O’Reilly are running a competition called Lauchpad at the Web 2.0 Conference. It’s a talent hunt for a great new company.

When I read about this, I wondered, is Exbiblio Web 2.0? or Web 3.0? – or perhaps Book 2.0?

Last year people were still debating the meaning of Web 2.0. I’m not sure that it’s any clearer yet, but I would plump for saying that the classic Web 2.0 company has a social media aspect to it – sharing, sifting, commenting, tagging, collaborating, and communicating at grass roots level.

Would anyone like to say if Exbiblio is a Web 2.0 company?

Tower Records – the mega-store music chain – has has filed for protection from its creditors for the second time in two years. It is, of course, a victim of digital downloading.

A few years back, when Amazon started to loom large, there were predictions that bricks and mortar book stores would go out of business – but so far plenty of people still like to turn paper pages before they buy. This seems to show that readers enjoy buying a physical product.

Now Amazon itself is threatened by the trend to go digital. The Economist predicts that Amazon is preparing to go into the download business. It might be too late to dominate music, but the field is still fairly open for video and, perhaps further off, for digital downloads of books.

Amazon is already involved in a new technology for book publishing. It owns a print-on- demand service called Booksurge. Currently this is an option for self-publishing authors, but Amazon hopes to sell its printing service to mainstream publishers.

Under the print-on-demand model, the author uploads a digital manuscript to Booksurge. A paper copy is printed from the digital file only when a customer buys one. It’s a reminder that these days paper books have their digital shadows sitting on the publisher’s computer. The gap between the two media is closer than we often remember.

Soon, a large online retailer, whether it’s Amazon, iTunes, or another business, will be a repository of digital books, video, and music. It’s only a short step to inter-mesh related products together into multimedia packages. You can envisage a digital book that, instead of an illustration, has a short video on the page. It’s possible that you might be reading this off an eye-friendly screen that you can fold into your pocket. But given that many people still love the aesthetics of physical paper, the vision becomes even more intriguing when one of the elements in the package is paper containing live hyperlinks.

This is a re-post of a blog entry I made to my internal blog on August 18. Internal blogs are one of the ways we communicate process and progress with one another at Exbiblio, and I thought I’d share it on our main blog as well since it’s about a process that many other small companies face at some point or another. So, without further ado, the post. — Ariel

What’s happening in my world (long)

Perhaps it’s hubris to think so, but maybe there are one or two folks out there who wonder what the heck happens on my side of the office every day. Well, among a couple of other smaller projects, I spend the majority of my time working on the website redesign.

Traditionally, web presences for small companies have been built as an afterthought. Many of these entities don’t want to devote time and resources toward building what is seen as simply a static brochure, so a site is launched with no planning or concern for the needs of its audiences; the goal is to just have a web footprint. I’m sure each and every one of us has been directed toward a company’s site hoping to learn more about it, only to find vague text and a directive to call the company for more information. How many of us pick up the phone?

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At Exbiblio we take responsibility for the things we make and do, and strive to leave beauty in our wake. This means our products should be beneficial to our users, not harmful to them, and likewise our products should not be harmful to the environment or the people manufacturing them.

The main aspects of an electronic device like Exbiblio’s oPen scanner that would cause environmental impact are the circuit board, the components on the circuit board (chips, resistors, capacitors, etc.), the battery, the case, and the packaging. Transportation is also a factor, but should be smaller than the others, and energy usage during customer usage should be very small compared to these manufacturing impacts, so we’re concentrating on them. So far, the green design considerations for are mostly going smoothly. This is a brief summary, more detail on each aspect will appear in the future.

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It is one of my career goals to someday attend the TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Conference. It is a collection of some of the worlds smartest and most interesting people, gathering to share ideas and change the world.

While you and I wait for our invitation, I’m happy to report that TED has posted a couple dozen videos from this year’s event. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Hans Rosling puts world economic and health statistics into amazing animated graphics.
• Sir Ken Robinson talks about creativity in education.
• Joshua Prince-Ramus talks about hyper-rational design and the Seattle Library.

Watch them at least once for the subject matter and once to study the presentation styles. Most of them are A+ in both regards. You can see all the videos or subscribe to a video podcast at http://ted.com/tedtalks/

The Staten Island Advance has some advice on what to buy for the coming new school year. Along side advanced index cards and a pillow that connects to your iPod, it mentions a clutch of smart pens.

