Rube Goldberg

Here an interesting copyright story making the rounds this morning: GoldieBlox, a startup who makes engineering-themed toys for girls, has a new ad which has gone viral, featuring several cute little girls constructing a Rube Goldberg-esque machine to the tune of ‘Girls’ by the Beastie Boys. The lyrics of this iconic song have been re-written [...]

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Paging Rube Goldberg… Found via BoingBoing, Arik Hesseldahl has a report at AllThingsD about an Austrian university professor who has used a Lego Mindstorm kit to hack together an e-book de-DRM scanner out of his Kindle and his laptop. Professor Peter Pergathofer built a Lego device that keys the page down button on the Kindle, [...]

The post Lego Mindstorms + Kindle + Laptop = E-book Scanner appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

It’s my favorite day of the year: National Book Lovers Day! Of course, I didn’t even know at first that this special holiday was today. I didn’t even know this holiday existed, to tell the truth, before this afternoon, when I started getting emails and texts from friends and family. For me, every single minute of every single day is book lover’s day.
But hey, what a great reason to celebrate today! Everybody take the night off and go home and read! And to kick off your celebration, here’s a round up of some fun NBL blogs and comments.

If it sounds like I’m saying, “It’s all about who you know,” that’s because that is exactly what I’m saying. You can rail about how unfair that is, and how it makes publishing into an incestuous little club, and to a degree you would be right. But that’s the way the machine is built, people.

Imagine that one night you have a dream in which you are in an enormous bookstore lined with shelves upon shelves of books, each bound in the same plain white cover….