Trippe (Page 9 of 23)
For those of you who follow structured FDA submissions such as RPS (Regulated Product Submissions) and SPL (Structured Product Labeling), you should be interested in XPortal.,a portal for preparing electronic submissions for the FDA. Under the direction of the FDA, GlobalSubmit has developed XForms that capture these submissions.
Michael Smith, the new Executive Director at the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), writes with some news about their upcoming conference in New York, Digital Book 08. Michael notes that the emerging global eBook market and the adoption of the EPUB digital publication standard will be high on the agenda. Included in the program will be a session on “The eBook Industry in Japan.” Mikio Amaya, President and CEO of PAPYLESS Co Ltd, Tokyo, the number one retailer for PC and mobile eBooks in Japan, will be presenting. Michael reports that the number of visitors to PAPYLESS sites is up to 4,800,000 people monthly, with 43,000,000 monthly page views.
Or at least of nothing about publishing in the strict sense, but the new movie and television site Hulu.com is very impressive. Among other things, it tells me that Flash video may carry the day when all is said and done.
There’s an interesting discussion about XML repositories going on over at the XQuery Talk mailing list at Stylus Studio’s website. Also, if you are interested in XML repositories, the best publicly available deep-dive is over at Ron Bourret’s site.
Jabin White from Silverchair was interviewing me the other day for their newsletter, and one of the questions was about which blogs I read. Of course, I read a lot–a quick count of my RSS reader shows me about 50 blogs under “content management” and “XML.” I also have a few RSS feeds for vendor press releases (and a note to vendors–I vastly prefer RSS delivery of press releases over email delivery, so if you have an RSS feed, please email me).
I need to do some housework in my blog list. Out of those 50 or so blogs, at least 10 seem to be completely dormant, and a number are very rarely updated. But there are some I read regularly. These include:
- General CMS blogs like Trendwatch at CMS Watch and the blog Conquering Information Chaos by AIIM’s John Mancini
- Two titans of the general technology blogosphere, Dave Winer and Jon Udell.
- The DITA blogs at XML.org.
- The blog by Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg.
- The amazing eBook blog at TeleRead, maybe the most in-depth technology blog on a single subject out there.
- The blog by Brian Jones at Microsoft, who is fronting a lot of their work with Microsoft Office file formats at ISO.
- For DRM, the one and only source, Bill Rosenblatt’s DRM Watch.
Aside from blogs, I read XML.com of course, and Robin Cover’s Cover Pages. (You have XML pretty much covered if you read these two things–and Gilbane.com of course!)
One other thing I do is use Google news and blog alerts, though sparingly, as you can really get overwhelmed. I get a daily Google Alert on XForms, for example, that is usually very good.
Note that I didn’t mention email. I do get a lot of things in my inbox, and read some, but I spend more time pruning my email than I do reading it. I also periodically unsubscribe to email lists and then curse myself for joining them in the first place. I read a few yahoo groups regularly (notably dita-users, now 1824 members strong!), but use the browser interface for that more and more.
So that’s my bag of tricks. Any thing else I should be reading?
- Apropos of nothing: when I hear people talking about “tagging” songs in a radio ad, I know that the average person understands markup and metadata even if they don’t necessarily use those words.
- Over at CMSWatch, Shawn Shell has a report on last week’s SharePoint conference. Shawn notes that SharePoint has now excelled a billion in revenue and 100 million licenses.
- Jeff Potts has some thoughts on the clash of cultures with the recent co-location of AIIM and DrupalCon.
- CM Pros has just put out their call for papers for their spring conference, to be co-located with Gilbane San Francisco in June.
- Bob Ducharme has a new tutorial about DITA specialization over at IBM’s developerWorks site.
I will be doing a Webinar tomorrow with Jake Sorofman of JustSystems on this topic as part of the AIIM Wednesday Webinars series. Dynamic publishing is a well understood issue for Gilbane readers, but the interesting news here is that the technology continues to evolve and expand in capability. I’ll give some background on the topic and discuss some of our recent thinking, and Jake will provide a snapshot of JustSystems’ solutions in this area.
You can get more information and register here.
UPDATE: If you missed the webinar, you can now view the archive of it online.
