Kjære krimvenn!
Jeg sitter i disse dager fordypet i skrivingen av neste års kriminalroman om lensmann Ole Vik. Handlingen tar til på Korsneset syd for Bergen, men vil forflytte seg til andre deler av Norge etter hvert som krimdramaet skrider frem, og selvfølgelig til mitt fiktive paradis, Fjellberghavn. En del av handlingen vil også finne sted i utlandet. Boken vil omhandle mennesker med ulik sosial bakgrunn, alder og yrke, noe som gir meg en herlig frihet i valg av skjebner. Dermed åpner det seg en unik mulighet for deg som leser: Kunne du tenke deg å bli drept i denne boken?

Med en snedig begrunnelse, en spennende historie eller en artig fortelling om deg selv, kan du bli skrevet inn i evigheten, bli berømt og få en flott nekrolog lenge før du selv dør. Det er ikke mange forunt!

De fleste boklesere ønsker å lese om spennende mennesker og deres skjebner. Din skjebne i boken er å bli drept. Kanskje skjer dette nettopp på grunn av en av dine helt spesielle sider? Skisser gjerne hva som er spesielt ved deg i svarskjemaet nedenfor.

My English translation (and do feel free to correct me, and make a better translation!)

Dear friend and crime lover!
These days I’m writing next year’s crime novel about police officer Ole Vik. The novel takes place at Korsneset south of Bergen [Norway's second biggest city], but I want to move parts of the plot to other parts of Norway as the drama thickens, and of course to my fictitious paradise, Fjellberghavn. Parts of the book will also take part abroad. The book will have people with different social backgrounds, ages and professions, something that give a wonderful freedom when picking destinies. Which opens an unique opportunity for you as a reader: Would you like to get killed in this book?

With a good reason, an exiting or fun story about yourself, you can be written into history, get famous and get a great necrology a long time before you die. Not something that happens to lots of people!

Most readers wish to read about exiting people and their faith. Your destiny in the book is to get killed. Maybe you’re killed because of one of your special behaviours? Tell me what’s special about yourself in the form below.

How about that? The winner will be killed in the book, and some runnerups will get book prices. He as already gotten over 200 entries, so be sure to enter before 1. May.

I’m not sure if you have to be Norwegian? I would guess so, even though the rules doesn’t say anything about it.

I just thought this was a wonderful way to get interesting content for a book. And what a great way to market your future book. Brilliant.

2) The iTunes store has sold two billion tracks or so, has a system that works, and has their frontend (iTunes) installed on the majority of computers sold the last couple of years…

Add these together, and you have the perfect portable book reader. Here’s what Booksquare thinks:

We’ve noted in posts past that that an unheralded feature of the iTunes store is the ability to serve up PDF files. Go back and read that sentence again because one key element of the iPhone is its tight integration with iTunes (in retrospect, woefully misnamed). See, if you can browse the web and use iTunes, you can, theoretically, download PDF files. Not a heralded feature, but we have faith in Steve Jobs and his design team.

In other words, you can read lengthy texts. Articles. Short stories. Novellas. Books. Compendiums. On your cell phone/miniature computer/portable media player/killer device.

Setting aside the comfort issues, the iPhone could either kill the nascent e-reader business or take it to new levels. We’ve been saying just about forever that the problem with dedicated e-reader is the fact that the consumer isn’t seeking a device that does only one thing. With its “smart” orientation features, the iPhone could usher in the mass market e-book era.

E-reader to new levels

I have bought quite a few books for my (now retired) Palm Pilot. eReader.com has over 17 000 titles, but reading books on the sharp, but way too small screen on my Sony-Ericsson K800i doesn’t cut it. The Palm had a bigger screen. A lousy screen, but a bigger.

The books are DRM’ed, which of course is a nuisance. But I can live with it. If i WANT to, I get the texts out of the books, but I seldom do.

Tie text and audio together = killer app

Booksquare’s idea is brilliant. If I could buy books for the iPhone in the iTunes store, I would. What if Apple made an app for the iPhone that let you have the same book in both text and audio together? They already sell thousands of audiobooks in iTunes, and if I – for a slightly higher price – could get both audio and text at the same time, that would be a killer. The text could follow the audio when I listen to it, and if I read the text, and later were in my car, the audio version would know where I left reading the text. Let me have a way to set bookmarks with my voice when I listen to the audio version, and let people copy smaller passages and send them by e-mail or by bluetooth. That will help spread the word, and good books will sell more.

