*WARNING! This post will self-destruct in 5, 4, 3... * In a sign that book publishing has entered the Snapchat era, James Patterson has partnered with a creative agency to put out what is being billed as the worlds first self-destructing book. One thousand readers will have the opportunity to get a free digital copy of Pattersons new book, Private Vegas, which will vanish after 24 hours. The self-destructing book was designed to create a thrilling reading experience, with a countdown clock at the top of the screen ticking the time until the entire book disappears. Readers can also keep track of how far along others are in the book and steal time from those readers. (gplus.ly/1sWxbpD) Back in 1992, William Gibson, to whom the Internet owes a lot of its nomenclature, collaborated on Agrippa, a poem that appeared on a floppy disk housed within a book. But in a nod to the fleeting nature of memories, the poem lightened and eventually disappeared after it was exposed to sunlight. (gplus.ly/1sWy3dU) Digital Rights Management (DRM) isn’t the most popular technology, restricting the use of the content—generally music and ebooks—to those who have paid for it. To show how that works in a more tangible way, a team led by graphic designer Thibault Brevet built a chair that falls apart after it has been sat in eight times. The DRM Chair uses a pressure sensor to count how many times it’s been used and an Arduino chip controls the trigger that makes the legs melt off. gplus.ly/1sWyapU While Pattersons new book may be the first self-destructing book, we can see that the idea is not new and may have uses that are much more practical than a marketing gimmick. BlackBerry and Boeing recently teamed up to develop a super-secret smartphone that will thrawt any attempt to break open the product casing by triggering a Mission Impossible-style deletion of saved data and software, and render the gadget inoperable. (gplus.ly/1sWxDUV) Electronic...
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 21:29:49 +0000
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