OpenCulture

Google Earth’s historical imagery feature now includes aerial footage of the aftermath of World War II, allowing users to comprehend the extent of post-war destruction by comparing photos of cities as they are today to those of bombed out cities immediately after the war.

Here’s Warsaw in 1935, devastated in 1943, and restored today. You can click here to see the pictures in a bigger size.

For more imagery, including pictures of Stuttgart, Naples and Lyon, see the Google Earth blog.

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He also participates in The Partially Examined Life, a podcast consisting of informal discussions about philosophical texts by three philosophy graduate school dropouts.

Time Travel with Google Earth is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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2. Touring Mars with Google Earth
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You stare. You get stared at. It happens countless times every day. But have you ever pondered what’s really happening here? Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a professor at Emory University, has been giving it some thought. You can get a quick introduction above, and more extensive thinking in her new book, Staring: How We Look. Thanks Nicole for sending this along…

What Are You Staring At? is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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The University of South Carolina hosts a few gems, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) reading lines from Shakespeare’s Othello. Or, more specifically, Othello’s oration to Venetian senators.

You can access the sound file in two formats here (aiff) and here (real audio).

This comes to us via Mike. Thanks to all who started sending good links our way. Whenever you see something good, please fire us a quick email. It will take one minute out of your day and make the day for many others.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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1. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
2. Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport
3. What Did Shakespeare Really Look Like?

From the TIMES ONLINE:

More than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring.

Owners of the Amazon Kindle, an ebook reader device, will be able to view well known works by writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thousands of less famous authors.

You can read the rest about this Microsoft funded initiative here. In the meantime, we’ve made it relatively easy to download major classics to your Kindle, iPhone, smartphone or computer. See our collection of Free eBooks (and Audio Books).

British Library to Offer 65,000 Free eBooks is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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1. Free eBooks for Your PC, iPhone, Kindle & Beyond
2. Free Podcasts of Classic American and British Thrillers
3. Library of Congress Adds 3,000 Photos to Flickr

A lighter piece for Super Bowl Sunday. Yes, this clip isn’t exactly heady. And, yes, it botches some facts (archers apparently shoot from 70 meters, not 20 yards). But, nonetheless, it gives you the basic physics of Drew Brees’ passing game. Brees will be playing QB for the New Orleans Saints tonight, and, as you’ll see, his accuracy is remarkable. Hat tip to Mike.

via Discover Magazine’s Cosmic Variance blog

The Physics of a Quarterback’s Pass is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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How can you learn foreign languages online? Last week, The New York Times outlined a good number of options for its readers. And, for days, the article remained one of the most widely read pieces on the NYT site. Today, the paper issued a followup post, highlighting yet more ways to learn languages digitally. And happily our collection of free language lessons got a small mention there. When taken together, these two pieces spell out the different educational opportunities fairly well. Some of the sites mentioned include LiveMocha.com, BBC languages, and Mango Languages.

Learning Languages Online with The New York Times is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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1. Learning Foreign Languages the Mango Way
2. Quick View: Learning the Languages of the New World Powers
3. Part 4: Learning the Languages of the New World Powers – China

Our reader Garnet sets the stage for this video: “Mathematicians have long declared that geometrical hyperbolic space could not be modeled in the real world. Now it’s been done, through crochet! Watch TED video science writer Margaret Wertheim explain how the art of crochet emulates sea slugs creating coral structures in hyperbolic space, using art to bring attention to the disappearance of coral through global warming.” You can get more information about this presentation here. And, for more TED Talks, don’t forget to check out this handy online spreadsheet.

The Beautiful Math of Coral & Crochet is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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1. The MIT Lecture Browser & A Beautiful Mind
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3. Math & Science Tutoring on YouTube

Alfred Hitchcock loved making cameo appearances in his own films. Apparently, he made 37 such cameos over a 50 year period. The appearances can be tough to spot. So the video above helps point out many of them.

If you’re looking for complete Hitchcock films, then head over to our collection of Free Movies Online. There, you’ll discover 12 complete Hitchcock films from his early career, including The 39 Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Now do you know what you’re doing this weekend?

via @EbertChicago

Hitchcock Cameos (and Complete Films) is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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Great message. Give it a minute to get going. Performed by Taylor Mali at the Bowery Poetry Club on November 12, 2005. Thanks Thomas for sharing.

This clip is now added to our YouTube favorites.

