- Now You Can Get A Latte AND An Espresso at Your Bookstore — The Espresso books-on-demand printing system was first unveiled at the beginning of 2007 and made it’s American debut last summer with an exhibition at one of the New York Public Library’s special collections. Now this revolutionary device is making its first big commercial appearance in the Australian bookstore chain Angus & Robertson (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch). The initial intended use of the machines is to allow customers to obtain copies of out-of-print and hard-to-find books, but the chain plans to use them to offer up to 10,000 titles by the end of next year. A typical “big-box” bookstore like Angus & Roberts, or American retailers like Borders or Barnes & Noble, generally stocks about 20,000 unique titles, so this will allow them to increase their offerings by 50% without having to spend money on store expansions or increased inventory. Borders, which bought itself (along with Waldenbook) back from Kmart about ten years ago, is struggling pretty seriously these days. Their talks about merging with B&N failed, and now the chain is trying to sell itself once again. So the arrival of these “ATMs for books” could be either a saving throw for them by adding titles, or it could be the final nail in their coffin as it could quite possibly make big-box bookstores irrelevant. Stay tuned.
- Coming Soon, The Complete MGM Film Library On A Grain Of Rice — Last week I mentioned a re-imagining of selling movies on USB sticks instead of DVDs. This week, I ran across this news item about a plan from SD-card maker SanDisk and four of the major record labels to sell record albums on SD cards instead of CDs. Those teeny-weeny fingernail sized micro-SD cards now range in capacity from 64MB to 16GB, and a typical music CD only holds up to 700MB in the first place. It’s no problem whatsoever to put the original uncompressed WAV files on the tiny micro-SD cards, which could then be directly inserted into even the smallest audio players as well as your full-sized home stereo system. The micro-SD cards are so small that you could carry dozens of them with you, if you were so inclined, and the ability to use them in the entire range of audio electronics would make them extremely flexible. Plus, if the group behind this idea could get portable music players to support the media format, it would let those manufacturers stop chasing onboard storage and make all the companies that want tougher DRM very happy. Keep your eye on this, as it has the potential to be a big, big deal for the record labels AND the electronics makers.
- Pay As You Go Everywhere — Last week, Time Warner Cable CEO Glen Britt told investors at a Goldman Sachs technology conference (oh, the humanity) that he thinks metered broadband service is the likely service model of the future. The cable companies are all in the midst of testing the waters of various schemes for changing the nature of broadband service, and TWC is piloting a pay-as-you-go plan in Texas. Comcast, of course, has just rolled out a bandwidth capping policy that provides the average user with so much bandwidth that it might as well be unlimited but will slow down the heavy users. A metered use system would let the cable companies offer price reductions to low-use users, place the burden of paying for extreme bandwidth usage on the actual high-end consumers, and potentially reduce the likelihood that the cable companies would feel compelled to abandon net neutrality and cram tiered Internet service down everyone’s throat. They should be just as enthusiastic about a-la-carte cable TV service, except that the cable companies OWN 90% of the cable networks themselves and don’t want to lose their sweet sweet revenue, but one can always hope that they’ll see the light. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless has announced that they’re rolling out a month-to-month plan that would also let you use any cell phone you want. This announcement goes along with their “any device anywhere on our network” plan that they introduced last year. It’s another step in the right direction of returning the network providers to their rightful roles as providers of the pipes and not the means of access or the content.
- Slavery Is Freedom — Last week I posted about the upcoming “enhanced” driver’s licenses in the State of New York that will come embedded with RFID chips that can be used for border crossings (among other things). While the United States is on the slippery slope to a police state, the U.K. has already descended into nothing short of Orwellian nightmare with its ubiquitous (and mostly useless) CCTV systems, ASBO classifications, and so on. Now they’re going one step further by introducing RFID-embedded identity cards for resident aliens that are chock-full of biometric identification (i.e. fingerprints, etc.). The cards will be issued to foreign students and to foreign nationals living in the UK on spousal visas. Cory Doctorow, the editor of BoingBoing and well-known privacy advocate, happens to be one of those “married aliens” who will be affected by the new system and has quite a long post about it today. The British government’s plan has been widely decried as a test balloon for forcing ALL British citizens to carry “enhanced” identification cards and be incorporated into a national database system which could be abused any way the government fancied. The Tories have also made the valid complaint that the cards will do little toward the stated goal of “fighting terrorism” because they won’t apply to short-term visitors from the EU, who can move freely in and out of the U.K. and who can stay for up to three months without any additional visas or papers.
Meanwhile, here’s a bit of good news about less sinister applications of RFID technology: Researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. are developing a tag technology based on RFID that would create very inexpensive tags that could be applied to produce, meat and other food that spoils quickly to detect the relative freshness of a piece of fruit or a cut of meat or a container of milk and update the displayed expiration date of the item on its packaging. Accurate expiration labels are presently non-existant, using “best guess” efforts only, causing tons of food to be wasted everey single day. This is a different system than the highly-touted “self-inventory” sort of RFID tag that lets warehouses track stock or lets your “smart” refirgerator tell you when you need more eggs, but could probably be included in the same sort of systems and would be very beneficial to consumers AND producers alike.
