Hasta La Gadget!

Prepare yourself for the best, most enthralling gaming experience of your life. No, it’s not the newest-fangled of the fangles, it’s not the latest tech around. It’s just The Great Gatsby, lovingly squeezed into an NES game (well, it’s really a stylized Flash game, but you know what we mean). The game itself is sort of a cross between Castlevania and Super Mario Bros., and that’s just fine with us. In fact, it’s the greatest thing we’ve seen all week. Hit up the source link and get to wasting the rest of your day.

The Great Gatsby gets a beautiful, enthralling NES version, kills productivity of the literary gaming elite originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not every day that you see something handcrafted with time and care on the internet, but what you see above certainly qualifies. An art / craft project by German designer Maria Fischer, it’s called Thoughts on Dreams, it contains threaded ‘hyperlinks‘ which are there to help guide the reader to links between important passages. The book is sadly (for us) in German, so we can’t know what it says, but we can imagine that it’s all sorts of beautiful, mysterious things that can only be conveyed by paper and colored string.There is one more image after the break, just because.

Continue reading Hand-sewn, hyperlinked book is a thing of beauty, and a joy for several minutes

Hand-sewn, hyperlinked book is a thing of beauty, and a joy for several minutes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Treading on the brink of being another CES crapgadget, here’s Ion Audio‘s venture into the book-digitizing business. The Book Saver promises one-second color scans of both pages of a book and comes with OCR software and the ability to export to PDF or JPEG formats. Plans aren’t quite finalized and the unit before us wasn’t functional, but a 2GB SD card is expected to be included while there’s also a USB connection to hook up straight to your PC or Mac. The big problem here is that there’s no automation for page turning, and worse yet, you’ll need to lift the entire, somewhat fragile, scanner in order to flip to the next page. That’s done using that fetching Wiimote KIRF up at the front of the device and there are a pair of cameras embedded in the bottom of the overarching plastic casing. MSRP is set at $149 and availability is coming in June at places like Barnes & Noble, Staples, and Office Depot … you know, in case you actually want one.

Ion Book Saver hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Jan 2011 22:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whether we like, loathe, or never even considered the idea of it, quantitative literary analysis seems ready for its moment in the spotlight. Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, a pair of historians of science over at George Mason University, have been playing around with the titles of some nearly 1.7 million books — accounting for all the known volumes published in Britain during the 19th century — in a search for enlightenment about the Victorian era’s cultural trends and developments. By looking at how often certain words appear in text titles over time, they can find corroboration or perhaps even refutation for the commonly held theories about that time — although they themselves warn that correlation isn’t always indicative of causation. Their research has been made possible by Google’s Books venture, which is busily digitizing just about every instance of the written word ever, and the next stage will be to try and mine the actual texts themselves for further clues about what our older selves thought about the world. Any bets on when the word “fail” was first used as a noun?

Continue reading Google helps scholars mine 1.7 million Victorian era book titles for clues to our historical attitudes

Google helps scholars mine 1.7 million Victorian era book titles for clues to our historical attitudes originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 05:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We might be busy refilling our inkwells in preparation for CES 2011, but let’s not forget that some of the CES 2010 exhibitors are still working feverishly on bringing their innovations to market. Copia is one such company, though in the time between its January debut and today it’s had to abandon its plans for own-brand e-readers and has fully transitioned itself into a software offering — with apps available for the desktop, iPad, Windows Phone 7 now, and Android and other touch devices following soon. Copia allows Facebook Connect logins, which should give you a hit at its premise — it aims to meld an ebook store in with a vibrant and active online reading community, with a litany of social and sharing features making it perhaps more attractive than the somewhat more limited social skills on offer from the current ebook market leaders. Unannounced OEM partners have been engaged to deliver the Copia platform on upcoming e-reading devices, though whether the whole thing sinks or swims will be entirely up to you, the user. See a video demo of what Copia’s about after the break.

Continue reading Copia’s ‘social reading’ platform goes live, abandons hardware plans

Copia’s ‘social reading’ platform goes live, abandons hardware plans originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 04:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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