What Teachers Make is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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2. Get Smart with Your iPhone

Somewhere during your day, you spot a great video, an enriching audio lecture, or an excellent free ebook. And you think, that’s perfect for Open Culture. So you shoot us a quick note, and the next thing you know, your personal discovery is live on the site, being shared with thousands of like-minded readers from across the globe — readers from London to New York, from Tehran to Bangalore, from Sydney to Sao Paulo and beyond. And our global village is happy … and better off for it. Sounds good, right? We think so.

So here’s what we ask: Whenever you see a great piece of intelligent media, please quickly send it our way. (We have a nice “Suggest a Link” button on the upper right side of the site.) And, assuming it fits with Open Culture’s general mission, we’ll share it with your fellow readers, give you full credit, and thank you warmly. Look forward to your suggestions, and, if you haven’t already, please join us on Facebook and Twitter.

An Open Invitation: Suggest & Contribute is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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Caveat: If you missed it, yesterday’s post was 10 Reasons iPad Will Not Kill Kindle. So take everything here with appropriate grains of salt.

10.) Books with graphics. Many books contain photos, graphics and diagrams that the Kindle does not handle well, if at all. When people realize that the iPad will do this flawlessly, they’ll head in that direction. Example: while reading the new Carver biography on my Kindle, an experience that I loved, I had to miss out on all of the pictures collected from Carver’s life. Once you take into account newspapers and magazines, there’s even more weight on iPad’s side.

9.) Cost: Seriously, Amazon really overstepped their boundaries when they set Kindle’s price at around $300, as they did. If they had made it $100 or less, they would have probably have sold 4 or 5 times the number of devices, hooking more readers to their bookstore and their device. Look at Gillette as an example: which costs more—the razor or the razor blades?

8.) “I love my Kindle!” – less than two million people have bought the Amazon product. By comparison, over forty million iPhones and iPod Touches have been sold. No one knows how many folks will rush out to buy an iPad, but if previous iPhone sales and the buzz around the iPad are any indication, this is going to be another big win for Apple.

7.) iPad is a Kindle: just use that free Kindle app on your iPad and you’ve got the whole Kindle store wide open to you. You can even take your whole Kindle library right over to Apple’s iPad with the Kindle App.

6.) Cost, again: with iPad coming in at a low $499 for a device that’s much better made and features much more capability than the Kindle, with at least four times the memory… well, you get the picture. Oh jeez… I just found out the Kindle DX goes for $489. Oh, Mr. Bezos… what are you thinking?

5.) Capability. People don’t want a dedicated reading device: if you can carry around a device the size of your e-reader, but also use it to check email, surf the web, watch TV and movies, listen to music, use office-type apps, etc. then that’s going to win in today’s economy.

4.) Book pricing. It looks like Apple, the diabolical pricers of all songs at $.99, might wind up being the publishers’ darling in the e-book market by pricing their titles higher than Amazon has been. So far it looks like ibooks will be closer to the $14.99 price point that publishers like. Right now, as evinced by this past weekend’s squabble between Amazon and Macmillan, publishers appear to be fed up with Amazon’s pricing strategy. Apple may just become publishers’ white knight.

3.) More like a book. With Apple iPad’s intuitive touch interface, and the ability to turn pages much more like you would with a real, paperback book, it seems like the iPad wins the war in replicating readers’ experience with traditional books. At least in the short term, this appears to be a valuable commodity. Seriously, did anyone think Amazon would design a piece of hardware as beautiful, functional and innovative as Apple would? As “that other Washington State company” already found out, competing with Apple in design categories is a bitch.

2.) The Future Is Now. Simply put, the iPad is sexier. Users of a new device will prefer to look like the lab guy from Avatar with a moving display he can walk around with, or Tom Cruise from Minority Report touching programs with his fingers and moving images around, than they would like to look like that geeky librarian you see on the train in the morning who’s just reading. With the touch interface and video/book/images handheld screen, we can look like the scientists from the movies, and we can do it now. This will catapult Apple’s iPad way past the Kindle.

And Reason Number 1?

Our laps have grown smaller. Sure, we can carry around traditional laptops and use them in multiple places, but for ease of use, portability, interface, battery life and capability, we’ve reached a point in technology where we’re ready to abandon the dedicated keyboard. As users have shown by their affinity for the iPhone, it is time for the next step. And with iPhone’s limited size and lack of software for word processing and document creation, iPad is the answer. Soon we’ll want a device that we can carry around more easily than a laptop, hold in our hands or prop up on our desks, laps, wherever; a device that can show pictures, videos and presentations with a minimum of set up.

