Technology

Via Democracy Club:

A massive thanks to the volunteers who organised and attended over 18 local meetings across the country last week. We gathered many more local issues and made lots of new friends. Now it's time for a new Democracy Club task!

Please dig out of the bin any election leaflets you've recently received. Or ask friends or neighbours, or wait a few days until you get one through the door.

Ready? To complete this task you first need to photograph or scan a leaflet (or several, if you want), transfer the image to your computer, and then [upload them to our website.]

Why am I being asked to do this?

Leaflets normally get thrown away and the authorities do not have an official process for monitoring dodgy election leaflets, so it's down to us to make sure there is no funny business going on where we live!

Democracy Club is doing this in partnership with our friends at The Straight Choice. They are creating a live online archive of election leaflets throughout the campaign. There are 2 reasons why this is a helpful thing to be doing:

1) Promises that candidates make in their leaflets can be compared to what they promise to do elsewhere, for example in responses to the local issues you helped collect over the last few weeks. In the future we can also compare the voting record of MPs with what they promised on the campaign trail.

2) It helps catch parties or candidates who are breaking electoral law - 2 parties have been reported to the authorities based on leaflets uploaded to The Straight Choice in the past couple of weeks.

Thanks,

Democracy Club and our friends at The Straight Choice

http://www.democracyclub.org.uk

http://www.twitter.com/democlub

There’s a bit of buzz around that the Amazon Kindle, a rather novel e-ink reading device with a built-in wireless (EV-DO) card, is coming to the United Kingdom. In the US market, Amazon is trying to do with the Kindle what Apple did with the iPod, namely to create a new approach to consuming and purchasing information.

With a Kindle you can buy and download electronic texts wirelessly for substantially less than purchasing paper copies. You can also read public domain texts such as the 30,000 published works at Project Gutenberg. The reader itself (see video above) only uses power when the screen content changes and the reading experience is more akin to that of real paper than using a backlit computer screen. Since the device contains a built in 3G interface, new content arrives very quickly and Amazon also provides free access to Wikipedia.

Now the downside, as seen recently, is that Amazon have proved they can instantly yank content off the devices, which is not a problem one faces with a traditional printed book. Amusingly (or scarily) the novel that was instantly removed from all Kindle devices in the USA recently was George Orwell’s 1984. (Quick tip: In Australia, the works of authors who died before 1955 are public domain, so you can get Orwell’s work via Gutenberg Oz.)

Some newspaper publishers think the Kindle might save their businesses, but the BBC got the killer quote from Gizmodo’s Wilson Rothman:

I can't see how an industry that's haemorrhaging money can subsidise a new-fangled tech product in order to lure people back to subscribing for something they are forced to publish for free online anyway[.]

The personal investment decision to purchase a Kindle depends on how many books you read annually. If you could save four to six pounds per book purchased, on three or four books a month you would save between £144 and £288 pounds a year, which would cover the costs of the device in as little as one year.

Amazon is trying to offer the full package – both the reading device and the content (they are a book seller after all). But there are others in the market with different solutions such as Sony with their Reader hardware range, and several iPhone applications including eReader.

Technology pundits have been talking about paperless offices and electronic books since the development of the first computers without much predictive success (and Isaac Asimov never anticipated tobacco-free civilisation). I wonder if perhaps it will be the expiry of copyright on the bulk of the canon of literature in all languages that brings such a concept into being?

If one looks at the most popular authors at Project Gutenberg today, they represent the bulk of the contributors to the Western Canon from the last few centuries, and translations of all the western and eastern classics I could think to name. If I do get a Kindle, I don’t think I’d need to spend any money on literature; the ones worth having available for free. (So more money to buy Skiffy I suppose.)

Top 10 Authors at Project Gutenberg (July 2009, monthly downloads):

1. Dickens, Charles (30,381)
2. Austen, Jane (28,827)
3. Twain, Mark (28,512)
4. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir (26,178)
5. Shakespeare, William (21,456)
6. Verne, Jules (18,522)
7. Carroll, Lewis (17,980)
8. Baum, L. Frank (Lyman Frank) (13,317)
9. Burton, Richard Francis, Sir (13,185)
10. Wells, H. G. (Herbert George) (11,957)