The next thing Apple should do with Google: Get all those Google-scanned books into the iTunes store. Let me use Spotlight to search all my books, and give me the most amazing e-reader ever made.

I wish more books came with blank pages. More space for notes. Books like “Blink” and “Freakonomics” – books that triggers tons of ideas as I read them.

Maybe Moleskine could do some research: Which books would be popular with their biggest fans? Wouldn’t it be cool to have “Blink” with the Moleskine black binding, and lots of extra blank pages? Two extra blank pages after each big idea. Six extra pages after each chapter. And tabs included to mark those special pages. I would buy it. All my books are full of notes and drawings. Books are to be used.

.

A bit down the trail we found these rocks dressed with pieces of cotton:

.

So my daughter (for whom I have read the six Harry Potter books twice each, and number two three times) says:

“Hey look dad, they are wearing pillows just like Dobby!”

Dobby shows up in the second Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

And the first Harry Potter book is called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (the original title)….

Just a thought…!

Let’s run down the list and see how much you score (and post it here):

The list

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Bible

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien

1984 by George Orwell

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque

His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Middlemarch by George Eliot

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

How many have you read?

I got (only) 12, only counting the ones I have read the whole book (which rules out the Bible for most people). I have “Life of Pi” on my iPod, but it’s number 4 behind a few other new audio books.

How many have you read? Post below!

And more fun: If you were to add only one more book to this list, which one?

In an e-mail interview, Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and the co-founder of Broadcast.com, said he has been impressed with Synergy but was “only surprised that it took this long” for a service like this to emerge.

True. Why did it? The concept of tagging things is amazingly simple and still very effective. Now coaches in NBA teams can search any tag and combinations of tags and get video of their team up on their screen. Find “3-point lastminute leftside” or whatever.

Tagging tv

Now let us take this a step further. What if you could search for anything a broadcaster (like NBC in the USA, or BBC in the UK) broadcasts? Search for “laughter” and you get every good joke that made people laugh, in a talk show, a movie, a sports programme etc. Search for “shot”, “goal”, “kiss”, “man”, “woman”, “joke”, “sad” and so on.

Is it possible? Is there a business in this? Why would someone want to do this? Sales? Reuse of material in new programmes? I just find it fascinating, and I would like your comments on what this could be used for.

Tagging movies

What if videos had a system where people could tag them? Ok, let’s say that IMDB.com (Internet Movie Database) made a system where every scene in a movie were listed under the movie. And the movie companies let them do this. They were not to whow the actual movie, just a picture illustrating the scene. Then people could add tags to that scene. “Carchase”, “man”, “sun”, “orange”, “horse”, “Kim Basinger” etc. I’m pretty sure that lots of people would tag their favourite movies in no time.

What could we use these tags for later? Sales? Rentals? Dating? Any ideas?

This database then could be used for rentals, and soon internet downloads. Amazon.com has added tagging of the products they sell, but you can only add tags to the whole product. Would it be useful if you could tag chapters in books?

So what is a “plog”? Amazon defines it as…

Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

Authors with at least one book for sale on Amazon.com are eligible to participate in Amazon Connect.

In other words: Authors of books can make a special blog inside Amazon.com. Their posts will show up on your plog if you ever bought on of their books.

So here’s John Lithgow showing up on mine:

Now I can comments on John’s post, and rate it which will give him feedback if his post was worth it for his readers too.

I like this. It’s a good idea, and will…

1. Make Amazon sell more books
2. Make people want to log onto Amazon more often
3. Help authors connect with their readers in an easy way
4. And the opposite: Make readers connect with the authors

I hope more authors do this, and also start their own blogs outside of Amazon.

(The book I bought by John Lithgow was this)

• Baum, L. Frank. The Road to Oz
• Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
• Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent
• Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground
• The Founding Fathers. The Constitution of the United States
• Irving, Washington. Old Christmas
• James, Henry. An International Episode
• London, Jack. Call of the Wild
• Shelley, Mary W. Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus
• Wodehouse, PG. Psmith in the City

You can help them, by reading books yourself, and upload them to their server.

