Posted 07/30/09 at 06:00:52 PM by Andy Salisbury

For some time now Barnes & Noble has been a WiFi hotspot for hipsters with ironic t-shirts all across the nation, however these hipsters have had to create accounts and pay in order to reap the benefits. But, thanks to a recent desire to push a fledgling online bookstore, the prices and account requirements have been lifted.

Barnes & Noble struck a deal with AT&T to provide free Internet access to those within their walls, all thanks to an online bookstore that they hope will compete with Amazon. They’re so confident, in fact, that they’re in the process of developing a reader of their own (currently in development with Plastic Logic).

Barnes & Noble is boasting that their eBookstore is launching with 700,000 titles (500,000 of which were public domain offerings from Google), compared to Amazon’s launch catalog of 300,000 volumes.

Should you find yourself in a Barnes & Noble enjoying the free WiFi, feel free to check out the online bookstore here. Or, if you’d prefer, continue to spend time with us. We prefer the latter.

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Posted 05/04/09 at 04:54:18 PM by Andy Salisbury

While book scanning has become a pretty common process, one problem that still remains is that the scanned images are slightly distorted where the spine of the book meets the page. It looks like Google has done their very best to fix this error, with a pretty nifty camera setup.

Their book scanner, which was recently revealed in patent pictures, paints a book with infrared light, and then two infrared cameras generate a 3D model of the book, which can be used to correct scans. On top of this, Google has implemented camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of the book’s pages when the book is in the scanner. This is then transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for any distortions, and allows the OCR software to read the text more accurately.

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Posted 07/27/08 at 11:01:13 PM by Paul Lilly

In what would typically be a publishing nightmare (and might still be), Wikipedia announced it will attempt to make history in print publishing by creating a book with about 90,000 authors, which would rank as the most credited individual authors ever. To help them do that, the online encyclopedia has partnered with German publisher Bertelsmann, and the two of them will set out to create a single-volume print encyclopedia containing 25,000 of German Wikipedia's most popular articles.

Set to go on sale in September for around $32 USD, The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia will have a credits page that runs 27 pages "in a dense layout -- it's a page full of names, separated by commas." One of those names will be Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber. All 25,000 articles will be short in length running no more than a few paragraphs each. But will they be factually correct?

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