A short poem about ereading

This podcast, by renowned poet Dr Beret Slipey, predicts the future of ebooks in poem form. Slipey uses evocative imagery to portray a future in which the provision of free information has unintended consequences. All material is exclusively created by Dr Slipey using Audacity, and is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) licence.

Music Playlist at MixPod.com

Coal NZ

Coal NZ, the customised web search tool that brings rich, carboniferous content right to your PC!

Digital images so rich you can smell the peaty mine stench, feel the clammy, stale air hovering in the mine shaft, and taste the coal dust. Collier meets compiler, canary meets computer scientist: you'll no longer have to venture into the chimney of your grandparents' house to get that authentic 18th century atmosphere, but can instead experience it in the comfort of your LAN party den.

Experience this revolution on the sidebar!

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It's fascinating how digital technology brings us closer to the sooty industries of history. The hi-tech, low impact information repositories of the future, are allowing us a vivid experience of the enormous industrial developments which are key to our history. The coal industry, with its fundamental role in many industrial processes, was a central driver behind economic progress in many countries for over 200 years. In New Zealand this played out in particularly spectacular contrast with the ungoverned natural environment.

This search tool uses the single keyword 'coal' to capture all coal-related images and videos from the digital heritage repositories aggregated by Digital NZ. These limits allow single search terms such as a place name to bring up visual resources which can be previewed immediately in the blog sidebar. It also is limited by date from 1830 to 1993, or broadly from the beginning of industrial coal exploitation in New Zealand to the major structural changes in the New Zealand coal industry. In practice these date limits will not significantly affect the search results, but as more material is aggregated by Digital NZ these will become increasingly useful.

The future of ereading

Tablets are attracting widespread media attention now that the iPad is on the market, while the competition in the ereader segment is hotting up between bookselling giants Amazon and Barnes & Nobles and electronics heavyweights like Sharp and Sony. However what will future ereaders be like? Why is it that the structure of the ebook industry is fundamentally flawed? What groundbreaking technologies are emerging? Find out below!

ereading tech roundup

The ereader market is maturing. Richly featured tablets have finally arrived in the form of the iPad. At the other end of the price scale is the stripped down third generation Kindle, while the Indian government has unveiled a linux-based tablet/eReader with an apparent unit cost of around $NZ50.

However the next wave of innovation is already coming over the horizon, and fully-flexible displays and interactive touch or 'haptics' are two technologies which have been demonstrated by working prototypes. Sony's rollable OLED display can continue to play video while being rolled and unrolled, while researchers at the Disney-backed research labs at Carnegie Mellon University are developing technology for 'haptic' displays which respond to the users' touch. Researcher Dr Ivan Poupyrev states that

"The basic goal of the technology we are developing at Disney is to create a perception of texture - to let people 'feel' objects on screen by stroking them with their fingers."

According to Poupyrev, the technology 'can recreate the feeling of paper of a textile, simulate the smoothness of glass and even the roughness of sand paper'. He believes that combining haptics with flexibility will provide a whole new class of displays:

"iPad allows people to touch virtual objects as though they were real," he said. "Flexibility should take a further step and let people feel them, stretch them, bend them and have them react to these interactions," he said.

Another fusion of technologies was recently unveiled by HP: a mylar-based flexible display capable of displaying video which is also bistable and thus hold images in a zero-power mode similar to e-ink technologies. Tech blogger Fabrizio Pilato reported that 'this type of display could be included in e-book readers, smartbooks, or slates... HP wants to create devices that deliver more richness while still maintaining mobility.'

The development of these technologies into consumer products depend on the commercialisation of technologies which are currently hideously expensive. OLED technology is also being heavily developed for use as a green lighting technology, where it is expected to grow 'from almost nil to more than $[US]4.5 billion by 2013' by market research firm NanoMarkets. While these predictions are considered optimistic by some, the industrial economies of scale which will be brought about OLED lighting will hasten the affordability of a whole new generation of haptic, flexible and low-power displays for use in ereading technology.

Fast broadband a step closer

The New Zealand Herald has reported that Pacific Fibre's 5-terabit Sydney-Auckland-Los Angeles fibre link is a large step closer to realisation after signing up Singapore and Hongkong-based Pacnet as an equal partner. Pacnet already operates a 36,800 km submarine cable network in Asia. The project is now estimated to cost $USD400 million ($NZD550 million), down from an estimate of $USD650 million.