Now, have a look at VitalSource, a new net shop for ebooks. It looks like everybody is copying iTunes music store.

The concept is quite clever:

Sell ebooks that are available for free (not all of them I must add!), and get people to pay for it. How? By indexing them, format them, add chapters and a nice program for highlighting, searching and notetaking.

The files are protected by DRM: “Digital rights management – Other formats deter copyright violation only by burdening the user. VitalBook files download and lock to your computer, but they don’t limit the functions you want (like print, copy and paste, highlighting, etc.).”. Ok, a bit better than some other ebooks that doesn’t let you do anything – no printing, no copy etc.

There are of course lots of newer books, especially in science and education. It makes sense to have these kind of books on your computer. You can drag graphics and pictures to other applications, and copy text. Cool!

I couldn’t find out if the books are searchable by Spotlight, which would make them even more useful. If not, that should be top priority for the creators of VitalSource.

One of the people behind VitalSource, James Duncan Davidson, has an excellent weblog. VitalSource also has one.

The game for Harry Potter 4 is in production, and the trailer for it is out now. Not much too see though.

The leaky Cauldron has more about the game, which is out in November.

Previously: Harry Potter 4 – the first trailer is out

Very interesting. This makes my head spinning!!! Imagine if I could search every book I buy from Spotlight?! Without having the actual books on my Mac? Simon points to Tim Bray’s On Search, the Series, for explanation on how this could work.

This is clearly the next thing Amazon should add to their list: When I buy a book they already have scanned, indexed and made searchable on their site, I should be able to buy a Spotlight searchable index for the whole book for an extra dollar. I would pay that! Everytime.

And Steve Jobs, this is your chance. You have a whole year (or two) before other OSes get search tools like Spotlight. In the meantime, have Jezz Bezos over for a talk, and start putting those indexes on Amazon.com

Make sure the files are bookmarkable on your iPod; AAC files can be made bookmarkable, while MP3 files cannot.

Update

Michael has updated the article for iTunes 6:

Importing CDs for audio books can be kind of painful, because there are usually a lot of them. To make matters worse, each CD usually has dozens of tracks on it, which makes it a nightmare to manage on the small screen of an iPod. Worst of all, the track names are rarely recognized by the automatic lookup service, so you need to enter them by hand. This import process attempts to reduce the amount of manual input, while also making sure that the track information is highly usable on an iPod.

“I have officially retired from the business of explaining what I meant by 42. It was just a joke. End of story.”, says Douglas in the netmeeting. Douglas also answers why he has a “thing” for Norway: “You live here. You tell me.”.

“And I sort of realized that I do design that way. I build up a tremendous amount of background data, let it synthesize, then “blink” it out as a fully-formed solution. It typically works like this:

• Talk to everybody I possibly can about the problem.
• Read everything that would even be remotely related to what I’m doing. Hang charts, graphs, diagrams, and screenshots all over my office.
• Observe user research; recall past research”

Read the rest at Jeff’s superb looking site.

“It seems odd, don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inversely with the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinary heights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to perpetual darkness. Could be worth a try, I think.”

A Korean family watched me wiping my tears of laughter, and couldn’t resist coming over to me, asking what I was reading that made laugh and cry.

So you can guess that I was a bit worried when I heard that a new film was in production. The 3rd trailer from the movie is out. I’m not worried anymore.

The trailer is very funny, and if you ever are going to make trailers for blockbuster Hollywood movies… Well, there you have your recipe. If I should be sleeping outside a cinema for six weeks, I would rather do it for this movie than “Star wars III” (which I propably will like a lot too).

Hopefully, cinemas will be serving Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters on the premiere night, which is described as “having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.” We’re not talking Gin Tonic’s here…

BTW, Marvin looks excellent too!

UPDATE: After reading about how Hugh MacLeod found a former friend of his through blogging, I’m gonna push my luck, and try for the impossible. Do you know the South-Korean family that asked me about the Douglas Adams book in Copenhagen in… it must have been 1989? The man told me he was working as an engineer. That’s all the information I have (I told you: Impossible).

I will post about my top wishes for FCP 5 later.

Larry has published a book on FCP too; Final Cut Pro HD Hands-on Training (Hands on Training (H.O.T)). I highly recommend it and will post a review about it soon!