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!

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.

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.

We also love trees. Recently, when we received several boxes of our first-published book The Power of Peace, which is also an on-demand print book, and carted them over to our author and neighbor Tom Early, it struck me. This thin volume took more trees for cardboard to ship than paper to print. Ten copies each were tied together with plastic, wrapped in foam and with another stack of ten packed into a cardboard box. Two of these boxes then fit into the sturdy outer box. And all of it was shipped via carrier, still needing to be transported to the local books stores, or mailed out again.

Ebooks are as green as you can get. And they are here to stay. We at Wild Earth Press are dedicated to bringing you high-quality and beautiful eBooks with the newest technology, for the most reading pleasure. Please take a look at our first e-only book Sierra Crossing which is an adventure photo story written by acclaimed outdoors writer Tom Stienstra.

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.

Now, however, a competitor may be emerging. Last year, Robert Darnton, a cultural historian and director of Harvard University’s library system, began to raise the prospect of creating a public digital library. This library would include the digitized collections of the country’s great research institutions, but it would also bring in other media – video, music, film – as well as the collection of Web pages maintained by the Internet Archive.

via A Bookshelf the Size of the World | LISNews:.

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.

But my mom said her videos looked just fine on her phone, which is mostly where she looked at them. And indeed, in my email, it looked pretty great too. And that’s when I realized that horizontal video is a construct born of horizontal video displays–namely televisions and movie screens–that are wider than they are tall. Screens probably began in horizontal mode because they are ideal for viewing stories, say, two people talking to each other, since there’s enough room horizontally for both to fit on the screen.

And since all of our screens were horizontal, it made sense to make horizontal video to fit. We’ve now complicated matters by having various shapes of horizontal video—widescreen (16:9) and 4:3 proportions—but in general, the video we’ve created has been wider than it has been tall, so that it would fit without minimal distortion on a screen that was also wider than it was tall.

Enter the iPad and the iPhone. While they can do widescreen and 4:3 horizontal movies just fine, they can also be rotated vertically to display vertical video without distortion as well. All of a sudden there are millions of vertically oriented screens available for watching vertically oriented, or tall screen video. And of course, any tablet can be rotated to a vertical orientation. The NOOK Color also plays vertical video beautifully.

The iPhone offers one more important push towards tall screen video: it makes it really easy to create them. I watched interestedly as my parents took video after video in tall screen format—perhaps because we’re in a big city with lots of tall things?—I am sure they’re not the only ones. And now that there’s a logical place to view them, there will be many more.

My parents were here just as I was trying to finish up my new Audio and Video in EPUB miniguide. My first thought when I realized that tall screen video made sense was whether it would work in ebooks. And it does. Beautifully. Both in iBooks on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, and on the NOOK Color from Barnes & Noble. I assume it will work in other tablets with ereaders as well (Samsung Galaxy?), but I haven’t had a chance to test it elsewhere. You have to adjust the size of the video player so that it doesn’t come out squished in a 300 x 150 box with big black bars, but once you overcome that piece, it works really well. Capturing and formatting tall screen video also has some tricky bits, since all video editing tools to date expect that you’re creating horizontal video. I explain all the details in my new miniguide. (Of course, I explain how to add regular horizontal video, as well as audio, in the guide as well.)

As I found out when preparing this blog post, it’s not easy to post tall screen video on the web. You can upload a tall screen video to YouTube, and you can play it there, but if you try to see it full screen, which is sort of the point on the iPad, it displays as if it were in a horizontal box. I tried changing the size of the player, and that worked in Safari on the Desktop, but not on the iPad.

Of course, you can always post a video on your own server, but that has complications of its own. Video files are huge, and you can run into problems if a lot of people view your video. Second, you have to know some HTML.

The answer is Vimeo. You can upload tall screen video there AND it plays fine on iPad/iPhone, both at normal size and full screen. I wish I were a better videographer, but hopefully you can still see the potential. I did have a great time walking around Barcelona yesterday morning looking for tall things to film. You can view it on any screen, but of course, it looks best on an iPad or iPhone, held vertically.

Barcelona Tall Screen Video from Liz Castro on Vimeo.

I think tall screen video is as big a revolution as adding sound was back in 1927. All of a sudden, videographers have a totally new medium. It should be really interesting to see what people create, and how they take advantage of the vertical orientation. I hope my Audio and Video in EPUB miniguide gives people a good start.

via Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis.

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.”

An online poll published as “The Digital Entertainment Survey” in May received widespread media attention largely due to its finding that one in eight women (12.5%) over the age of 35 have admitted to downloading a digital book illegally. That they have downloaded one ebook illegally does not, of course, mean that pirate sites are, or will become, their main source of ebooks in the future.

“While ebook piracy is definitely a threat to the publishing industry,” continued Gerard, “it shouldn’t lead to a decline in literary output any more than music piracy has stopped people from writing new songs. In fact the digitisation of books is lowering the barriers to entry in publishing, allowing authors to easily self-publish. The selling prices are lower, which benefits the consumer, but the writer gets to keep a greater share of the revenue which can often mean more money per book than in traditional book publishing.”

Bibliotastic survey: “Where will you get most of your books from in 5 years’ time?”

Free ebook sites 54%

Online book/ebook retailer 26%

Bookstores 9%

Library 8%

Pirate ebook sites 2%

The survey was conducted between 11 May and 11 June 2011 and involved 125 participants. Details can be found here: http://www.bibliotastic.com/content/where-will-you-get-your-books

via Book Publishing News: Readers Love Free Ebooks But Not Piracy.

Stay tuned.