Books

If you like gadgets, and you like the ocean, then you must like ROVs – it’s just that simple. For the uninitiated, ROVs (Remote Operated Vehicles) are small unmanned submarines that are used for underwater operations deemed too deep, dangerous or difficult for human divers. They’re tethered to a support ship, from which a human operator controls them in real time, watching a live video feed from an onboard camera. It’s all incredibly appealing to those of us who are fascinated by the prospect of what secrets lurk beneath the surface of the ocean... or of the local pond. A few dedicated souls go so far as to trying to create their own homebuilt ROVs, many of them turning to what has become the bible on the subject, Build Your Own Underwater Robot and other Wet Projects. Gizmag had a chance to talk to the two authors of the book, and found out what inspired them to pursue such an unlikely project.  Read More

You may have Facebook friends who have done the “Here are the top words from my Facebook status messages!” thing, where it lists the words they’ve most commonly used in telling the world about their lives. Interesting as that may or may not be, imagine something similar being done with four percent of all books ever published. That’s what a team of researchers from Harvard University, Google, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary have done. The resulting dataset is made up of the full text of about 5.2 million books, 72 percent of that text being in English, with French, German, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew making up the rest. Analyzing that dataset, a practice that the researchers call “culturomics” (a play on genomics), has revealed some fascinating things about the history of our species.  Read More

When is an eBook reader not merely an eBook reader? When it’s an enTourage eDGE reader. Unveiled this week at CES the clamshell designed reader is billed as the world’s first dualbook, with a 9.7” black and white E-ink screen on the one side and 10.1” LCD color touchscreen on the other. Along with 4GB of internal memory and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capability, the unit functions as a mini-netbook, notepad and audio/video recorder.  Read More

There’s been a definite buzz around eBooks and eBook readers in recent times, and despite Asus challenging the price point last year we’re yet to see what we’d guess to be an affordable enough solution to break the mass-market. There are some pretty tidy devices on the shelves though, with Amazon’s Kindle proving popular enough to ‘go global’ last October, a move that has now been repeated with the spacious Kindle DX.  Read More

Although digital storage devices that cram more and more information into smaller and smaller packages continue to be developed, unfortunately the same can't be said for those trusty old analogue data storage devices known as books. However, the British Library’s Boston Spa site in West Yorkshire has used new technology of a different sort in the form of seven robotic cranes that will be used to retrieve items in its new Additional Storage Building (ASB) that will eventually house approximately seven million items from the UK national collection.  Read More

Looking for the ultimate Christmas gift? How about a limited edition copy of Norman Mailer’s epic tale of the Apollo II journey, including a signed print of Buzz Aldrin for just US$1500? And if that takes your fancy, a Marc Newson designed “Lunar Rock Edition” of Mailer’s tome including your own piece of genuine moon rock is sure to blow you away…and it will only set you back US$90,500.  Read More

Establishing the condition of old books and precious historical documents traditionally involves removing samples of the paper from the valuable archival materials for testing in a laboratory. Naturally such destructive forms of testing are far from ideal. Now scientists have come up with a better option with the development of a nondestructive “sniff” test that can measure the degradation of old books and documents based on their smell.  Read More

Nokia has teamed up with Sesame Street to create an interactive reading experience that can involve grandparents and grandchildren no matter how far apart they may find themselves. The Storybook research project melds the tactile and visual pleasures of reading a real book with video conferencing technology which allows distant relatives to take an active part in a child's literacy development.  Read More

Too tired to read the little ones a bedtime story after a long day? Japanese researchers may have had the time-poor parent in mind when they developed Ninomiya-kun, a robot capable of reading aloud from that most ancient of random access mass storage devices - a book.  Read More