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Todd made a cube similar to the one seen in Paramount Pictures’s Super 8, ordered it off of Shapeways, and got a Cease & Desist from Paramount for his trouble. This is part of the first wave of intellectual property lawsuits regarding 3D printing…expect many, many more.

Cease and Desist over Super 8 cube

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Given that Deathly Hallows was available as an ebook online before it was even for sale in print form, Rowling has certainly taken her sweet time on this. But it will be good to have “official” versions of the books electronically. My favorite quote from the article: Henwood said: “We want to make sure anyone who buys it, can read it on any device, we are talking to the Kindles, the Apples, the Googles, Barnes & Noble to make sure they are compatible. At the books are now available on The Internets.

Rowling to finally allow official Potter ebooks

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ICANN, the international organization responsible for coordinating the Domain structure of the Internet, just voted to allow generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) to be created. This means that instead of being stuck with .com, .net. .org, etc…organizations can request and be granted the ability to oversee their own TLD. A group of automakers could band together and register .car, for example, and you could have ford.car, honda.car, and so on. On the other hand, Ford could theoretically register .car, and prevent other companies from using it. The methodology that ICANN is going to use to prevent this sort of meta-cybersquatting isn’t really apparent at this time. The Draft version of the application guidebook is now available, and among the details is the application fee. It will cost $185,000 to apply for a new gTLD…a fee which ICANN will keep, even if your application is denied. Even with that, I think that serious thought should be given by ALA and IFLA to a joint application for a top level domain of .lib or .library (I did not know that there was already a TLD for .museum). Given the relative failure of the use of non-standard TLDs, I’m not sure a .library TLD would be used. But it’s far better that ALA and IFLA control it than Microsoft or Google. 

ICANN approves custom Top Level Domains

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The British Library and Google today announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the Library’s commitment, as stated in its 2020 Vision, to increase access to anyone who wants to do research.

The British Library and Google to make 250,000 books available to all

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I wish I had the cash to jump on this before it sold out…a 3D printer for $500! Love, love this stuff. It’s sold out now, but I’m sure it’s the first of many examples of these dropping in price.

eMAKER Huxley 3D printer kits = $500

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Firefox extension that will display ePub files right inside the browser. I want this for Chrome….pretty please? Great addition to library systems, even if it won’t be able to deal with DRM.

EPUBReader – Read ePub in Firefox!

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Fascinating read from the Internet Archive, who has decided to begin maintaining physical copies in archival storage of any book they have digitally. From the blog post: Internet Archive is building a physical archive for the long term preservation of one copy of every book, record, and movie we are able to attract or acquire.  Because we expect day-to-day access to these materials to occur through digital means, the our physical archive is designed for long-term preservation of materials with only occasional, collection-scale retrieval. Because of this, we can create optimized environments for physical preservation and organizational structures that facilitate appropriate access. A seed bank might be conceptually closest to what we have in mind: storing important objects in safe ways to be used for redundancy, authority, and in case of catastrophe. Really, really interesting…the Internet Archive is quickly becoming just The Archive. Their answer to storage is brilliant as well: Based on this technical literature and specifications from depositories around the world, Tom McCarty, the engineer who designed the Internet Archive’s Scribe book-scanning system, began to design, build, and test a modular storage system in Oakland California. This system uses the infrastructure developed around the most used storage design of the 20th century, the shipping container. Rows of stacked shipping containers are used like 40′ deep shelving units. In this configuration, a single shipping container can hold around 40,000 books, about the same as a standard branch library, and a small building can hold millions of books. Is it wrong that I want to work for Brewster? Such interesting, amazing projects that the Archive maintains…

The New Physical Archive of the Internet Archive

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The former tablet manufacturer Kno released it’s iPad app last night, giving the iPad the largest collection of textbooks yet seen on the platform. Very interesting to see if schools respond to this availability, and if the textbooks in question are up to date/popular. 

The Kno Textbook App Hits The iPad

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Absolutely stellar review of the new Nook Simple Touch eReader, with pretty much the same conclusion I would espouse.

Nook Simple Touch vs Kindle 3

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A journalist covering 3D printing has a blog with some really interesting interviews and coverage. Take a look.

3D printing blog