A commenter remarks:

Apple has negotiated a product-placement deal with the fabric of reality itself. All this week, your friends are required to tweet about iPads, and comedians are required to work the iPad into bad jokes. Obama is going to tape his weekly video address while holding an iPad.

Here are some things that popped into my head after two days of ipad use.

• In the App store, I don’t see any indication of whether an app has an offline mode. I joyfully downloaded the Epicurious and Dragon Dictation app only to realize that neither tool worked without a wifi connection.   That almost begs the question about whether these are really standalone apps at all or simply simplified interfaces to what were already  free web apps.
• What I miss is being able to try an app for a trial period. Frankly, sometimes the description gives  no indication about whether the app really does what it’s supposed to.  Let’s see  demo videos, not just screenshots. 
• Youtube is terrible in ipad’s Safari. I had lots of problems trying to load videos. The free youtube app works better, but it is missing a lot of videos in search results (plus, there are not search prompts). Don’t assume that because a video is on youtube that you can access it from iPad’s Youtube app. Many vids which are easy to find on youtube.com can’t be found in ipad’s youtube app.  (Want an example? Go to the youtube app  and search for  “Chemical Brothers  Let Forever Be.“  It’s nowhere.  (here is the actual link to the video on youtube.com – by the way, this Michel Gondry video is amazing!)
• Speaking of which, can anyone really recommend an RSS reader with the usual features plus an offline reading mode? This is the app I need the most!
• To my knowledge, there are no popup/ad blockers on Safari, so prepare for the onslaught of web ads. (On the positive side, lack of flash on iPad will make ads less intrusive).
• Are the Apple people allergic to providing  documentation inside the iPad itself?  (Despite what you might think, the minimalist/Zen  Apple User Experience guidelines don’t say anything about abolishing documentation). I was happy to see the familiar question mark help icon in Goodreads, but that’s the only app I could remember that had it. 
• In Goodreader, I used the wifi transfer option to transfer things from my laptop to ipad.  I’m amazed at how easy it was (despite the long sequence of steps required). Goodreads has some webdav/ftp/cloud storage methods for accessing PDFs which is a lot more impressive than what  iPad does  out of the box (Ed Dumbill complains about this too).
• You can’t search the contents of a single Safari page.  On Windows, Ctl-F causes a search box to appear in the browser, but in ipad’s Safari, there are simply icons for Favorite, Multipage View, Forward & Back. For a use case where you would need this search, go to this page and look for Sonnets  by Shakespeare. (even if you narrow down your search, scrolling through the results is tedious). 
• I tried viewing the biggest PDF document I know about in Goodreader: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. Although  this 13 MB PDF  took a while to load, it worked fine after it did.   Goodreader  doesn’t have the fancy page-turning animation feature or an attractive bookshelf, but its interface is intuitive and one of the most functional of all the apps.  
• Mike Cane’s ipad blog provides a lot of daily links about ipad-publishing topics (with a dose of snarkiness thrown in).
• I am not opposed philosophically to the idea of iTunes; I just think it is expected to do too much. At some point, it will become unwieldy.
• I can’t tell you how many people seeing my iPad have exclaimed, “that just looks like a big iPhone".
• While doing one of my iTunes syncs, I noticed that all of my downloaded apps disappeared! How strange. If I synced the apps again, everything returned, but minus the logins and account information.
• I have never entered my credit card so many times on a single device without actually purchasing anything. Also, I have entered my AppleId way too many times (next time I won’t use such a convoluted password).
• Liz Castro wrote up about how layout of pages with image can suck when you view in landscape mode. This is an issue, but it’s a debatable question whether this requires a CSS solution.  Given the ease of switching back and forth, shouldn’t we entrust the reader with deciding which orientation is more desirable?  As much as I like the landscape mode for scanning long docs, landscape mode is always going to compare unfavorably to portrait mode.  
• Castro also notes that smashwords-generated ebooks have  design problems:

