technology

DQ Books brings together artists, illustrators and photographers and places their visuals within the context of the book form using Flash technology. Each thematic issue is accompanied by a soundscape created by French composer Avril.

These are pretty cool. Click through to check ’em out.

Aside from flashy 3D displays, the other big draw for fans of future tech at Display 2008 in April was electronic paper in at least 57 flavor-packed varieties.

The products on show could be split, approximately, into two barely separate categories – those that are already on sale and those that are jockeying for contracts from firms big enough to make or break them.

Talk about an innovative way to get the edge on your competition! Beginning in May, a digital version of each issue of SFX Magazine will be beamed into outer space, where it will bounce around the stars forever.

Write for SFX and your work is guaranteed to live on in perpetuity. :)

Scottish scientists are searching for the antidote to decaying books by bottling the atmosphere of the British Library in test tubes and using mass spectrometers to isolate the chemicals given off by decaying paper…by their smell. Armed with this info, researchers hope to design a chemical ‘nose’ that can be placed on library shelves to give the alarm when the decaying process begins.

Most writers have embraced modern technology for the convenience, but with new products being released all the time, it becomes very easy for a writer to become obsessed with the latest gadget to make things simple.

Portable computing power discussed.

What’s happened to the free-thinking reader now that the book market is glutted with less-then-literary bestsellers, celebrity memoirs and cookbooks? According to Stephen Page, they are “gathering around common interests online, just as intellectuals gathered in cafes in 1900s Vienna.” And publishers must go there to find them, providing content and inviting them to be involved.

This is as much about human progress as about the sci-fi genre. Ray Kurzweil and other futurists are saying that writers can’t imagine what life will be like beyond thirty years from now because of the law of accelerating returns. Before you laugh at these prognosticators of technology, remember H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. This is pretty intriguing stuff even if you’re not a sci-fi fan.

Apple's CEO says the Amazon Kindle book reader will go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

Book Patrol takes an interesting look at 2007’s book networking growth and happenings and offers an equally interesting analysis of what the next year might hold for the social book networking world. He predicts the phenomenon will become a little less ‘social’.

Web 2.0 has changed everything. Business models have changed, as has consumer behavior, and the world of the professional has become peopled with those who “speak in their own language” and “who think in a different way”. Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams aims to help those on the outside understand how the technology equates to new business trends.