When you pit all of this against a clunky (sorry Mr. Bezos—and yes, I should state that I really do like my Kindle) dedicated reader device that does not have an intuitive interface, iPad is the clear winner-to-be.

[The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of Open Culture or the author.]

Seth Harwood created a large online following for his fiction by serializing his novels as free audio podcasts. His first novel, Jack Wakes Up, came out in May from Three Rivers Press (Random House). He believes the iPad will enable him to further develop serialization options for his writing in text form, but would never let that bias the opinions expressed in top ten lists.

Top 10 Reasons Why iPad Marks Kindle’s Death is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

Related posts:

1. 10 Reasons iPad Will Not Kill Kindle
2. Top Ten Reasons Why the Kindle Won’t Be an iPod for Books
3. The iPad and Information’s Third Age

Listen up. The clip above features the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. It comes from a 1937 BBC radio broadcast. The talk, entitled “Craftsmanship,” was part of a series called “Words Fail Me.” You can find a transcript of the recorded portion here. Thanks Kirstin for helping get this nugget out there.

via mhpbooks

Virginia Woolf: Her Voice Recaptured is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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2. Tchaikovsky’s Voice Captured on an Edison Cylinder (1890)
3. Earliest Recording of the Human Voice

Caveat: before half of you get your shorts in a bunch, tomorrow’s post will be: Top 10 Reasons Why iPad Means Kindle Is Dead. With that said, have at it!

10.) Taking reading from a simple printed page to an e-book environment such as the Kindle is a great step forward. Its ease of use, portability and storage are ideal for readers. No more innovations needed!

9.) The enjoyment of reading has always taken place within a reader’s mind. This is both why reading is great and why the words on the page don’t need to be in flashy colors or feature fancy graphics.

8.)  Added cost of iPad and $30/month fee for 3G from AT&T (the realistic cost) make Kindle a better deal. Enough said.

7.) Everyone hates AT&T, their 3G service is spotty at best, and NO ONE who’s buying a 3G iPad will use less than 250MB a month, so the $14.95 price point for 3G is useless!

6.) Glare/e-ink. You can always read during the daytime with your Kindle. Take it to the beach, read in broad daylight. e-ink is simply easier on readers’ eyes than back-lit pixels.

5.) There’s no need for a device that fits between laptop and smart phone. Both are extremely portable and serve different purposes. If I want to curl up in bed with a movie or the web, I can use my laptop for that already. If I want to curl up in bed and read, I can use my Kindle!

4.) Apps! That’s right: The new opening up of Amazon’s Kindle format to app developers will mean a lot more versatility on the device. Once a few folks come along and develop email clients or web browsers for the Kindle, Kindle will become even more useful as a potential smart phone substitute—the niche that iPad seems intent on filling.

3.) The new price-sharing announcement (70% publisher/30% Amazon) for Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) makes Kindle more attractive once again to all the powers that be in publishing. If they can get this pesky text-to-speech battle cleared up, things will be even better.

2.) Big publishing is currently doing so much of their sales through Amazon, that they might be afraid to carry business over to Apple. Sure, they will sell books there, but keep in mind that Apple might have to keep prices in the iBook store higher than at Amazon.

1.) “I love my Kindle!” –Seriously, a lot of readers are devoted to these devices, including me. I’ve found a nice cover that makes the Kindle easy to hold. I really like the ease of buying/storing books on it. And I just want a plain, simple device to use for reading.

The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of Open Culture or the author.

Up next (tomorrow): Top 10 Reasons Why iPad Means Kindle is Dead

Seth Harwood is a voracious reader, subversive publishing maven and crime novelist. His next book Young Junius will be available from Tyrus Books this fall. He’s sure to have some crazy promotions going at his site this spring as well.

10 Reasons iPad Will Not Kill Kindle is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

Related posts:

1. Top 10 Reasons Why iPad Marks Kindle’s Death
2. Top Ten Reasons Why the Kindle Won’t Be an iPod for Books
3. The iPad and Information’s Third Age

Bertrand Russell, the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher, mathematician and peace activist, died 40 years ago today. And so, above, we rewind the video tape to 1959, to Russell explaining why he doesn’t believe in God. This was a viewpoint that he otherwise elaborated upon in his well-known lecture/essay, Why I Am Not a Christian. For more vintage Bertrand Russell, you can check out another wide-ranging BBC interview with Russell flagged by one of our faithful readers, Mike S. Find it in three parts here, here and here. To be sure, some readers won’t share Russell’s views on religion. But don’t take umbrage. Just remember, we offer media from across the divide too..