• Leapfrog Fly Pentop Computer: No ordinary ball-point, this pen actually has a computer inside it. An optical scanner reads everything you write and can perform many functions. It can solve math problems, translate English words into another language, remind you of your daily schedule, and if you draw a piano, Leapfrog will let you play it. Circuit City, $99.99.
• Wizcom SuperPen Professional Handheld Scanner and Dictionary: Use your pen scanner as you read and study, scanning important information into the pen. Then later download it onto your computer to create study guides. It can store up to 1,000 pages of text. The pen also has built-in dictionaries and a thesaurus. The scanner can also turn text into speech. Staples, $199.99
• Logitech Digital Pen is an alternative to taking a laptop to class. The Logitech digital pen is used in conjunction with “smart paper” which was developed to interact with the pen. The pen records handwriting and sketches, and then will convert notes into computer text, storing up to 40 pages at a time. It looks like a regular pen and lasts eight hours before needing to be recharged. From www.amazon.com, $134.95.

Here’s a movie that Exbiblio folk should go and see – A Scanner Darkly
– staring an animated Keanu Reeves and told in the style of a “graphic novel” come to life. The critics describe it as “difficult” but that’s never been a word to put Exbiblio people off. The scanner in question sees into the heart and mind. Now there’s a challenge for the scanner pen mark II.

The cross-over technology with which the film was made might be of interest too. The Scotsman reports:

Scanner was shot as a live-action movie and then fed into a computer, whereupon artists digitally traced over some frames by hand, using an electronic pen tablet.

The lines between traditional and digital media are getting more blurred all the time.

Yesterday, Ed Mahlum and I spent a couple of hours walking around our old stomping grounds at the University of Washington to observe how people interact with both print and digital documents. We visited computer labs, libraries, and coffee shops. Here are a few random observations:

• Librarians are very helpful and like to answer questions! Among other things, we were pointed to a site containing survey results on UW library usage and given direct contact information of those in charge of technology, library usage statistics, etc…
• Computer labs at UW Campus were about 75% Dell / 25% Mac. I’m sure one of our new contacts could give us an exact count on this, but that is what it looked like to me.
• The campus computer store and the people using laptops in free WiFi areas seem to be weighted the other way (about 75% Mac / 25% PC)
• There is a lot of free WiFi on or near campus.
• People we observed using computers were usually doing e-mail, on MySpace type web sites, or composing Word documents. We also saw someone using Wikipedia and a few people playing games. We wondered how folks go about installing their own software (games, for example) on computer lab machines.
• Not many people were reading material on computers besides the activities above.
• A librarian told us that eBooks were not popular with Librarians or students because of the archaic DRM restrictions.
• The library will not subscribe to document databases (of academic papers or newspaper archives, for example) that restrict printing in any way. These databases are usually an annual subscription fee.
• There was a good selection of flash drives and voice recorders at the campus computer store.
• An employee of the campus computer store said that very few people want to buy scanners. He had a price sheet for some flatbed and multi-function scanners, but none in stock.

All in all, I think it is great to get out of the office and into environments where people will be using our products. If we choose to focus on higher education as a starting point (which is a strong contender), I think it would be cool to move our office to a major campus so that we have many more opportunities to cross paths with our target audience on a daily basis. Maybe we could even go Delicious Monster style and set up shop in one of the Free WiFi areas of campus!

Ed, I encourage you to chime in with other observations if I missed anything. You can see pictures from our trip here.

I’m currently reading “Carter Beats the Devil” by Glen David Gold which I enjoy and recommend (this is my second time reading it). Here is a quote I like. For me, it captures the romance of creativity:

“We know how ninety-nine percent of the universe works,” he told Carter shortly after they met, “and that’s the clockworks, that’s what we build with. But the other one percent makes the clockworks wind down. That’s inertia. No one knows how that works, but it does. It’s that one percent mystery that’s that way of our maker. Put everything together, energy and inertia, the explicable and the inexplicable, and that’s how you and I make our living.”

— “Carter Beats the Devil” (Glen Gold)

Exbiblio’s other founder, – I say “other” because he is based in England and often less visible around Exbiblio than Martin – is Quentin Stafford-Fraser. I was nosing around his website when I came across this rather interesting piece of footage which dates from 1995 and grew out of his Ph.D. You will see it is all about training a video camera on a white board – or on a piece of paper for that matter – and writing commands which tell a computer what to do – print, for instance. It intrigues me, partly because of its nostalgic vintage feel, but also because I think you can detect a strand of the Exbiblio thinking here. The linking of the digital world to the printed or written world is a theme which continues to this day.

You may need the Quicktime plugin to watch the video.