Element Collection, Inc

There are plenty of pronouncements about "the future of the book" when it comes to the increasing popularity of e-books and the steady release of new digital literature apps. Indeed, the ability to add video, voice-over, animation, and annotation all point to the great potential when literature becomes electronic, and in coming years we're sure to see a number of new creations that will challenge our definitions of "the book." But the while the possibilities of electronic literature and enhanced e-books sound good in theory, often they fail to deliver in practice. There are a lot of reasons why this occurs: it can be costly to add video or animation, and the integration with the text itself isn't always seamless or sensible. With this in mind, there are a lot of reasons to expect why an iPad version of one of the 20th century's most important poems, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" could be a complete flop. It's "The Waste Land" after all, a 430-ish line poem that is both incredibly familiar and notoriously difficult. Indeed, Eliot himself seemed aware of the challenges in interpreting the poem as he included his own lengthy notes when the poem was published in 1922. And that annotation - from the author almost 100 years ago - does hint at what an enhanced e-book should and could do best: offer more insights, more interpretations, more accessibility to a poem, without ever quite unraveling the puzzle entirely for the reader. (If you have read some of Eliot's own notes on "The Waste Land," you'll know that his commentary hardly helps make the poem clear.) But "The Waste Land" iPad app (iTunes link), released last week, is absolutely marvelous, and again, pronouncements about "the future of the book" aside, does demonstrate some of the brightest possibilities with digital literature. The app is a collaborative effort between Faber & Faber (which owns the rights to the poem) and Touch Press (the maker of the beautiful bestselling science e-book The Elements). It also includes video contributions from the BBC. These videos include analysis and commentary from the poet and literary critic Craig Raine, novelist Jeanette Winterston, and punk rocker Frank Turner, among others. (If you feel bad for never quite "getting" the poem, then it might be quite consoling to watch the video where Irish poet Seamus Heaney talks about how the poem frightened him when he first encountered Read More

By Rene Ritchie, Sunday, Nov 14, 2010 | ‘Tis the season to be gifting and with iPhone and iPad being pretty much the perfect tool for students, there will be lots of elementary, high school, and college kids to shop for this year. That means not only devices like iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad all wrapped up and ready to go, but all the great apps and accessories that go with them. Do you know someone special who’s in school? If so, here’s TiPb helpful holiday gift guide! Don’t need anything for a student? Check out the recommendations anyway, something great might still catch your eye. If not, no worries, we’ll have plenty more holiday gifts guides coming your way this month! We don’t know about you but our kids have pretty much put aside their (or more likley our!) iPod touches and gone head-over-heels for the big, bright screened iPad. And since we panic every time we see them stumble, run, and jump from sofa to table to who-knows-where-else they’re going, we make sure we have a nice, safe, squishy case on that baby to save it from our babies. Griffin’s FlexGrip fits the bill here. It’s durable, provides good protection, and is easy to grip so they have less chance of dropping it. Once the iPad is safe the very next thing we want is for it to be silent. Endless games, stories, music, and learning is fun for them but we want to have our conversations, enjoy our shows, and otherwise keep our sanity while they’re having their fun. Enter the BlackBerry Premium Stereo Headset. Yeah, again, the name says BlackBerry but the price says cheap so we won’t feel bad when they lose or otherwise destroy them. When it comes to apps, whether they’re in kindergarten or sixth grade, we want them to learn and they want to play. Truth is, they’re better at plant-pelting zombies, cutting ropes, and launching birds than we are. Builds eye-hand coordination and multitouch proficiency (technology of the future until neural implants get here) so we’re not too worried. Still, it’s good to sneak some education into their fun. Obviously, there’s a huge difference between kindergarten and 6th grade, so here’s a wide sampling: With high school students we like to double up. Skin under, case over. That way if they decide to be daring and take their iPad out, it’s still Read More

Although we don’t suggest crunching down on a corner of your iPad to check whether Apple’s statement is correct, according to their latest TV advert, the iPad is delicious, playful, productive and a whole lot of other things too.  Rather than using a voiceover to describe what the iPad can do, this ad relies on demonstration instead. The image of hands interacting with the iPad is a strong one, and certainly brings the control system to the forefront, while the chosen apps appeal to a broad range of tastes and ages. Here are the apps featured in the ad: These are all great apps certainly, but aside from Safari that’s used to demonstrate Twitter, and Flipboard, new iPad owners are going to have to splash out for the rest of them, which isn’t very clear in the advert and could prove somewhat disappointing to the new buyer.  Or does everyone pretty much understand that most things shown in iPad/iPhone ads is ‘extra’ these days? Read More

...Home Delivery Log In Register Now Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Times Topics Search All NYTimes.com Business Day Personal Tech World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Autos Search Technology Personal Tech » Camcorders Cellphones Digital Cameras Portable Computers TVs All Products All Products Pogue’s Posts »... Read More