Update: Another reader sent us a nice addition to the video above. Here, you can listen to a famous 1948 debate between Bertrand Russell and Father Frederick C. Copleston, Jesuit Catholic priest and professor of philosophy. It was aired on the BBC. You can listen to the audio below.

Bertrand Russell on God is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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Following J.D. Salinger’s death last week, The New York Times has created an interactive map that retraces the footsteps of Salinger’s most famous character, Holden Caulfield. The Times introduces the map as follows:

Trace Holden Caulfield’s perambulations around Manhattan in “The Catcher in the Rye” to places like the Edmont Hotel, where Holden had an awkward encounter with Sunny the hooker; the lake in Central Park, where he wondered about the ducks in winter; and the clock at the Biltmore, where he waited for his date. Roll your mouse over each point and read about Holden’s experience there in J.D. Salinger’s words.

Note: The map comes with an accompanying article that you can read here.

Holden Caulfield in NYC: An Interactive Map is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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A quick fyi on a free eBook from the University of Chicago. (It’s an offer that seems well timed, given this weekend’s copyright debate on OC.) Here are the details from UC:

Offered as a free e-book for one day only, February 1: Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. “[Adrian Johns] traces the tensions between authorized and unauthorized producers and distributors of books, music, and other intellectual property in British and American culture from the 17th century to the present. . . . The shifting theoretical arguments about copyright and authorial property are presented in a cogent and accessible manner. Johns’s research stands as an important reminder that today’s intellectual property crises are not unprecedented, and offers a survey of potential approaches to a solution.”

For more free eBooks, please visit our collection of Free eBooks.

PIRACY: A Free eBook (Today Only) is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

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Great find by Robert B., who captions this clip: “the teenage Glenn Gould at his Canadian home.” Gould is playing here J.S.Bach’s Partita #2. Give this a minute to get going. It’s a pretty awesome display of Gould’s talents. Thanks for sharing Robert…

A Young Glenn Gould Plays Bach is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Bohr and many other great scientists appear on paper currencies from around the world. Note that you can click on each image to see it in a higher resolution.

via @olfus

Einstein is Money is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

Nina Paley and Jaron Lanier are facing off in a friendly, public radio smackdown, debating the pros and cons of open/free culture. (Listen to the audio below). As a quick refresher, Nina Paley got a good amount of press last year when she created Sita Sings the Blues, a prize-winning animated film, and then released it to the public under a Creative Commons license. Jaron Lanier, meanwhile, is often called the “father of virtuality,” and his new book, You Are Not a Gadget, takes a fairly hardline stance against Web 2.0 and the free/open culture movement it engendered. And now the debate recorded by WNYC in NYC:

NOTE: You can find Sita Sings the Blues (and 125 other films) in our collection of Free Movies Online.

The Open v. Closed Culture Smackdown is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!

Today we have a guest post by William Rankin, director of educational innovation, associate professor of medieval literature, and Apple Distinguished Educator, Abilene Christian University. ACU was the first university in the world to announce a comprehensive one-to-one initiative based on iPhones and iPod touches designed to explore the impact of mobility in education. For the past year, they have been considering the future of the textbook. Rankin, who made a brief appearance on NBC Nightly News last night, does a great job here of putting the new Apple iPad in historical context and suggesting why it may solve the great informational problems of our age.

It may seem strange in the wake of a major tech announcement to turn to the past—570 years in the past and beyond — but to consider the role of eBooks and specifically of Apple’s new iPad, I think such a diversion is necessary. Plus, as regular readers of Open Culture know, technology is at its best not when it sets us off on some isolated yet sparkling digital future, but when it connects us more fully to our humanity — to our history, our interrelatedness, and our culture. I want to take a moment, therefore, to look back before I look forward, considering the similarities between Gutenberg’s revolution and recent developments in eBook technologies and offering some basic criteria we can borrow from history to assess whether these new technologies — including Apple’s iPad — are ready to propel us into information’s third age.

