A year ago in my first post, The Future of Ink, I explored e-ink technology and the e-book concept when the potential was still largely unseen. But since then, the industry has completely transformed, and the prospect of the e-book is beginning to be realized.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service. One might say, why do I need del.icio.us if I have bookmarking capabilities built right into my browser? Well, here are some reasons:

• del.icio.us uses a non-hierarchical categorization system, that is, instead of organizing your bookmarks in folders, you assign tags to them.
  
  

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• For all new comments made on iMechanica, the feed is: http://imechanica.org/crss
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By Michael H . Suo and Zhigang Suo

While browsers have improved greatly in recent years, we have noticed that many academics are still missing out on important functions. In this post, we will focus on Firefox, an open-source browser that has recently gained popularity. Note: this is not a Microsoft-bashing article. Internet Explorer 7 is a very functional modern browser, but for the reasons below, we like Firefox better.

Who owns your content? Is it you or the copyright holder? If it isn't you, then why did you pay for it? All these questions are at the heart of the current war for the rights to music, movies, and everything in between.

The first shots of this war were fired with the start of the digital age. Before, the best you could was make physical copies of media. Technically possible, yes, but the equipment and manpower needed to run an operation on a scale large enough to threaten publishers was nearly impossible to obtain without being noticed.

Since I know (or was told 20 minutes ago) that some of you are interested in large area electronics and displays, I thought I would throw something out for you.

Lately, e-book readers have been a new trend in the tech industry. The potential for it is incredible: hundreds of books in the palm of your hand, digitized content distribution, and infinite number of bookmarks, searchable text, hyperlinks between books; the list goes on. However, all these benefits come at a price; namely battery life and readability.

But what kind of display should they use? The average LCD screen has about 72 dpi (dots per inch), meaning that there are 72 pixels in every inch of screen. While that's passable for regular computer usage, anyone who's tried heavy reading will tell you that it's just not clear enough. By comparison, the average newspaper has over 300 dpi, and the average book has about 400 dpi.