I’ve written about VDM (Verlag Dr. Mueller), an exploitive academic/scholarly mill before. Writer Beware writer advocate and writer Victoria Strauss notes that VDM has a new wrinkle: . . . a company called Bloggingbooks that wants to publish your blog in book form Read Writer Beware’s warning about Bloggingbooks. Run away; you can do this…
I like social networking sites for bibliophiles. I’ve tried most of them. The recent idiocies surrounding Goodreads has had me re-thinking my participation for quite a while. The latest Goodreads faux pas has Goodreads deleting reviews and user’s shelves based on arbitrary criteria about shelf labels referring to authors. There’s a certain irony in that…
It really isn’t that much cheaper to produce an ebook. The binding/printing costs are depending on the book and the binding and the numbers printed somewhere around 1 to 3 bucks a book, for a Robert Jordan Hardcover with foil. The costs up to the point a file is sent to an ebook producer or…
Evernote is giving giving away premium Evernote accounts good through the end of the school year (June 30, 2012), to US college students with a .edu email address. This is a fabulous offer; Evernote lets you take notes, stash .pdfs and Web pages for research and access them from just about any computer, or iOS…
From a Cult of Mac article by John Brownlee: These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location,…
I always check out new blogging and CMS platforms, so when I started hearing about Pinterest.com, I took a look, and then tried Pinterest. Pinterest describes itself as “Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love.” Pinterest isn’t really directly comparable to any of the extant blogging or CMS systems; it’s most…
This is a really smart article by Mathew Ingram: “Our Relationship with E-Books: It’s Complicated“. Ingram quite even-handedly covers the bases on sharing ebooks, and ebook annotations, complete with lots of links, in clear language. He notes: Will we ever be able to download a digital version of the print book we just bought, and…
My original 5 gig iPod, purchased in November of 2001, still boots, still charges, and still works. October 23 was the anniversary of the initial announcement regarding the then new iPod, and while mine still works pretty much as well as it did in 2001 (the batter is not what it was), I subsequently became…
I’ve written a short article on Peachpit’s site on “iPad Tips for the College Student.” I suggest several useful and time-saving iPad apps for students. None of the iPad apps I’m discussing cost more than $10.00; most are under $5.00 and quite a few are free. Read the rest of “iPad Tips for the College…
I’ve been thinking about standing desks and my ideal workspace for, well, a few years now. My interest has been spurred in part by people I know who, like me, write for a living, having positive experiences with standing desks. And of course there are the articles, like this one from early this month in…