In the world before Gutenberg’s press — the first age — information was transmitted primarily in a one-to-one fashion. If I wanted to learn something from a person, I typically had to go to that person to learn it. This created an information culture that was highly personal and relational, a characteristic evidenced in apprenticeships and in the teacher/student relationships of the early universities. This relational characteristic was true even for textual information. The manual technology behind the production and copying of books and the immense associated costs meant that it was difficult for books to proliferate. To see a book — if I couldn’t afford to have my own copy hand-made, a proposition requiring the expenditure of a lifetime’s worth of wages for the average person — meant that I had to go visit the library that owned it. Even then, I might not be allowed to see it if I didn’t have a privileged relationship with its owners. So while the first age was rich in information (a truth that has nothing to do with my personal bias as a medievalist), its primary challenge involved access.

Gutenberg’s revolution, ushering in the second age, solved that problem. Driven by one of the first machines to enable mass-production, information could proliferate for the first time. Multiple copies of books could be produced quickly and relatively cheaply — Gutenberg’s Bible was available at a cost of only three years’ wages for the average clerk — and this meant that books took on a new role in culture. This was the birth of mass media. Libraries exploded from having tens or perhaps a few hundred books to having thousands. Or tens of thousands. Or millions. And this abundance led to three distinct revolutions in culture. Though the university initially fought its introduction, the printed textbook provided broad access to information that, for the first time, promised the possibility of universal education. Widespread access to bibles and theological texts fueled significant transformations in religion across the Western Hemisphere. And access to information, philosophy, and news led to the dismantling of old political hierarchies and some of the first experiments with democracy (have you ever stopped to notice how many of the American revolutionaries were involved in printing and publishing?).

But the proliferation of information had a dark side as well, creating a new challenge for the second age: finding. Where information had been previously organized primarily along relational lines, its abstraction into mass-produced books in enormous collections led to a need for all sorts of new technologies aimed at solving the problem of finding: card catalogues, bibliographies, indices. A barrier of symbolic complexity emerged between people and information for one of the first times in history. And the superabundance of information created a world that by necessity had to be divided into smaller and smaller subsections for organizational reasons. As people began to feel increasingly disconnected from information and as its relational and contextual aspects began to fade, we saw a transformation in teaching and learning. Hands-on apprenticeships and small teacher/student cohorts began to disappear, replaced by teachers delivering carefully parsed and categorized information to “standardized” students, all while trapped in classrooms isolated from the world in order to limit “distraction.” Mirroring the age’s informational technology, the assembly-line model of education had appeared, one that was becoming increasingly untenable by the close of the 20th century.

Luckily, and enabled by new technologies, that model of education is beginning to change. Access and finding aren’t particularly problems in the world of the Net and universal search, and many of the teaching strategies of the last age — memorization, repetition, a focus on information over application — all targeted at solving the problem of finding seem increasingly irrelevant. In under a second and without having to understand any bibliographical technicalities, I can type a search term into Google’s deceptively sparse search window and voilà! 50 million hits. It’s a level of access and ease of discovery unprecedented in human history — a new informational age. And this new informational age is cursed with a new problem: 50 million hits.

It has become virtually impossible for a person to assess the quality, relevance, and usefulness of more information than she can process in a lifetime. And this is a problem that will only get worse as information continues to proliferate. But a quick look at popular technologies shows some of the ways people are working to address it. Social networking leverages selected communities to recommend books, restaurants, and movies. Context- and location-aware applications help focus search results and eliminate extraneous complexity. And customization and personalization allow people to create informational spaces that limit the intrusion of informational chaos.

More than many other companies, Apple has understood this challenge for some time — and has leveraged these same popular technologies to help solve it. One has only to look at the ecosystem connecting the iPod and the iTunes store to see a prime example. Of course, Apple is not the only company to do so; Amazon, Google, and others have built similar solutions for people using their services. But with the iPhone and iPod touch, and now with the new iPad, I think we’re beginning to see something really interesting develop. Especially in the context of eBooks, I’m increasingly convinced that we’re at the dawn of a change as radical as that driven by Gutenberg’s invention.

How can I make such an audacious claim? How can one even assess whether a particular eBook technology will be successful? Any genuine solution will have to address the problems of the current informational age — and it will need to continue answering the problems of the previous informational ages. From what I’ve seen, Apple’s new iPad is the first device to promise this (even if that promise isn’t yet fully realized). That is what makes it such a compelling candidate to be the first platform that serves true digital books.