• Liza Daly notes the peculiarities of iPad ebook presentation. Embedded fonts and @font-face don’t work and won’t work until Webkit has been updated.  She summarizes: “iBooks is pretty good for a first-generation ePub reader. The biggest concern is of course that once you purchase books from iTunes, you’re locked in to only reading them in iBooks.”
• In this slideshow, Daly makes the point that despite the plethora of books, there are really only two reading engines to worry about: Adobe Reader Mobile and WebKit. At the moment, all gadgets use either one or the other (with iPad using WebKit).
• Isn’t it ironic that iPad doesn’t have a free PDF reader and yet the main user manual is a mega 18 MB file PDF?
• According to Daly  internal and external hyperlinks in iBooks work fine. (PDF Hyperlinks work as advertised in Goodreader also). 
• Maybe I’m just being stupid, but if you can’t drop an SD card or USB storage device into the iPad, you would need to put original images on your laptop first before they can be transferred to the iPad.  I understand why you’d want to use iPad as a photo displaying device, but I don’t understand why you’d actually want to edit graphics or Keynote presentations if you already have your laptop out in the first place.  (Yes, the eye-fi SD cards offer another elegant solution for avoiding  the laptop/itunes altogether.
• Here’s a thread where  Calibre creator Kovid Goyal says  it won’t be necessary for Calibre to create an output profile specific to Ipad (and that the Sony profile is sufficient). We’ll see how long he  sticks to that position.
• At a SXSW panel about the Ipad, someone asked whether the keyboard would be friendly enough for shopping cart applications.  The keyboard is not bad, but I keep having to remove extra spaces and make the first letter of a word to be lowercase instead of uppercase.  Frankly, I am growing sick of logins and registration forms.
• I’m not sure how painful it will be to find things when  your home screen has dozens (if not hundreds) of ipad apps. Did you know that some individual ebooks are regarded as apps? There is the Dr. Seuss app, the Cat in the Hat app, the Twilight app. Arrgh!

In summary, I totally love the ebook reading possibilities of the iPad. Sometimes the minimalist design seems too minimalist, but it’s cool after you’ve figured things out. Ibooks seems cool too (although I wish it supported  font-embedding).  And I’m still waiting for a decent  offline RSS reader!

See also: David Rothman’s review & PDF tips  and Teleread’s guide to free ebooks.

(Here are some Q&A about ebooks which I wrote up for someone which I am reposting here).

WHAT KINDS OF PEOPLE DO YOU FIND ARE INTERESTED IN EBOOKS? IS THERE A TARGET AUDIENCE?

Before answering any questions, I think I should define what an ebook is. There is honest disagreement, but I define an ebook  as a digital file which  with the aid of software tries to simulate the experience of reading a print book on a portable device.  My ideal ebook reading device  would be something you can comfortably read for an hour or more  1)in bed, 2)at a restaurant table and 3)on the subway. Note that you can read in many different ways and with many different devices. But would you be comfortable reading on a PC/laptop/PDA/phone for an hour or more?  My bed/restaurant/subway criteria is a pretty good one. 

I find that all serious readers are "interested in ebooks", but only wealthy people and gadget freaks and fans of public domain literature crave ebooks. Over the years, the target market has become more mainstream (especially since Amazon has spent a lot of time and money promoting the Kindle). Devices that cost more than $200 will seem like a "risk" to many people, especially if they don’t perceive it as saving time.  The target market crowd is now probably women over 40 who like the convenience of being able to obtain a best-selling title almost immediately.

The education sector is massively interested in ebooks. It is a real cash cow, and publishers have been complaining that e-ink devices don’t let them do the fancy multimedia they need to justify the $120 price tag for their textbooks. Ipad does address that, and for that reason, I predict that within 5 years all college students will be using a device like the iPad (and probably the iPad itself) for class. The real struggle here is that many multimedia developers and instructional designers produce content in flash and iPad doesn’t support Flash. That is a real train wreck waiting to happen for the educational textbook market.

WERE PEOPLE WARY ABOUT EBOOKS (AS THEY ARE IN MANY OTHER NEW TECHNOLOGIES), WHEN THEY WERE FIRST INTRODUCED?
Cost is the biggest obstacle .. not only the cost of the device but the fact that used books already cost next to nothing. It makes little sense to pay $12 for an ebook if a used print book can be bought online for $2 + 4 shipping. (This market oddity is temporary and will disappear in less than 5 years). People worry that they may not use the ebook reader as much as they would have thought. (I personally am a real ebook fanatic, and yet I still do 95% of my reading on print books). People worry about locking in their purchases to a single device; there is no guarantee that the device will be even working 5 years from now. I personally can say that it often takes at least a decade to get to a particular book I own. If an ebook breaks down after 5-7 years anyway, that means a lot of the ebooks I buy will never be used.

