Showing posts with label kitten lulu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kitten lulu. Show all posts

23 November 2007

We Demand Books on Demand

One of the interesting results of the move to digital texts is a growing realisation that analogue books still have a role to play. Similarly, it's clear that analogue books serve different functions, and that feeds into their particular physical form. So some books may be created as works of art, produced to the very highest physical standards, while others may simply be convenient analogue instantiations of digital text.

Public domain books are likely to fall into the latter class, which means that ideally there should be an easy way to turn such e-texts into physical copies. Here's one:

This is an experiment to see what the demand for reprints of public domain books would be. This free service can take any book from the Internet Archive (that is in public domain) and reprint it using Lulu.com. Prices of the books are rounded up from Lulu.com cost prices to the nearest $0.99 to cover the bandwidth and processing power that we rent from Amazon using their EC2 service. There is also a short post on my blog about it.

How Does It Work

Anyone with an email address can place a request on this page using an Internet Archive link or ID. Your request will be forwarded to our conversion server which will convert the appropriate book to printable form, and sends it off to Lulu.com. When the book has been uploaded, it will be made for immideate ordering and shipping, and you will receive a link to it via email. Currently, only soft cover books are supported in 6"x9", 6.625"x10.25" or 8"x11" trim sizes.

Interesting to see Lulu.com here, confirming its important place as a mediator between the digital and analogue worlds. (Via Open Access News.)

30 January 2007

Barely Born, Vista Gets a Second Life

Well, I suppose this was inevitable; call it the Clash of Hypes: Microsoft Vista is being launched at ten locations in Second Life. And nothing wrong with that - although intriguingly, as Kitten Lulu points out:

4 out of 9 are places where you can find sex escorts, and there is also the Isle of Lesbos that is somewhat sex-related.
I guess they want to convey the idea that Windows Vista is sexy… but not free.

Me, I just feel sorry for the bloke "coolz0r", whose MS implant seems to be overheating with all the excitement:

What they have done is beyond all imagination.

Yikes! (Via 3pointD.com.)