Month: March 2007

500 Billion Digital Photographs in the United States Alone?

ZDNet summarize a Tabblo survey which foundthat 11 percent of U.S. respondents said they had more than 10,000 digital photos. Breaking down all the groups, the survey estimates that Americans have about 500 billion digital photographs stored on their hard drives and memory cards.

That is an enormous estimate which highlights just how much digital cameras have changed photography. Digital photography really started taking off in 2000 (as of 1999 there were only an estimated 8 million digital cameras worldwide compared to 200 million film cameras in the United States alone). If we assume that the bulk of those 500 billion digital photographs were taken from 2000-2007, that would be about 71 billion photos each year. According to this estimate of worldwide information production in 1999 there were 82 billion photographs taken worldwide.

A lot of commentators typically complain that these sort of statistics are indicative of an information glut where far more photographs are being produced than could possibly be viewed (and besides, who really needs more pictures of someone’s cat?) But Flickr’s February cache problems illustrate just how voracious our appetite for photographs are.

According to the Flickr blog, the site regularly serves up hundreds of millions of photographs and, on the busiest days, tops 1 billion photographs per day. Flickr doesn’t say how many different photographs are stored on the service but does mention that it uses “hundreds of terabytes of storage.” That’s a crapload of photographs on just a single website.

DC Superfriends Batmobile

Marvel has its Spider-Man and Friends line of toys for toddlers, and Mattel is soon going to be bringing out a DC Superfriends line aimed at the same market. There are definitely adults who collect these, but I find most of them annoying (my dog, however, loves the ones my son leaves on the floor).

I make an exception for the DC Superfriends Batmobile,

I. Must. Own. That.

Fan Efforts to Build an Open Hardware E-Book Reader

Not Another E-Book LLC is an effort by contributors to the Baen forums to build an open (i.e., no stupid DRM) e-book reader.

Essentially the idea is to put together a spec for the reader, then get enough people to sign on to buy one to contract with an manufacturer to produce the device. The group’s mission statement says that,

1. This is a reader by us for our own use and for any other book lover who just wants to read books without being trapped into anyone else’s business plan.

2. We will not lock you into any one format, or try to dictate your choice of download sites.

We don’t want anyone doing that to us and we’re not going to do it to you.

3. This is a bare bones reader. That means you can carry a small library with you and we don’t have to charge you the earth for it.

If you want something that does text messaging you’ve bought the wrong device.

4. No DRM and no hidden “gotchas” what you see is what you get.

5. We intend this reader to support as many formats as possible

Very nice effort. Personally, though, I’ve given up on separate e-book readers and have been using Mobipocket on my Treo to read books.

A friend whose wife uses Mobipocket tells me the app is a real pain-in-the ass to use with DRMed files, but I’m converting straight .txt/.doc/.html files to the Mobipocket format using Mobipocket’s library manager. The program as a whole is pretty slick and does a pretty good job of preserving highlights and annotations which are extremely important to me.

A dedicated e-book reader would have to be extremely impressive to get me to add yet another device to my gadget bag. I carry my cell phone everywhere and so always have the latest book I’m reading with me. It’s not perfect, but the convenience more than outweighs the negatives (which, in the case of the Treo, is the small screen size, but after a few hours my brain adapted to reading smaller chunks and constantly scrolling).