The biggest complaint I hear is that current ebooks are not interesting to look at. People feel this way because the Internet is already so richly designed and so cool to navigate through.  The Internet  gives readers higher  expectations about what a book ought to look like.  For the last 4 years we have been using e-ink devices (whose main appeal was low battery use). Unfortunately, the low energy requirements for e-ink limited what kind of software and specifically what kind of interface you could use.

I think we need to differentiate between different consumers. Heavy readers worry about saving books for a long time. Heavy gadget freaks worry about digital rights management (DRM) and being dependent on a single platform. The average consumer worries mostly about price and upkeep (both in time and money).

DO EBOOK WRITERS APPROACH THEIR WRITING DIFFERENTLY THAN THEY WOULD FOR A PAPER BOOK?
It would seem easy to say yes here, but in general I don’t think it’s true. All kinds of writers try to make their writing portable, and those who like hypertext/multimedia/intertextuality have already moved to the Internet (as I have). If you look at attempts to harness the power of the internet in writing 5 years later, they seem awfully gimmicky.  I think blogging has caused writers to radically change the way they write .. but that is not ebooks.

As for me, I am always thinking of images which can accompany text. I know of some multimedia books/magazines that embed sound/flash/multimedia, and that is cool and expensive, but most writers don’t have the time or patience to mess around with that.

Revision is a lot more casual process for ebooks than paper books. If you make a typo, well, get it fixed; it’s not a tragedy (and recent purchasers will download a corrected version). If you make a typo in print, it looks really bad and chances are all readers will always have a defective copy.

IS IT ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE AN ALL-IN-ONE DEVICE LIKE THE IPAD REPLACES EBOOKS LIKE THE NOOK AND THE KINDLE?

Yes, but there’s still  room for two kinds of devices. If low-end dedicated devices sold for about $50-60 (and that day is not too far away), I think people would be comfortable with having a throwaway device just for reading and a higher end device for doing work. Right now I still have a lot of programs on my PC/laptop which I still depend on and that would never work on an iPad.  Google apps lets you do a lot of fancy tasks completely on the web, but we’re not anywhere near that point (at least 10 years). Some have talked about keeping all ebooks on the "cloud," and I think that idea will come sooner rather than later (certainly within the next 5 years).

I finally did it: I purchased an ipad.  I purchased the 32 gig device without 3g (although the monthly price was tempting indeed).

My main purpose was professional: to see how it would change reading and to test ebook designs on it.  See Craig Mod’s article about book design on the ipad.

I am not a big fan of the multimedia magazine (especially since Conde Nast or Wired or Verve seem to be the only ones with the technical resources to do it). Nor am I a fan of branded ebook readers or the iTunes store. I remain relatively happy with Windows Vista and Vista 7 and my  cheapo cellphone. I don’t mind buying a handful of applications, but I don’t relish the idea of buying a large number of single function applications. Nor do I relish the idea of having to sync things between Windows and the ipad.

On the other hand,  I also look forward to new writing tools like Budding (which like Google Docs or Live Writer are indispensible  to me now). As much as I enjoy the freedom permitted by the e-ink devices, I miss the interactivity and full color of the  world wide web.

I don’t intend to turn into an Apple Fanboy, but frankly, I see no other device that competes in the same category. I’m sure I will find other things to despise about the iPad, but for now I feel the joy of having spent several hundred dollars on something no one has ever seen.

Alberto Manguel, (in an interview with PBS ArtBeat) speaks about  reading and technology.

ALBERTO MANGUEL: I don’t think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don’t forget that there are also books. I don’t believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.

JEFFREY BROWN: I guess what people wonder about, and some fear, is that the technology changes how people take in information, how we take in narrative, you know, our attention spans even to narrative, which can impact reading and therefore can impact writing.

