Amazon Releases Kindle App for the iPad & Mac OS X

A quick fyi: Ama­zon has released an app that will let you read Kin­dle texts on your Mac (final­ly!) and the upcom­ing iPad. If you’re look­ing for free Kin­dle texts, we’ve pro­duced a long list here, includ­ing many great clas­sics. You can find Kin­dle apps (all free) for oth­er devices below.

Thanks Wes for the info…

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Open Video Coming to Wikipedia

Wikipedia is now open­ing the online ency­clo­pe­dia to video, giv­ing con­trib­u­tors a new way to con­vey infor­ma­tion in a rich­er way. And they’re mak­ing a point of using video in an open for­mat (Ogg The­o­ra).

Among the con­flu­ence of fac­tors com­ing togeth­er in 2010 are: 1) the grow­ing aware­ness that video is the dom­i­nant medi­um of the web and that video can help make Wikipedia arti­cles even rich­er; 2) the devel­op­ment of open source play­ers and codecs (alter­na­tives to Flash, Quick­time, Win­dows Media, and H.264, 3); the intro­duc­tion of pub­lic brows­er tools—Firefox’s Fire­fogg exten­sion, for example—for upload­ing and play­ing non­pro­pri­etary video for­mats; 4) the will­ing­ness of non­prof­its like the Par­tic­i­pa­to­ry Cul­ture Foun­da­tion and the Open Video Alliance and for-prof­its like Kaltura and Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion to ded­i­cate them­selves to open video; and the pro­vi­sion of strate­gic fund­ing from the Mozil­la Foun­da­tion and Ford Foun­da­tion, among oth­ers, to sup­port devel­op­ers, pro­gram­mers, and activists.  As Wikipedia board mem­ber S. J. Klein explains in a recent Open Video Alliance video short, the day is fast com­ing where video will be as easy for users to write, edit, anno­tate, and remix as text is today. (You can find more details on the cam­paign here and here.)

What are the rec­om­men­da­tions for video con­tributed to Wikipedia? They should be relat­ed to cur­rent arti­cles, short and under 100 MB, free, and avail­able to share and reuse (offered under a Cre­ative Com­mons BY-SA or equiv­a­lent license). In com­ing weeks new videos are expect­ed to pro­lif­er­ate and new strate­gies will be unfurled for work­ing with edu­ca­tion­al repos­i­to­ries of lega­cy video.

This post was con­tributed by Peter Kauf­man, the CEO and pres­i­dent of Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion, who shares our pas­sion for thought­ful media.

Cannes for Free!

Right in time for the week­end… Work­ing in part­ner­ship with Stel­la Artois, TheAuteurs.com is now fea­tur­ing a selec­tion of its favorite films that have played at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val.

The line­up, includ­ing many prize win­ners, fea­tures movies by Fed­eri­co Felli­ni (Amar­cord), Wong Kar-wai (Hap­py Togeth­er), Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni (L’avven­tu­ra), Jacques Tati (Mon oncle), and oth­ers. There are nine movies in total, filmed between 1958 and 2008. And they’re free until June. These films should be avail­able world­wide, but reg­is­tra­tion is required. Kick back and start watch­ing here.

For more great clas­sics, see our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

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Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison in 1909. It’s the Only Known Footage of the Author.

Here’s a lit­tle nugget for you. The great inven­tor Thomas Edi­son vis­it­ed the home of Mark Twain in 1909, and cap­tured footage of “the father of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture” (says Faulkn­er) walk­ing around his estate and play­ing cards with his daugh­ters, Clara and Jean. The film is silent and dete­ri­o­rat­ed. But it’s appar­ent­ly the only known footage of the author who gave us Huck­le­ber­ry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain would die the next year.

Find works by Twain in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

And if you like what we serve up, don’t miss us on Twit­ter on Face­book. It’s any easy way to share cul­tur­al gems with fam­i­ly and friends.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Shirt­less in 1883 Pho­to

Thomas Edi­son Recites “Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb” in Ear­ly Voice Record­ing

Thomas Edison’s Box­ing Cats (1894), or Where the LOL­Cats All Began

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New Magazine & Video Archives Coming Online

Lots of new archives have been com­ing online late­ly. So, why not give them a quick men­tion.