Friday Five: in which we take a look at the past week and pick out five interesting new releases! Wow, is it July already? Fancy that. In just a couple of days (literally!) we’ll be celebrating July 4th…not that the App Store hasn’t already released a slew of sales in the name of Independence Day. Here, though, we’re concerned with new releases from the past week. Without further ado, I present…our weekly Friday Five! Hope you find them interesting! Diptic Diptic is a simple little photo app that lets you combine two or three images, creating a diptych or triptych, respectively. It also includes brightness, saturation, and contrast tweaks, as well as custom border controls and five different layouts. The function is simple, but then, sometimes simple is what you need. Diptych and triptych creation is a rather popular means of making photos more “meaningful,” especially among teens, so I expect that Diptic will see some use. $0.99 Released: 2010-06-23 :: Category: Photography Cineast Cineast is a “movie companion app” that allows you to search for movies or people, watch trailers, find release date or cast info, and more. You can also mark movies and people as “Favorites,” to easily return to them later. It relies on the website themoviedb.org. Cineast is a universal app, so iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch users alike can get in on the movie-info action. $0.99 + Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad Released: 2010-06-29 :: Category: Reference The Twilight Saga – Memory Quest Love it or hate it, the Twilight series is a hit. (Just look at the performance of Eclipse, which released this weekend.) The Twilight Saga – Memory Quest is a tile-flipping memory-match game featuring the stars of the series. You can play as Bella, Edward, or Jacob. Presumably this game is relying heavily on rabid fans…still, it looks like a decent tile-matching game. $0.99 iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad Released: 2010-06-24 :: Category: Games The Elements for iPhone 4 The Elements was one of the highlight apps for the iPad at launch, and now it’s got an iPhone incarnation..though only for the iPhone 4. Phooey. Still, if you’re the lucky owner of a brand-new iPhone, you can take advantage of The Elements and its highly visual, comprehensive periodic table. You can examine each pictorial representation of each element, and extensive information is pulled from Read More

Apple seems to be on a roll of late with App Store app lists. First came The Best Games You’ve Never Played, a roundup of hidden gems that haven’t quite burned up the app charts. Now they’ve released the Awesome iOS 4 Apps list, a collection of apps and games that have been updated to take advantage of iOS 4′s new features, like support for the Retina Display and Multitasking/Fast App Switching. Here are some notable that have made the list: Now I haven’t tried all 42 apps on the list, but I don’t think I’d consider all of them to be awesome. I suppose it’s all a matter of personal preference and interests (and of course, apps that actually have been updated for iOS 4 already). The entire Apple roundup can be found right here on iTunes. Read More

Eager to get some iOS 4 or iPhone 4 specific applications?  Here are ten to get you started: Designed for the iPhone 4, this is labeled as an HD application as it makes use of the iPhone 4’s Retina Display to provide super high-resolution graphics.  Play through the championship on your own, or challenge a friend to a game via Bluetooth.  $7.99, US-Only. The iPad app comes to the iPhone 4, with stunning results.  This amazing interactive book takes you on a journey through the periodic table, while making use of the iPhone 4’s high resolution display and sensitive multi-touch system.  It’s not cheap and it’s a hefty 1.2GB file, but it’s worth it.  $9.99/£5.99. One of the first games to make use of the new iPhone 4’s gyroscope, Eliminate puts you in charge of a series of 12 weapons inside a gun range, where 144 challenges await.  The gyroscope provides a 3D aiming system for a unique experience.  $0.99/£0.59. Version 1.22 is a special update for the iPhone 4 and iOS 4, incorporating uprated graphics and menus, better textures and trackside graphics, multitasking support and the gyroscope has been added into the control system.  $4.99/£2.99. The iPhone version of the best-selling toy has had the iPhone 4’s gyroscope built into the control system along with improved graphics for the Retina Display.  $2.99/£1.79. Currently free, this is a scanner application which incorporates multi-tasking support.  Smart page detection ensures documents you scan with the camera are as close to the original as possible and once they’re scanned, they can be sent as a JPG or PDF, renamed and even edited.  Free. The popular music app gets a Retina Display overhaul, plus iOS 4-only video auto-tuning!  Currently reduced.  $0.99/£0.59. Available for the iPad since its launch, Apple’s eBook app comes to the iPhone.  This needs iOS 4 to work on an iPhone, so you’ll need to have a 3G, 3GS or 4 with the OS upgrade completed, when you’ll have access to essentially the same app you’ve seen on the iPad.  Free. The official Twitter application has had a tweak to include improved support for the Retina Display’s higher resolution, plus tweets can be sent in the background when running iOS 4’s multi-tasking system.  Free. All three Abvio fitness applications have been updated to provide iOS 4 multi-tasking support, so whatever excercise you choose to do – walking, running or cycling – they Read More

