Threepress Consulting blog » toc

Slides from “Survey of Current E-Readers”

Liza Daly — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:56:37 +0000

I had a lot of fun putting this presentation together, and not just because it was an excuse to play with toys. It was also nice to see the PlasticLogic device up close, even though I suspect the final marketable product may be quite different from these early prototypes.

Keith and I beat pretty hard on Sony and Fictionwise (and Stanza, by extension), but only because we want commercial ebooks to succeed. We want publishers to make money and readers to make use of a convenient service.

Here’s a quick summary of our conclusions:

Your ebook purchasing process should be as much like the Kindle as possible.
Buy your own ebooks through every device and channel you offer. Identify points of friction and fix them.
Consider the mobile purchasing experience.
Have empathy for your customers.

Survey Of Current E-Readers

View more presentations from lizadaly. (tags: ereader ebooks)

Tools of Change twitter visualization

Liza Daly — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:51:42 +0000

Geeks love raw data, so I couldn’t resist a text dump of all #toc tweets that occurred during the conference.

Here’s the quick visualization I threw together (warning, it loads very slowly):

It skips any images that are broken or any that were listed as having the Twitter default icon. For some reason the raw data included a lot of default icons it shouldn’t have — for example, all of my tweets were listed with the default instead of my profile photo. Those are missing. I recommend starting with the XML instead (posted after I wrote this) and getting the profile icons directly via Twitter.

Source code that generates this from the raw text (not from the XML) follows:

#!/usr/bin/python
import re, copy, urllib, sys

# Pattern-match the twitter username
p = re.compile('^([^:]+):(.*)$')

data = []
tweet = None

for line in open('toc-tweets.txt'):

    # If we're not currently in a tweet, start a new record
    if not tweet:
        tweet = {}

    # Skip the useless relative date values
    if line.endswith('ago'):
        continue

    # This is an end-of-tweet marker, so push it on the stack
    # and reset the temporary datastore
    if line.startswith('*'):
        data.append(copy.deepcopy(tweet))
        tweet = None
        continue

    # Grab the user's image
    if line.startswith('http://'):
        tweet['img'] = line
        continue

    m = p.search(line)
    if m:
        # If we matched the regexps then we have a line containing a valid tweet
        tweet['name'] = m.group(1)
        tweet['message'] = m.group(2).replace('&', '&')

# Put in chronological order
data.reverse()

print '''
  
    
    #toc timeline
    
    
    
    
    
    
   

'''

images = {}

for t in data:
    if 'default_profile' in t['img']:
        continue
    image = t['img'].replace('mini', 'bigger')
    if image not in images:
        sys.stderr.write("Checking %s\n" % image)
        i = urllib.urlopen(image).read()
        if 'Error' in i:
            sys.stderr.write("Skipping...")
            continue
        images[image] = 1

    print '''

  
  
    %s
    %s
  

''' % ( t['img'].replace('mini', 'bigger'),
       t['name'],
       t['name'],
       t['name'],
       t['message'])

print '''


'''

On TOC: Read anything on the Kindle

Liza Daly — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:25:58 +0000

As part of an on-going series on exploring the hidden corners of the Kindle, a post on using an undocumented image browsing feature to read complex PDFs or image-based documents: How to Read any Type of File on the Kindle (Almost).

Of course, going from text to scanned images is exactly backwards from the way things ought to be.

Threepress Consulting blog » toc

Slides from “Survey of Current E-Readers”

Tools of Change twitter visualization

%s

On TOC: Read anything on the Kindle

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