Hasta La Gadget!

Graffiti, without any bothersome cops to stop you

OK, so this notebook isn’t really a gadget, but I know all you nerds out there love your pens and your paper. This beautiful book doesn’t bother with blank pages. Instead, it has photographs of blank walls, ready for you to scrawl all over like an armchair graffiti artist.

Inside the book, titled “Walls”, are 160 pages with 80 photos of New York City walls, onto which you can doodle, sketch or write. It sure beats the creativity-blocking fear of staring at a blank white page. And at $17, its a lot cheaper than the fine the cops will give you for spraying up real NYC buildings.

Walls Notebook [Think of The via Laughing Squid]

New York City Graffiti Laws [NYC.gov]

At last, you can get rid of those last few dirty, dusty paper books

Picture this. You have wholly converted to e-books. The very thought of buying another bundle of paper fills you with revulsion, and all your reading is done on an e-reader or a tablet. But one problem remains. You have a stack of old, out-of-print books which you still love, but which are taking up space. Worse, you can’t even buy digital versions as it would seem that their publishers hate money. What can you do?

The answer is to scan them yourself. You can do this with cameras and home-brewed software, or you could use the new Plustek OpticBook 3800. It’s a flatbed scanner specifically designed for scanning books. The scanning bed has a very thin bezel so you can scan almost all the way to the spine, and a thick foam lid liner combined with correction software eliminates the curved, distorted text and shadows you’d normally get.

The OpticBook also comes with a slew of software packages designed to do OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and turn your scanned pages into searchable PDFs.

Specs-wise, the scanner can go up to 1,200dpi, but if you let it run at a more-than-adequate-for-the-screen 300dpi, it’ll scan an A4 page in seven seconds.

You probably won’t want to go through entire novels, but for cookbooks and other reference materials, a searchable archive is ideal. And if you have books that are literally falling apart through use and cannot be replaced, you should probably do something about that. Windows only, available now for $300.

OpticBook 3800 [Plustek. Thanks, Betsy!]

See Also:

• The $20 DIY Book Scanner
• DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes
• Japanese Book-Scanning Services Fueled by iPad, E-Readers
• Swift, canny book scanner bodes publishing mischief a-plenty …
• High-Speed Camera Scans Books in Seconds
• Pocket Fold-Out Scanner Makes Book-Copying a Snap
• 500 Pages–Per-Hour Book Scanner From Atiz Released

The Most Interesting Man in the World’s got nothing on Tracey Moberly. She’s either incredibly exciting or is acquainted with plenty of people that are, because over the course of twelve years she’s collected enough interesting texts to publish a book about them. We can’t imagine saving and compiling thousands upon thousands of SMS messages — let alone weaving them together into intricate stories and life lessons — but it sounds like she’s received more than enough interesting texts to make Text me up! worth a peek. A book about texts may sound boring, but the novel isn’t just full of threaded conversations; Tracey’s interspersed it with commentary and illustrations of her own, making it a rather unique (and comprehensive) take on the various trials and joys we face in everyday life. Regardless of how successful the book is, it’s nigh impossible to read our own incoming messages the same way again. Check out the six-minute video that shows Tracey being interviewed after the break.

Continue reading Woman publishes book filled with 12 years of her personal texts

Woman publishes book filled with 12 years of her personal texts originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It seems dangling deals to lure consumers away from competitors is all the rage these days, and Barnes & Noble has jumped on the make-the-switch bandwagon, offering $315 worth of e-books to prospective buyers of its Nook e-reader. Starting today, when owners of those other devices tote their current e-readers into a Barnes & Noble store and buy themselves a new Nook or Nook Color, they’ll get 30 free eBooks, with an apparent value of $315. Here’s the catch — because, you know there had to be one — Barnes & Noble’s won’t let you pick the books for yourself. Those 30 free eBooks will come pre-loaded on a 2GB microSD card. If you’ve got the taste of a corporate marketing team, and have been waiting for a reason to get in on the Nook action, check out the source link for more details. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Barnes & Noble offers 30 free e-books to switch to Nook — that’s one expensive carrot

Barnes & Noble offers 30 free e-books to switch to Nook — that’s one expensive carrot originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 20:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve long known paper books are on the decline, but now we’re seeing the first death knell for the fattest of them all. California’s public utilities commission has ruled that it will no longer deliver doorstops residential phone books unless folks specifically ask for it — a move that’s expected to prevent 1,870 tons of material from entering the state’s waste stream. Californians, like everyone else, can search the White Pages online, but they’ll still be able to request a paper copy or CD-ROM if they’re feeling old-fashioned. For now, though, the state will continue to ship government White Pages and the Yellow Pages for local business listings (in a post-Yelp world, that seems antiquated). What’s especially fascinating about all this is that the pressure to cease automatic phone book deliveries came from none other than Verizon, which mounted a case back in October, citing the enormous human and natural resources required to get updated phone books into people’s hands each year. Of course, the estimated 1,870 tons of averted waste is a fraction of the 660,000 tons BanthePhoneBook.org says these tomes create every year, but here’s hoping it’ll be enough to make other states take note.

California stops automatic phone book delivery following pressure from Verizon originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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