Google+ Adds Face Recognition, Deeper Gmail Integration

I use Google+, but I’m not sure how useful these will be to me. At any rate, Mashable has the latest…

Google is on fire today: besides introducing the new activities recommendation engine Schemer, and the news aggregator Currents, the company also improved Google+ with several nifty features, including face detection.

The new feature is called Find my Face, and it helps tag photos of people in pictures, provided they’ve activated the feature.

Google has obviously learned a lesson from Facebook, which suffered some backlash – even an EU probe – over turning its face recognition feature on by default. In Google+, you can accept or reject someone tagging you or turn the feature on and off and, most importantly, the feature is opt-in.

Find my Face will be rolling out to users over the next couple of days.

Gmail has also been upgraded with a couple of social networking features, making it easier to add people to your Google+ Circles from Gmail and share stuff on Google+ without leaving your inbox.

 

Furthermore, you can now also filter messages in Gmail according to your Circles; for example, you can see only the messages from your family, work colleagues or any other group of people you’ve defined as a Circle.

Google will be rolling out these new features to users’ Gmail and Gmail Contacts over the next couple of days

via mashable.com

 

Google Alerts for Books

I’ve found Google Alerts to be very useful and this new feature looks especially appealing to me.

Google Alerts has a new feature that lets you set alerts specifically for books.  So if you are into a specific author, books on subjects that you follow, or books that have a unique combination of subjects, this service will be a big help.

You head over to Google Alerts:

Then you enter your keywords on the bar at the top.  The change comes to the Type pull down where you can now select Books as one of the types.  Then set up the frequency of the alerts, the volume and the email address.  You will get to preview your alerts if you like.  I find this very helpful because I can make quick changes that really tailor the alert to the results I am looking for. 

Create the Alert and you will start to receive them.  I use general alerts to find news published about our library, about subject areas, and now I look forward to building alerts for books.

via sites.wakingbraincells.com

 

Amazon aims for book rental service, report says

If this comes to pass, it will be interesting to see how the ebooks offered compare to what local libraries carry . It certainly promises to make the $79/year Amazon Prime service more valuable.

Amazon’s proposal would reportedly offer limited book rentals to Amazon Prime customers. (BLOOMBERG) Would you pay to have limited, monthly access to a library of books for your e-reader? According to report from the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is hoping you would.

The online retailer is reportedly thinking about making a subscription library service available to Amazon Prime members, adding book rentals to the $79 per month [sic] service that now offers online video and an unlimited deal on two-day shipping. The rental subscription, described in the report as a Netflix-like service for books, would offer older titles, and the company would limit the amount of books users could read for free every month.

According to Journal sources “familiar with the matter,” Amazon is trying to sell the idea to publishers, who may be wary about the effect that that kind of service would have on the value of books and their partnerships with bookstores.

via washingtonpost.com

Two Great Interactive eBooks For Kids [Android / iPad]

From MakeUseOf:

Despite the obvious attraction to real paper-based books, the digital world has begun to create some really special adaptations of great stories. These somehow blur the line between books, movies and games, by providing a story in page-by-page format, interactivity and audiovisual segments. They’re also usually highly customisable, enabling parents to choose how much glitz to add to an already-worthwhile story. Take a quick look at two prime examples of the new interactive picture book market.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore – MoonBot Studios, William Joyce & Brandon Oldenburg

The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore is a story which started as a short film and then was adapted to become an interactive book for the iPad. Both the film ($2) and the iPad application ($5) version of the story are available to purchase, which is good news for people without an iPad.

Moonbot Studios have created something very special with their iPad application. You can make the pictures animated, add music and sound effects, or remove everything and read it as just a straight book.

On every page there’s something interactive: wind, books, piano keyboard. It’s all there. Readers can get quite engrossed in the story as they’re actually helping the story to be told.

via makeuseof.com

 

Time Inc. Expands Tablet Magazines for Apple, Google

From All Things D:

Magazine publishers have veered back and forth on what tablets means for their business — Savior! Disappointment! Maybe sort of promising! — but here’s Time Inc. making another bet on the technology: The Time Warner publishing unit says that by the end of the year, all 21 of its titles will be available on just about every tablet platform.

