The January, 2009 Consumer Electronic Show is ending and this event has been one all about eReaders. The amount of coverage these devices have been receiving is amazing. Only time will tell if they (or something still to come, can you say Apple?) will be the tools the masses will use to read, share, edit, annotate, etc. content.
It's going to be fascinating to watch.
Here are a few stories that help summarize the week. While we do the best we can in covering ebooks and ereaders, we strongly recommended having a look at TeleRead, THE blog for this subject area.
The inevitable and soon-coming relegation of the dedicated e-reader to the boneyard of low-end, discount obsolescence has left e-reader makers scrambling for an edge. One of these edges is touch, but touch has two major problems: many readers will have it this year, and all of those touch-enabled readers will be more expensive than their non-touch counterparts.
This week, nearly two dozen companies that make the devices or deliver reading material to them are showing products at the International Consumer Electronics Show, the first time it has devoted a section to e-books.
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E-books make up a tiny portion of book sales, but their popularity is growing rapidly. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, which organizes the trade show, 2.2 million e-readers were shipped to stores in 2009, nearly four times as many as the year before. This year, the group expects 5 million will be shipped.
His latest project, Blio, is an effort to improve the emerging electronic book field with software that turns e-books into more than just a digital copy of the print edition. Blio, which is due out next month, is software that combines a full-color digital book with the ability to add Web content, video, and professionally narrated audiobooks.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
