A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.

Great annotated legal terms.

Wired: “It’s the font foundries — many of which will not license their typefaces to be used in PDFs, HTML5, or any other format that renders them dynamically.”

From the site: “When you purchase a font through FontSlice, you only pay for the glyphs you need. The same licensing terms apply and you can purchase additional glyphs whenever you like.” Interesting concept, to be sure.

Buy a cup of coffee? Read the EULA first... #eula #stockholm @ Vete-Katten

"Ars Technica: Chris Foresman" <chris.foresman@arstechnica.com>

Apple updated iBooks Author to version 1.0.1 on Friday afternoon, the only change being an update to the software's controversial end user license agreement. The updated EULA now specifically only applies distribution restrictions to the interactive .ibooks format files generated by the app.






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David Pogue is amazed that people are still amazed at children's tech prowess. It's too bad there's no List of Things That Were Once Amazing, but Are Really Kind of Old News at This Point, he says. It would be a handy clip-and-save document that you could review, perhaps to avoid unwittingly embarrassing yourself at the next cocktail party.

"I understand that technically, under the hood, the iBooks Author output is standard ePub plus Apple proprietary extensions. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that Apple is attempting to confuse anyone in this regard. The under-the-hood similarities to ePub are an implementation detail. No casual user creating a work in iBooks Author should have any reason to believe they are creating an ePub file, or something that can be used anywhere other than in the iBooks app on an iPad.

I don’t disagree that Apple’s goal is for the proprietary iBooks format to become a de facto standard — for it to become popular and widely used and thus, because it only works on the iPad, further cement the iPad as the leading next-generation personal computing platform. I simply disagree that Apple is being in any way disingenuous or misleading about it. The only people who seem to be confused about iBooks Author’s relationship to ePub are technically-minded people who know exactly what ePub is and who have a vested interest in seeing the open standard become the de facto industry standard."""Bott’s on firmer ground with this follow-up piece: “Some Standards Are More Open Than Others”, wherein he makes the case that Apple is a hypocrite for developing and promoting its own proprietary e-book format while serving as a member of the International Digital Publishing Forum, the trade group behind the ePub standard:""The question is, what does it mean to be a “good” member of IDPF: supporting ePub alongside any proprietary formats, or supporting ePub to the exclusion of any proprietary formats? Bott clearly sees it as the latter.

Put another way, if you’re a producer of ePub-formatted books and wish to remain so, your books are just as welcome in the iBookstore and just as well-rendered in iBooks as they were prior to Apple’s announcements last week."

"only iBooks 2 on the iPad can even read the files generated by iBooks Author"

"Ars Technica: Chris Foresman" <chris.foresman@arstechnica.com>

restricts what you can do with the output of the software after the software is closed and put away