It’s no longer such a novel thing to read a book on a mobile phone, and on the iPad, it’s practically a requirement to download “The Elements” or open Winnie the Pooh” to give your friends a glimpse of the future of book reading. But for many people, choosing the best book-reading app is a challenge, especially for iPhone users, because of the wealth of choices in the App Store from Apple. The problem is not really the small things — the differences in how the iBooks and Kindle apps, for example, turn a page, or enlarge the fonts. The better apps are all pretty good in these respects already, and they will all reach parity on such things quickly enough. And they’re all free, so it costs nothing to switch. Nonetheless, the iBooks iPad app offers a generally better reading experience than its rivals, because of automatic brightness adjustments and overall ease of use. But its store has fewer books than the Amazon Kindle app or the Barnes & Noble eReader app. Kindle and Barnes & Noble for the iPhone were good, although the Kindle app lacks the ability to lend books to friends, as you can with the Barnes & Noble app. On a BlackBerry, Kobo was the most full featured, and on Android phones, Aldiko was the best in a sparse field, although it is greatly hampered, at least for now, by a lack of recent titles. But since the reading experience on these apps is not significantly different, the hard choice comes down to differentiating how you select your books, and how you may one day like to use them — beyond reading on your Android, iPhone or BlackBerry. In this respect, there are nuanced differences, but the upshot is this: I’m starting my own digital library through the Kobo iPad app, and I plan to hedge by not buying a lot of books in the near future. I will also keep a close eye on Barnes & Noble’s capabilities when it introduces its iPad app in the coming weeks. Kobo is backed by Borders, among others. Kobo’s selection is not as good as those on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but you can potentially do more with those books when you buy them through Kobo. The books you buy from most of these apps are, for now, readable only within the company’s apps. It is as Read More

Fellow TUAW blogger Michael Grothaus gave us his take on utilizing the iPad as an ebook reader over the weekend. It's is a good look into some of the down sides of ebook readers like the iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, et. al. I'm the type of bibliophile that reads a lot of different things at once. I'll be reading a couple of novels, along with several volumes of manga, at a time -- going back and forth as I feel like reading the particular book. While I do agree that traditional books aren't going anywhere soon, there are some rather big positives the iPad does bring to the literary world. I am in the process of launching a webcomic that requires a lot of research on literature that's already in the public domain, such as "The Wizard of Oz" with a few swipes. I had the initial book in the series, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," on my iPad and read it over the course of a few hours. Being a Kindle graduate, I found the process fairly easy and quickly loaded up some other titles onto the iPad. Of course, many of these are available for most ereaders thanks to Project Gutenberg. Presenting old classics in a new form. I encourage anyone with an iPad to try out the sample of this interactive version of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is simply superb, and really shows the possibilities of what the iPad can do for reading. Another example is The Elements, one of the initial iPad apps that got raves and with good reason. . The moment any reader gets an iPad, they should they load iBooks and Amazon's Kindle app and Stanza. The Kindle app especially has a few features over iBooks such as the ability to read white print on a black background, which is easier for some people. I also love that I can read my original Kindle purchases on the iPad. Thank you, Amazon! Face it, rotten eyesight affects many of us. The iPad makes it easy to enlarge text, change the font, bookmark, utilize the dictionary to look up a word, even control the brightness from within the app. What it can't do though is change the page itself to be white on black or black on sepia. For that, you'll need the Kindle app. Same goes for note-taking. Once more, the Kindle Read More

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge Published: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 Category: iPod, iPhone, and iPad Gems: Apps, Games + More Even though we don’t buy all or even most of our music from the iTunes Store, we give Apple serious credit for what iTunes and the iPod accomplished for the music industry—a unified, simple, and reasonably-priced interface for buying and playing music either on computers or on the go. Now Apple is trying to replicate that model with iBooks on the iPad, a free application that lets users buy and read books from major publishers, building upon Amazon’s previous work with the Kindle family of digital book readers. But unlike Apple’s approach to music, which started with a computer-based downloading and playback solution that extended to numerous portable devices, iBooks enters the world at a disadvantage: for the time being, it works only on the iPad, and the books Apple sells aren’t readable on other devices or even iTunes-equipped computers. Moreover, Apple is offering only a limited assortment of books, and iBooks relies upon a book publishing format that is incapable of properly rendering even visually intense printed publications, let alone more sophisticated interactive multimedia ones. For numerous reasons, iPod- and iPhone-like success is far from guaranteed for iBooks… at least in its current form. This edition of iPad Gems reviews four different iPad book applications, focusing mostly on Apple’s iBooks, then offering an iPad-specific update to our previous review of Amazon’s highly similar application Kindle (Free), and finishing with a brief combined discussion of two stand-alone iPad-specific books, Atomic Antelope’s Alice for the iPad ($9) and Theodore Gray’s/Element Collection’s The Elements: A Visual Exploration ($13). Since a proper review of iBooks begins with an understanding of what Amazon previously attempted and accomplished with Kindle, we start with a little backstory before diving into the application reviews. Read on for all the details. Background: Why Apple Would Care To Copy Amazon’s Kindle Years before Apple introduced the iPad, it was well-established that the company was working on a larger version of the iPod touch—a device that many people guessed would directly compete against Amazon’s dedicated digital book reader, Kindle. But would it? Starting with the first-generation version in 2007, Amazon had pitched Kindle as the iPod of books, capable of storing and even wirelessly downloading an entire library within a thin, portable enclosure, and had made some strong though controversial design choices in the Read More