Skip to main content

Pure Coolness

By

I have seen far from all the talks here, but from what I've seen and the buzz that I've heard the winner of the "coolest presentation award" was Manolis Kelaidis. He showed a paper e-book device that he's been prototyping. By means of conductive ink traces, a person touching a button on the page can trigger an action by an embedded processor.  He had a book where pads on the page triggered actions on his laptop: going to web pages, playing songs on iTunes, and so forth. 

It  was a hand-bound Bluetooth book!

There's clearly a huge expense still involved in platform building and so on, but everything he did is compatible with contemporary printing technology, using inks that are commercially available (not experimental). Other developments in printable circuitry play into this as well: printable batteries, printable electronic components,  printable speakers.

Of course this is a technology, not a solution, and there's a huge chain of associated requirements -- protocols for books to notify other devices; security regimes to define so that your new books won't hack your computer.  Based on experience in other media, conventions for authoring and use of the new technology are likely to be the most dificult adaptation.

But the great thing about paper is that you can write on it!

I immediately started thinking that this would be a great addition to a notebook. I'd buy a book with 10 generic buttons to a page, and any of them could be mapped to a function on my machine easily. So  I could take notes on something I was recording as audio or video and whack a button on the page to make a link. Or to record the page that I'm browsing right at this moment. 100 pages is 1,000 special buttons to memorize some data!

The other interesting thing is that you can make conductive traces by using a silver ink marking pen, so you could just draw buttons onto a page anywhere you want, connecting them to traces on the edge.

If the notebook shell had a slot for a memory and the processor, and a unique ID build in, you might be able to bring the hardware costs way down because you'd just have to clip the brain onto the book, and the brain would know what book it was connected to, so you could have fewer chunks of electronics.

Links to follow soon

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Mobile-Optimized Template Simplifies Site Design

By
Pre-designed templates are increasingly popular as a quick way to get new Tizra sites launched, or to refresh the design of an existing site.  A key driver in both cases is keeping up with increasingly high user expectations for ease of use and visual appeal, particularly on mobile devices. To address these needs, we’ve released a major upgrade to our Bootstrap-based responsive design template. The new version makes it much easier to customize with your own colors and logo, improves mobile interaction with the latest version of the Bootstrap framework, and adds numerous other visual and usability refinements.

Existing Tizra customers can try it out now by selecting the “Bootstrap Responsive Template” in the PRESENTATION area. Or if you’d like to see a quick preview, take a look at this demo site… https://abedemo.tizrapublisher.com
Post a Comment
Read more

What Einstein Taught Us About Searching Inside Publications

By
When the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein went live on Tizra a few years ago, it was a huge step forward. Suddenly, anyone anywhere could search and access the output of one of the 20th Century’s great minds…from love letters to breakthrough articles that changed how we think about the nature of time and space. But the project also showed the limits of traditional tools for searching within large, complex publications. These limits sparked a collaboration with Princeton University Press and Einstein Papers Project editors, which this year resulted in a dynamic new search interface, which we’ll be demonstrating in a Webcast Friday, December 15 at 1pm ET. The interface not only makes it easier for Einstein researchers to home in on relevant content on both mobile devices and desktops, it points the way toward faster, better searching within a wide range of publication types, from reference books to periodicals, technical documentation and standards to textbooks. Click To Register for…
Post a Comment
Read more

"How to deliver content digitally without going out of business"

By
That's how The Chronicle of Higher Education described the quandary many publishers face. We think it's apt, particularly since they also said Tizra Publisher offers "a cost effective new model to try out." A key reason? We start with the "dreaded PDF" files publishers already have, which means… Tizra doesn't require an investment in high-priced technology or legions of IT helpers. Presses don't have to convert files to a more flexible XML format or invest scarce resources in custom-designed software. Read the full article here.
Post a Comment
Read more