Of course, as you may note from that last phrase, I don’t believe we’ve yet seen a true digital book. Yes, we have eBooks on a variety of digital devices, but they haven’t yet taken real advantage of their electronic status. Books that are static, don’t allow customization, don’t connect with other information on the device, and don’t leverage social connectivity aren’t the future, no matter how sophisticated the device that serves them. They’re simply the past repackaged. Their repackaging may be interesting in some circumstances (airplanes and commutes anyone?) but the current crop of eBooks and eReaders simply doesn’t address the informational problems of the third age robustly enough to be compelling for the long term. This is certainly one of the reasons that the Kindle pilot at Princeton didn’t go very well. Don’t misunderstand — the Kindle, like the nook and the Sony Reader, addresses some important informational problems. But I don’t believe it has put the whole package together in a way that can drive real cultural change, and that means its adoption will be limited.

Given what I’ve seen of its features and approaches, the iPad shows the promise to engender such a change, though much development will have to take place for it to realize its potential. Nonetheless, the innovation it offers in three critical areas is especially compelling: accessibility, participation, and customization. Central to all three of these is the fact that the iPad is not a single-use, standalone device; it’s a powerful, converged platform with robust development tools and capabilities. Although it has come to market well behind other eReader devices, this aspect alone makes the iPad a credible platform for the future of the book.

One difference between the iPad and other tablet or eReader devices is its new level of accessibility. I don’t merely mean accessibility in the traditional sense of that word — that this device is portable, generally affordable (especially when one thinks of textbook costs), and solidly connected. Many devices, including the current generation of eReaders (and full-blown laptops), offer this kind of accessibility. Instead, I would argue that the key accessibility feature of the iPad is its apparent “lack” of an interface (a feature Apple’s marketing is working hard to underscore). Unlike all of the other similar devices (including those running Apple’s standard OS), which require users to learn to negotiate complex symbolic interfaces — files, folders, hierarchies, toolbars, navigational buttons — the iPad limits or even eliminates these in favor of touch, an approach intuitive even to those too young to read. Pioneered on the iPhone and iPod touch, this technology offers a simple way for users to interact with and control content. So instead of seeing an image on the screen and having to use a button on the side of the device to “turn the page,” I simply drag my finger across it, and the digital page behaves as though it were a real object in the real world. The collapsing of symbolic complexity into the simplicity of touch enables participation by new groups of people — even relative technophobes — and this mirrors the increased accessibility offered by Gutenberg’s revolution while lowering the barrier characteristic of most recent technologies.

In Gutenberg’s case, the increase in accessibility led to a dramatic increase in cultural participation, and this is another way the iPad differentiates itself from many of its peer devices. Whereas the current generation of eReaders limits most users to the consumption of information, mirroring the control of publishing that emerged during the last informational age, the iPad offers (and certainly promises to offer more fully) a new set of tools for content creation. Put in the hands of readers and students, the robust capabilities of its new version of iWork, combined with access to the complete range of apps on the App Store and an entirely new generation of native apps, the iPad could provide access to professional-quality creative tools that empower a new set of participants. For those interested in culture and creativity, this is an exciting prospect.

Finally, the iPad’s blend of social and contextual technologies and its ease of customization offer useful ways for the device to help users sort, focus, and control the information around them. The iPad’s networking capabilities, linked to a new generation of digital books, could help people discover both new texts and the members of a discussion group who could help them process what they’re reading. Combined with a portable format that allows readers to carry their books into various contexts, this could be incredibly powerful. One imagines, for example, a field-guide to forests linked to live discussion partners, allowing a reader to discover the forest in a new and engaging way that offers the advantages of both the first and second informational ages. Yet this sort of capability also reveals an area where the iPad falls surprisingly short: its lack of a camera (let alone two, one forward and one backward facing) means the device has limited capabilities for interesting emerging technologies like augmented reality — a staple of recently-developed apps. In terms of future eBooks, a volume of Hemingway that could alert readers that they were only two blocks from the café Les Deux Magots, for example, and offer an augmented tour of the place or that could direct the reader of Brontë to a moor would be transformational indeed. Perhaps we’ll see such capabilities on iPad 2.0.

Will the iPad’s mix of eBooks, media, and creation tools change the world? It’s difficult to say. At ACU, we’re certainly looking forward to getting these devices in the hands of teachers and students so that we have a clearer sense. But it’s already clear that in providing a device that addresses the core issues of all three information ages, Apple’s iPad is the first contender to show genuine promise.

The iPad and Information’s Third Age is a post from: Open Culture, the home of Free Audio Books, Free Courses, Free Movies, Free Foreign Language Lessons, a Free iPhone App and other intelligent media!