ALBERTO MANGUEL: Of course. Two things happen. On the one hand, the new technology, especially in the case of electronic technology, which is pushed so hard for industrial financial reasons, may lead to us believing that the only possible communication is superficial and brief and easy and everything else should be eliminated. But at the same time, it makes us reflect, at least a few of us reflect, on the value of those apparently superseded qualities, and so we become more conscious of what it means to read on the page, more conscious of what it means to acquire the pleasure of reading through difficulty, more conscious of the importance of a book that allows depth instead of simply surface as in those objects we call books and that pile up on the bestseller tables. I think that we will eventually realize that there are certain reading activities that are better performed electronically, such as searching an item in an encyclopedia or a dictionary. If you want to go to one specific point, the electronic technology is not well suited to reading "War and Peace," for instance, in that it requires that almost perfect object, which we invented centuries ago — a book, on paper that can be transported anywhere in which we can write and that has a physical presence in our world.

Here are other essays by Manguel (all PDF). See especially Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader (PDF) and the very amusing NYT essay on libraries. I’’m a fan of his book News From a Foreign Country Came.

I keep googling around to find this observation I made a few years ago on Teleread; now I am putting it on my own blog in the hopes that it will be easier to find.

NAGLE’S FIRST LAW OF EBOOK PROMOTION AND DISTRIBUTION: Comparatively speaking, it requires more effort to persuade a reader to invest TIME in an e-book than MONEY.

Two months ago I wrote in an article I wrote about  how to build a better vocabulary,  I recommended buying a good dictionary – only to realize that I no longer possessed one!

I have always been a dictionary fiend, but especially become one while teaching in Eastern Europe, where a good English dictionary was still a rare and valuable object. I remember the joy in my supervisor’s voice when I arranged for him to receive a brand new version of American Heritage Dictionary (AHD). I have  fond memories of reaching underneath my bed for the dictionary, looking up a common-but-unclear word like scalloped and closing the book with a precise understanding of the word.

But I had already given away my  dictionary  and afterwards, well, there was this thing called the Internet, and suddenly dictionaries become bulky and extraneous fetish objects mainly found  in  haunts for  Luddites and retired people.

Should I be recommending that people buy dictionaries anymore?

Purely for nostalgia reasons I decided to buy a new dictionary, and after reading this   wonderful review of the New Oxford American dictionary(NOAD) , I dared to think the unthinkable: has  an upstart dictionary  unseated  American Heritage’s position as the best and most practical  English dictionary in the world?  I made a trek to the local Barnes and Noble to do  comparison shopping. If there’s one thing  a brick-and-mortar bookstore would be good for, it would be for comparing dictionaries (the books’  heft added substantial shipping charges when purchased online).  Both dictionaries were at my Barnes and Noble (thankfully), but both were wrapped in tight plastic — heaven forbid that anyone would actually want to flip through their pages at the store! What was the bookstore afraid of — that word pirates would sneak into the store and pilfer some definitions without paying?

So I went home and did what I should have done in the first place. I went to Amazon.com and used the preview function to compare the NOAD with the AHD . I had expected AHD to win hands down, but even though AHD was nicer to look at and had in-depth discussions about certain words and grammatical points, I actually preferred NOAD for its better etymologies and its secondary definitions.

So I order NOAD used on Amazon.com for $25. Let me tell you; I  love it. And imagine my delight upon finding a CD for an electronic version for Windows mobile in the front cover. This version didn’t include any  updates and the interface was sort of weird (in an age where you are used to Google’s ajaxy magic  anticipating your words before you actually think of them) but still functional.

The problem of course was this pesky Internet thing. As wonderful as NOAD is,  it’s never going to keep up with online editions (especially with a dwindling number of customers).  Even though older public domain dictionaries still suck and wiktionary is still pretty basic, online definitions have been improving. If you type definition: iatragonic in the google search box, you will receive an ad-free list of dictionary definitions from various sites. (Do you remember those horrifying Internet days where going to a dictionary site meant having to endure popups and animated ads? those days are long behind us).

After buying the NOAD, I  compared my online dictionary experience with my old-fashioned 20th century dictionary experience.  Again, let me repeat: NOAD is  outstanding.  Definitions are much fuller and better than any one dictionary definition online, but  they just don’t compare with google’s ability to aggregate definitions from several different sources onto a single page.  On occasion, I’ve relied on wikipedia entries for a word which describe the background of a word much better than any dictionary ever would — see exclave and (more humorously) merkin. The NOAD definitions were excellent, but the wikipedia’s explanations were better.

