Lecture: What we learned from 5 million books

Have you played with Google Labs' NGram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

Video: Espresso Book Machine

The Espresso Book Machine by On Demand Books

The Espresso Book Machine is an on demand printer capable of printing off text at 105 pages a minute, creating entire paperback books in as little as four minutes. The machine offers print titles from an online database of about eight million books, or it can be used for self-publishing. It has been installed in about 70 locations worldwide, most of which are libraries and bookstores. 

Book Trailer: Enhanced Game of Thrones

Here's a demonstration of the new "enhanced" e-book version of The Game of Thrones, which is currently available only in the U.K. Here's hoping that we see more thoughtful designs like this in e-books in the near future!

Lecture: The Enigma Machine

At Fractal’11 last April, author Kij Johnson gave an interesting lecture entitled The Enigma Machine: Writing, Typewriters, and Decoding the Truth.

During World War two, the German military sent information critical to the war through messages encoded and decoded on Enigma machines, small rotor machines that looked a bit like typewriters. A message encoded by an Enigma machine was nearly impossible to decode except with another Enigma machine.

Here’s another way to think of it: the Enigma was a typewriter that concealed and revealed the truth. Every writer works as an Enigma machine, using her typewriter (or computer keyboard or pen) to do the same things. This talk explores the ways a writer uses fiction to code and decode reality, lie and tell the truth.

Lecture: Beautiful Books and the future of Storytelling

The always-excellent Craig Mod of Flipboard on “beautiful books” and the future of storytelling in age of digital books – a must-watch for any storyteller, designer, and media observer.

How Books were made in 1947

Back before inkjets, printing was a time-comsuming laborious process, that took teams of people working together to produce just one book. Now days, any crabby person can sit at home and crank out stuff on a blog or even make internet video. This movie will make you happy as you watch others toil for 'The Man' under primitive conditions.

Tech: Augmented-Realty Poetry

Between Page And Screen is an augmented-reality book of poems (written by Amaranth Borsuk) developed by Brad Bouse. Like a digital pop-up book, you hold the words in your hands. Print a marker and try it with your own webcam.