Exact Editions Blog

It looks as though there is a new category of web application emerging: services which encourage the sharing, posting and processing of online documents. Techcrunch mentions two of the more prominent: Scribd and Docstoc….. the Techcrunch comments also mention Thinkfree.

Its not completely clear how these services may evolve and what new forms of writing and reading they may encourage, but this has to be a hot area when you look at the enormous success in the last … Keep Reading

And it is. What follows?

1. The iPhone will be much more important as a new way of promoting and selling physical books, than it will be for selling digital books….. for the next few years. Few of us want to read digital books all the way through on our handheld, but the iPhone is a bookshop window with an infinite catalogue. In your pocket. This is very good news for Amazon and publishers who want to sell you print

Magforum has a useful round up of some of the new entrants in the weekly news segment. Tony Quinn reckons that the Economist will fight off the various new challengers to its crown, as the…. pre-eminent London/International business, current affairs weekly, newspaper/magazine. In fact, it is not easy to define exactly what the Economist‘s slot is, but it does whatever it quintessentially does very well. One million+ copies a week sold. Most of them on subscription.

But the Economist… Keep Reading

Google Book Search (‘search the full text of books and discover new ones’) now supports ‘text versions’ of some of the out-of-copyright books that are in the Google Book Search database. Google Blogoscoped has a report. This is interesting, Google are OCR’ing books which have been scanned and figuring out how to reconstitute a reasonable ASCII version of the underlying text. Its also interesting that it is not possible to get a consistently good result — mind you Blogoscoped … Keep Reading