The only time when a dictionary was better than Google definitions  was when I wanted to learn how to pronounce the word Swedenborgian. Actually though, I just checked dictionary.com for the same word and heard a computerized pronunciation of the word. That’s nice, except that NOAD and dictionary.com offered contradictory pronounciations. Now what?

Here are some other things to consider in the digital vs. print debate. As a high school student I used to write  unfamiliar words on  the back cover of a  book (and look them up in the dictionary later). I  was preparing for the SAT, but the habit stuck with me.  With ebooks, I have nowhere to store these unfamiliar words; even if I bookmarked the words, they are not easily accessible (nor are they easy to transfer to a centralized word list).  Quite by accident I have started keeping a  word list on my blog and linking to the best online definition. This has the advantage of letting me access my word list from any computer and watch the list accumulate over time (and  impress random readers).  It certainly works for me, but at the same time it’s kludgy. Shouldn’t some app developer be able to store word lookups from your iPad or Stanza or Kindle and upload them to some website?  Also, wouldn’t it  be great if you could preview  hard words from an ebook  before you start reading?  That would be  helpful for reading a book in a second language (for example).

In the ebook world, content creators on mobileread have complained about epub’s inadequacy about supporting dictionaries. Here’s Nate the Great’s great xml-based proposal for implementing dictionary definitions in epub.

Finally I would like to tell you about my first encounter with a dictionary. It was Cat in the Hat’s Beginner Dictionary by Dr. Seuss (actually P.D. Eastman, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Are you my Mother? ) This pictorial dictionary for children was silly and mostly useless, but I regarded it as a serious dictionary until I came to the letter  Z. The Z section only had  4  Z words (zebra, zipper zoo), but the last Z word really threw me: Zyjgyduf. Unlike the other words, I had never heard of this one and couldn’t even pronounce it. What did it mean? A screenshot is unavailable, but  I can  describe the accompanying illustration (which was the largest in the entire book). It was a large nest filled with about 20 small birds with beaks open. Underneath was the caption: A Zyjgyduf of birds.

I was only 7, but I went to the library and consulted several gigantic adult dictionaries to learn more about this  mysterious Zyjgyduf word.   Finally, with the librarian’s help, I found  Dr. Seuss’s  mailing address   and  wrote him a letter asking for a clearer  definition.

But Dr. Seuss never wrote me back. That  stuck-up bastard.

A few weeks ago Paul Biba blogged about a hilarious Charlie Brooker video about how to report the news. Charlie Brooker is a kind of British Steven Colbert/Bill Moyers who analyzes current media obsessions with a cynical eye. (See his piece about mass killings and his pilot Newswipe episode and his take on American news media). Surprise! Brooker also writes regular columns at the Guardian too. Here’s his take on ebooks:

The lack of a cover immediately alters your purchasing habits. As soon as I got the ebook, I went on a virtual shopping spree, starting with the stuff I thought I should read – Wolf Hall, that kind of thing – but quickly found myself downloading titles I’d be too embarrassed to buy in a shop or publicly read on a bus. Not pornography, but something far worse: celebrity autobiographies.

Here’s his opinion about the forthcoming iPad:

Some people are complaining because it doesn’t have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. It’s technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue to prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a 15-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they’d whine that it didn’t have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?

Here’s a great textbook about how to teach and illustrate principles of economics. If you browse through it, you may notice that it is not merely a textbook but a compendium of tips from professors about how to illustrate what economics is all about. It also makes for interesting reading (probably more than the typical textbook).

I wonder if these group-written books about teaching exist for other disciplines: namely literature, history, writing. Wikis probably could fulfill that function admirably. In this case, one professor seems to have compiled and edited everything. (There is a PDF of the complete online book).

I’m working on a user manual and am in the process of discovering several tools to do the job.

Here’s RSTA,  an online restructured text editor which lets you output into HTML and PDF. This is mainly of interest to people in the plone and python world.

Python programmer extraordinaire Mark Pilgrim explains why he codes in HTML and not Docbook. From the comment section, I learn about Pandoc, a great program for converting different forms (LaTex, RST, markdown, HTML, Docbook, gosh – just about everything!).

Here’s the Pandoc user guide and an online converter. The key, I’m guessing is how it handles unicode and document fragments, but I look forward to finding this out.