CSPAN: This week, the Amer­i­can cable net­work final­ly com­plet­ed the dig­i­ti­za­tion of its vast video archive. What does that mean for you? It means you can access online every C‑SPAN pro­gram aired since 1987. 160,000 hours of video in total, cov­er­ing 23 years of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal his­to­ry. The Times has more on this sto­ry.

Pop­u­lar Sci­ence: Thanks to Google, you can now freely access a 137-year archive  of Pop­u­lar Sci­ence. As Pop­Sci, found­ed in 1872, writes, “Each issue appears just as it did at its orig­i­nal time of pub­li­ca­tion, com­plete with peri­od adver­tise­ments. It’s an amaz­ing resource that beau­ti­ful­ly encap­su­lates our ongo­ing fas­ci­na­tion with the future, and sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy’s incred­i­ble poten­tial to improve our lives.” If you spend some time with Brain Pick­ing’s recent post, you’ll see why the Pop­Sci archive holds so much inter­est. As a side note, you can also find a vast archive of Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics via Google Books. Just click here and, as Wired put it, â€ślet the nerdgas­mic loss of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty com­mence.”

Spin Mag­a­zine: Google Books has also added to its vir­tu­al mag­a­zine shelf every issue of Spin, the music mag­a­zine Bob Guc­cione Jr. found­ed in 1985. As Boing­Bo­ing men­tions today, it’s inter­est­ing to see “how awful­ly dat­ed the design of the mag­a­zine is.”

Salman Rushdie: Now this isn’t a pub­licly avail­able archive, but it’s worth know­ing about. Archivists at Emory have been work­ing with the dig­i­tal assets of Salman Rushdie and devel­op­ing a new field — “dig­i­tal archae­ol­o­gy” — that will help schol­ars pre­serve and method­i­cal­ly study the dig­i­tal remains (text doc­u­ments, emails, brows­er logs and files) of writ­ers and artists. You can watch Rushdie talk about the project, its chal­lenges and ben­e­fits. (There’s anoth­er clip of him speak­ing here.) Then you have the archivists them­selves talk­ing about how they’re pre­serv­ing Rushdie’s lit­er­ary remains, down to the yel­low sticky notes he attached to his com­put­er. (Note: The Times has a piece on this project this week.)

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The End of Attribution?

A cou­ple of days ago, we fea­tured a video post­ed on Pen­guin’s YouTube Chan­nel that used a smart video tech­nique to restore faith in the future of book pub­lish­ing. A cou­ple of our read­ers were quick to point out that the video’s cre­ative ele­ment was high­ly sim­i­lar to an award-win­ning video called “Lost Gen­er­a­tion”. (See above.) And yet there was no attri­bu­tion. A prob­lem? Par­tic­u­lar­ly for an enti­ty in the intel­lec­tu­al property/copyright busi­ness?

UPDATE: Tonight, anoth­er read­er tells us that “Lost Gen­er­a­tion” has its own ori­gins in a 2006 adver­tise­ment for Argen­tin­ian pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Ricar­do Lopez Mur­phy called “The Truth.” Does this make this style of video a meme of sorts? A style that’s so out there that attri­bu­tion is not worth a both­er? Per­haps I’m hold­ing Pen­guin’s feet too close to the fire on this one. Per­haps (as, Maria, a blog­ger col­league men­tions via email) this high­lights a big­ger prob­lem. Too much deriva­tion. Not enough orig­i­nal think­ing all around.

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The Uniqueness of Humans

Robert Sapol­sky  â€” one of the world’s lead­ing neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gists, a MacArthur Fel­low, Stan­ford pro­fes­sor, and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers — breaks down an intrigu­ing ques­tion. Pre­cise­ly in what ways are we (humans) dif­fer­ent from oth­er ani­mals inhab­it­ing our world? The dif­fer­ences are few­er than we think. But there are some, and they’ll make you some­times uncom­fort­able, some­times a lit­tle more con­fi­dent in human­i­ty, and some­times moti­vat­ed to change the world, even in these cyn­i­cal times. The inspi­ra­tion hap­pens dur­ing the last minute. So stay with this engag­ing talk until the very last.

via TED’s Best of the Web

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The End of Publishing. Or Is It?

Smart and hope­ful. But you need to stick with it for a cou­ple of min­utes. A job well done…

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