Explore and Play in the San Francisco Bay Area

Sunday Drive Getaways, our new eBook is out!

Map for a Sunday Drive shown on an iPhone

If you are living or planning to travel near San Francisco, this book is such a great resource. While editing it I wanted to run off and visit many of the great spots included. I already have a list of favorites for my next visit to the City.

What’s unique about this particular book? You can carry it around with you on your smartphone or iPhone, or another reading device. Ready to plan your next adventure? Do it right on your phone, check the Most Romantic, Best Views, Outings with Dogs and many other categories (go here for all of them, plus a slide show) and propose or plan a great trip in minutes. With on-line access, you can check weather, download maps, check lodging or make reservations. Now that could impress someone.

Go to the Sunday Drive Getaways Page

Happy exploring!

Take a Stroll on the Wild Side

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Sierra Crossing:
a photo adventure story

With the fixed-layout feature supported by the iBookstore, you can carry a coffee table book in your back pack- or your pocket. Our newest book Sierra Crossing: The epic trip you can do in a week, is half story half photos- and looks great on iPad and even the iPhone.

Sierra Crossing: 91 pages, 75 photos and 10 maps.

 

 

For more information about Sierra Crossing click here

Loving Books and Reading Green

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We love books. At home several of our walls are covered with book shelves. So is my parents living room wall. We own several thousand physical books. I grew up going to the library every week, reading a book a day when time allowed. My local library here in Arcata, CA still finds me a loyal visitor.

The feel of a book in my hand, the images and colors of the cover, lay-out and print type, all contribute to my joy of reading. And yet, I have begun to read books on e-readers and online.

Of course there is the ease of handling the reader, especially with a 330 plus-page book. Not having to hold up a heavy hard-cover, actually helped me heal up an arm and shoulder injury last year. Then there is the ease of choice when traveling. Which book to bring? Will I stay within weight limits of my baggage? And should I run out of reading material, any wi-fi equipped cafe allows me to restock my reader instantly, including after hours. Did I mention the free samples? No more lugging home books from the library that sounded good but remain unread after the first few pages disappoint.

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A Bookshelf the Size of the World

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July 24, 2011 – 12:32pm — birdie

From the Boston Globe:

As the digitization of human culture accelerates, publishers and academics have had to begin addressing a basic question: Who will control knowledge in the future?

So far, the most likely answer to that question has been a private company: Google. Since 2004 Google Books has been scanning books and putting them online; the company says it has already scanned more than 15 million. Google estimates there are about 130 million books in the world, and by 2020, it plans to have scanned them all. Continue reading →

Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

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From Liz Castro at Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis

Tall Screen Video on iPad, iPhone, and NOOK Color

One of my greatest challenges as a technology writer is to keep my eyes wide open and continue to be able to see things the way they are and not how I think they are. Technology is changing so quickly that you just can’t make assumptions about the way things work.

The other day, my mom, a photographer, was visiting us here in Barcelona. She had just gotten a new iPhone 4 (so jealous!) and was really jazzed about taking videos, and how different it felt to capture not only an image, but also the sound and movement.

When she emailed me one of her videos, I gently suggested, as upstart daughters are wont to do, that she should take her videos horizontally, because otherwise, they would be difficult to watch on a computer. That had always been my experience: photographers naturally rotate their cameras to capture vertically-oriented subjects (say, Gaudí’s Sagrada Família or the Clock Tower in my square), but if you do that with a video camera, the video comes out sideways on your computer. Then you have to figure out how to rotate the video, and often that results in ugly black bars and a tiny reduced video within.

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Readers Love Free Ebooks But Not Piracy

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Readers Love Free Ebooks But Not Piracy

Bibliotastic co-founder Bernard Gerard noted, “As a survey of users on a free ebook website it is not surprising that most cited free ebook sites as their main source of ebooks in the future. More surprising though is that so few admitted to pirate ebook sites. Perhaps they did not want to admit to illegal behaviour, but it contrasts sharply with other surveys that have suggested a greater proclivity to ebook piracy.”

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