Articles by Kirk Biglione

Kirk has spent most of his life working in, and analyzing, the Media. A self-described music-geek, Kirk has worked in radio, written for music industry publications, and developed dozens of websites. Kirk's consulting firm, Oxford Media Works, specializes in development of digital media strategies, web publishing systems. Kirk's recently founded WP Apprentice, an online training portal specializing in in WordPress training and tutorials. Follow Kirk on @kirkbiglione

Exploring iPad Typography With Bibliotype for WordPress

A few weeks ago, book designer Craig Mod released Bibliotype, an HTML template system that designers can use to explore typography on the iPad.

Bibliotype is a thoughtful approach to designing typography for long-form reading on tablet devices. The template includes support for several viewing distances, portriat and landscape orientations, and a hyphenation library, among other features.

If you’re a book designer looking to experiment with typography on tablet devices, Bibliotype will jump start your design process.

What’s missing from Bibliotype is a way for designers to easily work with real content. If only there was some way to connect Bibliotype to a light-weight, user-friendly, content management system.

Well, now there is. Presenting Bibliotype for WordPress.

As a WordPress theme, Bibliotype becomes a framework for publishing beautifully designed books on the web for consumption on tablets.

Point your iPad here to see the theme in action. Or download BiblioType for WordPress and start designing your own web-based book.

Event Alert:

I’ll be speaking about Open, Webby Book Publishing Systems at tools at O’Reilly Media’s Tools Of Change conference next week in New York City. Registration is still open, but probably not for long. The event sells out every year. If you’re planning on going register today and use the Medialoper code toc11med to save 15%.

eBooks: Going Digital…The Hard Way

While the news from CES last week buzzed with updates about the latest Android tablets and stories of self-navigating iPad robots, a new product with the potential to further disrupt the already troubled book business went largely unnoticed.

The ION Book Saver is a new scanning system designed to convert print books into eBooks at a rate of two facing pages per second. It’s fast. It’s cheap. And it has some in the publishing industry wondering if it’s a precursor to a new class of product that will one day enable consumers to digitize their book collections in much the same way they ripped their CD collections.
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DRM, Digital Content and the Consumer Experience: Lessons Learned from the Music Industry

This is a screencast of the DRM presentations I gave last week at O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference.

The Day Apple Didn’t Change the World

Apple’s latest gadget is everything we hoped for, and so much less. Granted, the iPad is very cool, but it’s more evolutionary than revolutionary. It is essentially an extra-large iPod Touch with optional 3G wireless.

In my last post I identified five things I’d be watching for during the iPad event.

Here’s what I saw: (more…)

Medialoper’s Guide to Unicorn Watching

Forget the Super Bowl. Tomorrow is the big game.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a Blackberry you’re aware that tomorrow is the day that Apple unveils its highly anticipated new product. After nearly three years of speculation, tomorrow is the day we all get to see…the Unicorn.

Rumors abound about the alleged capabilities of this mythical beast. Some say that it can fly. Others have suggested that it’s invisible. Those same people insist that it’s already here and we just can’t see it yet. There is actually a rumor floating around the net theorizing that tomorrow morning when Steve Jobs walks onto the stage to introduce us to his new creation, a shiny new Apple tablet will materialize in each of our homes. These invisible unicorns have apparently been hiding in the corner for months just waiting for the right moment to come out and meet us.

Steve Ballmer will bow down to this supernatural new technology. Pat Robertson will condemn it as satanic. Newt Gingrich will buy three.

As for you and me? Who knows. Whether or not this “revolutionary” new product actually transforms our lives in the ways that we’ve been lead to believe it might, depends on any number of things.

Here are a few of the things I’ll be looking for to determine whether the Apple tablet turns out to be a unicorn or a duck-billed platypus. (more…)

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