What that means in practical terms:

• Time Inc. currently supports tablet versions of its four highest-profile titles — Time, Sports Illustrated, People and Fortune — and will roll out another 17 versions for titles like InStyle, Entertainment Weekly and Real Simple.
• All of the titles will be available via Apple’s iTunes, Google’s Android store, Hewlett-Packard’s new tablet platform and Next Issue Media, the “Hulu for Magazines” joint venture that Time Inc. spearheaded a couple years ago.
• Time Inc. also highlights an agreement to sell digital subscriptions via Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and doesn’t mention Amazon in the release (below). But it’s a very safe bet that Time and other publishers will be supporting Amazon’s new tablet when it’s released this fall.
• It’s much less likely that you’ll see the titles on Research In Motion/BlackBerry’s unloved PlayBook, which isn’t mentioned in the release.
• Note that while the release mentions “digital subscriptions,” what that really means is “digital-only subscriptions available everywhere but iTunes.” Apple and Time Inc. still haven’t come to terms on subscription rules, so right now the only way to get a digital subscription for the iPad is to buy a subscription package that also includes print.

via allthingsd.com

 

Pew study: eReader ownership surges; tablet ownership grows more slowly

Pew Internet & American Life provides a lot of interesting research, usually on up-to-date topics such as the one summarized below:

The share of adults in the United States who own an e-book reader doubled to 12% in May, 2011  from 6% in November 2010.  E-readers, such as a Kindle or Nook, are portable devices designed to allow readers to download and read books and periodicals.  This is the first time since the Pew Internet Project began measuring e-reader use in April 2009 that ownership of this device has reached double digits among U.S. adults. 

Tablet computers—portable devices similar to e-readers but designed for more interactive web functions—have not seen the same level of growth in recent months.  In May 2011, 8% of adults report owning a tablet computer such as an iPad, Samsung Galaxy or Motorola Xoom.  This is roughly the same percentage of adults who reported owning this kind of device in January 2011 (7%), and represents just a 3 percentage-point increase in ownership since November 2010.  Prior to that, tablet ownership had been climbing relatively quickly.

These findings come from a survey conducted from April 26-May 22 among 2,277 adults ages 18 and over, including surveys in English and Spanish and on landline and cell phones.

There is notable overlap in e-reader and tablet computer ownership – 3% of US adults own both devices.  Nine percent own an e-book reader but not a tablet, while 5% own a tablet computer but not an e-reader.

via pewinternet.org

 

Library E-Book Checkouts Get a Major Boost

This is interesting news from ReadWriteWeb. I’ve been using Overdrive at my library since it became available, first for eaudiobooks, then for ebooks after I got an ereader. This move is in the right direction, although there are likely to be some hitches along the way.

The number of people who check out e-books via their local library is still pretty small – less than 15% of people in a recent survey indicated that they turned to libraries for their digital content. In part, it’s been difficult for libraries to offer e-books to their patrons, but as the popularity of the e-books and e-readers has skyrocketed, it’s clear that both libraries are keen to find a solution to make e-book lending possible. And an announcement today from the digital content distributor OverDrive is a huge leap towards making that possible.

Earlier this spring, Amazon announced that it would be working with OverDrive in order to make it possible for libraries to lend Kindle books to their patrons. OverDrive already provides digital content to libraries and schools, and by making the popular Amazon format an option, it was anticipated that many more people would be able to take advantage of library e-book lending.

Platform Agnostic, DRM-Free E-Book Lending

OverDrive says it will become platform agnostic and “eliminate the need for librarians and readers to deal with various e-book file formats.” In addition to supporting multiple file formats, OverDrive says that it’s launching “Open E-Book,” a DRM-free collection. These formatting options will make it much easier for libraries and for patrons to be able to access content across devices and platforms.

OverDrive is also tackling one of the long-standing complaints about e-book lending: the fact that they’re restricted by the same laws of physics that bind printed books and if someone else has checked out an e-book that it isn’t available for anyone else. OverDrive says that it will provide new “always available” e-book collections so that multiple patrons can read certain titles simultaneously.

And finally, It’s going to enable “patron driven acquisition,” an opt-in program for libraries that will let readers immediately borrow a title (or recommend that their local library purchase it) from online booksellers.

All of this sounds fairly promising, although it’s worth pointing out that many of the details of how these things will be implemented aren’t available yet. OverDrive says it will offer more details at the American Library Association conference at the end of the month.

via readwriteweb.com