Pilgrim also does a rant about the restrictive fonts:

I know what you’re going to say. I can hear it in my head already. It sounds like the voice of the comic book guy from The Simpsons. You’re going to say, “Typography is by professionals, for professionals. Free fonts are worth less than you pay for them. They don’t have good hinting. They don’t come in different weights. They don’t have anything near complete Unicode coverage. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t…”

And you’re right. You’re absolutely, completely, totally, 100% right. “Your Fonts” are professionally designed, traditionally licensed, aggressively marketed, and bought by professional designers who know a professional typeface when they see it. “Our Fonts” are nothing more than toys, and I’m the guy showing up at the Philadelphia Orchestra auditions with a tin drum and a kazoo. “Ha ha, look at the freetard with his little toy fonts, that he wants to put on his little toy web page, where they can be seen by 2 billion people ha h… wait, what?”

Let me put it another way. Your Fonts are superior to Our Fonts in every conceivable way, except one:

WE CAN’T FUCKING USE THEM!

Soon — and I mean really fucking soon, like “this year” soon — there will be enough different browsers in the hands of enough different people that can use any possible font on any possible web page. And then a whole lotta people will start noticing fonts again — not just Your People, just also Our People. People who couldn’t tell a serif from a hole in their head, but they’re gonna be looking for new fonts. People who are just savvy enough to be tired of Comic Sans will be looking for a new font to “spruce up” their elementary school newsletter, which, in an effort to Love Our Mother (Earth), they now publish exclusively online.

A typeface designer responds:

As a type designer I feel like I have to step in and say something here. First off the majority of typefaces designed in the past twenty years haven’t been made by big foundries but by individuals working on type in their spare time. Second, typefaces receive no copyright protection in the United States so copying font files and renaming them for sale is pretty much legal. Third, fonts have been available on peer-to-peer networks since before the days of Napster and in 2000 it was estimated that only one out of fifty instances of a typeface file (postscript or TrueType files) was paid for, and it has only gotten worse.

I have over forty commercial typefaces available for sale through various type re-sellers around the world and my average yearly income off the typefaces is $115, even though I regularly see my typefaces in use on the web, on TV in print and in video games. I used to think that one day I’d have a nice supplemental income from my typefaces but the reality of the situation is that people like you don’t value the effort that goes into making a typeface. I haven’t designed a new typeface in eight years now and I have no desire to do so. Why should I when you’re going to be a big bitching twat you greedy self-centered tantrum throwing teenager?

Actually, the whole thread has a lot of expletives and rants, but lots of issues come up.  Actually, the most valuable information I gleaned from the threads were the names of some decent free fonts: Gentium, Day Roman, Yanone Kaffeesatz, Yanone Tagesschrift, Delicious, Aller, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Junicode,  Linux Libertine, the Liberation and Droid families, and Computer Modern (or, more likely, its Type 1 version, Latin Modern).

See also the Open Font library (here’s the beta version, which seems buggy—the search results only gives 1 result). Here’s a general list of the most famous free fonts, separated by license type.

Here’s a good (and indispensable) article about how to use the font-face css rule to use any of these awesome free fonts. Here’s another how-to. Here’s a nice demo.

Update: This browser support table shows that Chrome 3 (the current version) does not support embedded fonts, and that Chrome 4 will be released in 2010. Also, Internet Explorer only supports EOT fonts. (I’m not 100% sure what that means; according to the link in the previous paragraph, EOT is a Microsoft implementation of fonts. Certainly there has to be a conversion tool? Update 2: this font wiki has this information and more).

The free font issue is important for distributing ebooks. (Here’s a mobileread discussion). The .epub standard supports embedded fonts (I think), and having a unique font makes reading a more enjoyable experience when reading on a  Kindle or Nook.  I am growing weary of the same font on my Sony PRS 505 reader.

I guess I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’m working on two creative commons ebooks and am working on a user guide to publish on Booksurge and possibly as an ebook as well. For that reason, I’ve been learning a LOT about docbook. Overall, I’m happy with its flexibility even though the learning curve was steep –and also I’m depending a little too much on a on a noncommercial license of Oxygen XML editor. If I wanted to do something commercial, I’d have to pay $349 for a full version and $199 for an Author version (which lacks some  XML/XSLT tools but has an easier interface). Frankly, Oxygen is incredible, but I’m close to making commercial use of it.

