You fly on some airline, you register with their frequent flyer program (although each airline comes up with their own goofy name for the program, such as “Dividend Reward Value Sky Miles Plus”), you earn miles, and when you earn enough, you cash them in on a free flight. So they’re worth something to you, but what? If you cash in 25,000 miles on a flight that would have set you back $500, that doesn’t mean that each mile was worth 2 cents, although that is a popular…
I’ve discussed the epub eBook format here before when describing how I created some epub children’s books from Project Gutenberg files for the OLPC XO. In another discussion of the format, I once saw someone complain that Adobe’s strong support of it was based on the fact that their tools are the only ones that can create epub files, but this is only true if we add a few qualifications: their tools are the only commercial ones that can create epub files for now.
In a recent posting here on The future of RDFa, I described some of the advantages of RDFa compared with some of the disadvantages of microformats. When Massachusetts Commonwealth Mass.gov Chief Technology Strategist Sarah Bourne posted a comment about problems that microformats present for website accessibility, I asked her to elaborate, and she was kind enough to put this together for me.
John Markoff has been one of the most respected tech journalists for a long, long time, so his Reading Steve Jobs piece this week on potential clues that Apple is working on an eBook reader is worth a read for anyone interested in the eBook market. I don’t have anything to add to what he says, especially when he tells stories like this:
A co-worker recently told me that she needed to create a flowchart but didn’t have Visio. She knew that I had it, but I played dumb. I told her how I’d recently learned to make simple flowcharts in PowerPoint, and recommended that she try that, but she needed more of a swimlane diagram, which would have been difficult in PowerPoint.
