Category: Jon’s Articles

By Jon: First published in Online Currents 2003 – 18(5): 12-14

In a previous article I indicated that the fledgling e-book market has matured and settled down for some steady growth, largely driven by an increase in the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) with e-book display capabilities. Although fiction is by far the more popular, there are increasing amounts of non-fiction material finding their way into e-book format. In this article I look into sources for downloading non-fiction e-books, while the concluding article will describe e-book ‘libraries’ and CD distribution systems. read more

Online Currents 2003 – 18(6): 23-25

In two previous articles I discussed the current state of eBook development and looked at online sources of downloadable eBooks. Here I want to describe two other distribution models – the supply of eBooks in bulk on CDs, and the use of an ‘elibrary’ model to permit limited-time access to eBooks while online.

All businesses mentioned here can be found online at www.nameofcompany.com; e.g. ‘www.samizdat.com’, etc.

CD Sales

There are two major sources of free out-of-copyright eBooks on CD, Samizdat and BlackMask Online. Both appear to be run as one-man businesses: B & R Samizdat Express, by Richard Seltzer and BlackMask by David Moynihan. Both carry out their marketing through websites; Blackmask also provides its texts for free download. Both derive most of their material from Project Gutenberg, which was discussed in the previous article. Both attempt to provide answers to the question ‘Why should I pay for something I can get online for free?’. The differences between them are mainly a matter of price, classification and emphasis. read more

By Jon. For Online Currents

By Jon. For Online Currents

By Jon. For Online Currents 18 (3), April 2003

By Jon: First published in Online Currents – 20(9) November 2005

Computer people are good at inventing things, not so good at naming them.  Daft names from the history of computing include CD-ROM, which has nothing to do with ROM, PCMCIA card (allegedly People Can’t Manage Computer Industry Acronyms) and USB (Universal Serial Bus), which makes a sophisticated data handling package sound like an under-25’s road trip through Thailand.  A more recent entry in the daft name stakes is podcasting: the automatic transmission of sound broadcasts to a user’s computer in a form they can then listen to on a portable music device. read more

By Jon. For Online Currents

By Jon. For Online Currents 23 (2009)

By Jon: First published in Online Currents 2003 – 18(7):25

Another day, another set of initials. This time the initials stand for Resource Description Framework. This is closely associated with XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which in turn is a subset of SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language). But what does it all mean?

RDF, like XML, was developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium. It is designed to provide for the expression of semantic information –information about things. At the core of RDF is the notion of a resource description. A resource is something: it could be a document, a book, a company or a person, or any other object or concept of interest. A description is a set of information whichrepresents the resource. The information is obviously selected to be of value to users or searchers; thus your resource description would probably include information about your position title and phone number but not whether you can waggle your ears. read more

By Jon: First published in Online Currents – 20(4) May 2005

April 1st is approaching as I write this, and I can’t help thinking what wonderful April Fool jokes could be played with this software. Give your computer ESP! Amaze your friends! Computer remote control products should be right up there with whoopee cushions and itching powder in the magic shop window. But for the serious-minded among us, here are the facts.

Remote access to another computer can take place over a local network or through broadband Internet connections. It allows technical support staff to fix broken PCs without having to be physically present; it also allows users to show each other documents and applications, and to take over and run programs on someone else’s PC. The computer which is accessed is called the ‘host’; the one doing the accessing is the ‘client’. The types of access provided by these programs are listed below. read more