Serna XML editor (the free version) is good for authoring, but I haven’t figured out how to validate it using various  schemas and DTDs. Apparently, Serna uses python plugins to enable validation of various XML languages like docbook and DITA. It looks like Serna only supports 4x versions of Docbook; I could be wrong.

By the way, after I finish one or two ebook projects, I plan to write an article about using docbook for ebook creation.

You may have heard about the false arrest of Henry Louis Gates (read Dr. Gates’ statement here).

Below are some fascinating comments I found from the New York Times discussion section.

First, I wanted to mention that  Henry Louis Gates deserves credit for discovering by accident the first African-American novel ever published in 1859. Here’s a  fascinating mp3 Gates had in 1983 with literary interviewer Don Swaim about Our Nig . The mp3 interview (recorded early in Gates’ career)  goes into detail about how Harriet Wilson’s publisher  publicized the “sad plight” of Harriet Wilson as a way to sell more books.  Some things never change! 

I’m happy to report that Our Nig is available on Project Gutenberg.  (It’s one of those early PG scans, and I think the hyphenation and formatting is not ideal, but it’s still readable and downloadable as EPUB.

The Gates interview was one of my favorites from the several hundred  Wired for Books interview mp3s I heard over the past two years.

See also: a minor academic controversy about whether Our Nig was really first.

Anyway, most of the reader comments about the false arrest are just bickering, but here are some fascinating comments:

This is unfortunate, all around. The person who called the police is to be commended. What happened from there is anyone’s guess. But, it does show that we need all calm down–it does seem like the Professor did do something to contribute to the incident. We have a ways to go in healing the nation of the effects of racism and slavery, to be sure. But we will all have to take the high road.

I had a wonderful elderly professor in graduate school who looked like she might be homeless, because she cared more for her work than her appearance. She helped many people who were schizophrenic–she was a Professor of Social Work. Brilliant.

One day she was walking in downtown New Orleans, and her purse was snatched. When she walked up to a policeman to report it, he asked her for identification. She said, I can’t give it to you because, as I just told you, my purse was just snatched. He arrested her for vagrancy. She had to call a fellow professor from her department to come to the police station and set the record straight.

She stayed calm, and went with the flow. It all worked out, and she had a very funny story to tell afterwards.

….

I’ve worked as a window cleaner in New York City for two decades, I am white, and have had the police called on me countless times when people thought I have been going in through a window, or wandering around an airshaft looking for access to a window. People see what they want to see, or only part of the whole, and those who only saw me entering made an assumption. On each occasion I cooperated calmly with police, and the issue was done with. Gates, who I admire greatly, is full of it. He had every reason to assist the cops, they were looking after his home, after all. He blew it when his patience ran out. He owes the cops, his neighbor, and the Harvard community an apology. In most cases he would be correct. In this one I believe him not only to be wrong, but to be playing with the truth. His credibility is at stake. There is no historical issue of racism here, it’s not like the cops came in gunning, or pulled their weapons. What did he think might happen, his home or not, if he tried to push in the door?

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I think Henry Louis Gates Jr. is losing out on an opportunity to fight for all the "non-famous" blacks who would not have had the charges dropped and been apologized to. He should sue the city of Cambridge for false arrest…I mean, Charles Ogletree is his lawyer. What an opportunity to bring attention to racial profiling, take the case to the Supreme Court, for God’s sake. They have the money, the influence, the time….I think he is a sell-out. My son was arrested for disorderly conduct, for talking back to a police officer. I had to pay for the tow of the car,($125.00) (he had been stopped for no reason), the bail to get him out($40), the fee for a public defender ($150.00). I filed a racial profiling complaint against the officer, who did not appear at the court date, but on the date, the side mirror of my car was ripped off (a coincidence?). Anyway, my son got six months probation anyway, and we have to pay fifty dollars a month, each time he reports to probation.($300) Plus he got two weeks of community service. Yes, my son is black. Internal affairs called us to see if we wanted to pursue our complaint against the officer, but after the mirror incident, my son was afraid (me, too, I must admit) So, merely saying that he feels "keenly" what ordinary black citizens go through, is not enough. Who will remedy this situation if not the top black leaders in the country? Another opportunity lost. Like the NAACP. We got ours, the hell with you all…….