My books scanned by Blue Leaf.

Blue Leaf Book Scanning Service is one of a handful of scanning services that cater directly to consumers (as opposed to businesses like libraries and museums). Based in Missouri, the service will scan books you ship to them and convert the scanned images of individual pages into PDF, EPUB (ebook), Microsoft Word text and even MP3 audio formats. They will scan books intact or “destructively,” cutting the spines off so that pages can be scanned less labor intensively through an automated sheet feeder. Destructive scanning takes your book on a one way trip–the cut pages are not returned.

The process began with my adding up the total number of pages of two books I decided to have scanned. I initiated the order on the company’s web site using a detailed form where I chose non-destructive scanning for the 584 pages. The setup fee was $29.95 (now $24.95) for the first book, and $14.95 for each book thereafter. The first 50 pages were free, then there was a 10-cent charge per page. The subtotal at this point was around $98. I opted for the $12 conversion fee to generate standard EPUB format for ereader devices. There were additional options to create the proprietary Amazon Kindle MOBI format, and even convert the resulting text into an audio file with words spoken by a computerized voice.

I then completed and paid for the online order. After blinking at the $110 charge listed on my confirmation email, I had to wrap up the books to ship to Missouri. I chose Priority First Class for $13.60. The obvious pause here is that the books could be lost in shipping. The company warned of this remote possibility. Don’t ship irreplaceable items! One of my books was a title easily found at used book stores for a few dollars. The other was a rarer volume of scientific research in the $75 range. I set my worry aside in the spirit of experimentation.

Nine days later, I received an email announcing the completion of the scanning with a link to download a large compressed archive of all the files. After unpacking on my MacBook laptop, I got a folder full of all the promised file formats for each book. I transferred the PDFs to my iPad 2 to view in iBooks and they looked fantastic. A great bonus was that the scanning process included optical character recognition (OCR) of the printed text, so even though each page of the PDF was a scanned image, there was highlightable, searchable text in an invisible overlay. I was even able to open the PDFs in the Voice Dream Reader app to have them read aloud to me!

The EPUB files loaded fine on my B&N Nook ereader. The OCR’d text wasn’t perfect, which was expected. I got some gibberish when there was an ornate headline font. My second book had lots of tabular information, so that didn’t come out well in the EPUB, but looked fine in the PDF. I realized that I could have saved the $12 EPUB fee by converting the Word documents myself using the free Calibre utility. But then again, that was one less thing for me to mess with. The physical books arrived back at my home a week later at no extra cost.

So was it worth roughly $60 each to have these two books scanned to digital formats? In this case, yes, because they are books I will refer to over and over again in the future on one of my mobile devices when I am away from my home library. 1DollarScan is another popular and much less expensive service that only destructively scans books. Customers frequent the service when they are downsizing and want to convert batches of books that they don’t care to keep in physical form. I’ll cover this service and some other benefits of digital book scanning in a future post.

Photo: curiouslee/flickr

Back in August 2012, tech blogs like Engadget were abuzz with the announcement of an ultra simple cellphone by a company in the UK called Cycell that, because of its custom printed speed dial buttons, light weight and long battery life, would appeal to children and seniors. The phone is only available in the UK and was initially marketed as the Ownfone on a web site where customers could design their own phone by selecting from an array of button layouts, image backgrounds and graphic patterns. The phone would then be printed to order and shipped ready to use. The device, personalization and shipping is £55 (USD $89); and the monthly plans: £7.50 ($12)/50 minutes, £10 ($16)/100 minutes and £15 ($24)/500 minutes. The cost to reprint the speed dial sticker and reprogram the phone buttons is only £5 ($8). If the phone is lost, the replacement fee is only £35 ($56). The Age UK charity has licensed the product with selected customization options to market to its members via mail order and at several hundred neighborhood shops.

The phone is really a generic plastic pod of electronics that Cycell calls the SEED. The front of the pod has an array of buttons that are pre-programmed to only dial 2, 4, 8, 10 or 12 numbers. One of the buttons can be set to dial 999, the UK equivalent of 911 for emergencies. Other buttons on the front adjust the volume up or down, answer or end a call. The custom printed front sticker aligns with the button programming, and can incorporate family portraits and even tactile braille dots. The flat plastic housing offers a speaker, microphone, USB charging port and lanyard holes. There is a master on/off slider switch for power on the back to allow the battery to retain its charge for up to a year. There is no speakerphone, voicemail, SMS text or GPS capability. Simplicity rules this product.

I was able to charge and power up the two samples I received from Age UK (pictured above), but since the phones are currently only licensed to work in the UK, a computerized female voice said “No SIM!” I was able to hear the default musical ringtone, and at maximum volume, was plenty loud. My 83-year-old tech-shy mom commented that she would have a hard time pressing the printed buttons and suggested that a single braille dot be placed over all the printed buttons as a standard feature. She said she would also be concerned about call clarity and volume, neither of which we could test. The lanyard was a good physical security feature because she felt the small phone could be easily misplaced. The pricing plan was a non-starter as prepaid minutes would be her requirement.

Despite the astounding number of mobile phone products in the market from simple to complex, I think this phone will successfully appeal to a certain segment of caregivers and consumers who have very basic needs for a mobile phone. I applaud Cycell for driving towards simplicity in its innovations and Age UK for bringing this unique product to its membership. If this phone were to come to the U.S., what custom sticker designs and features might you want?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo:  Courtesy OwnFone

My brother and I were working as movie theater ushers in high school when Apple Computer began its first meteoric rise to success. It was 1978 and the box office hits for which we managed crowds at the KB Langley Theater in suburban Washington, D.C. included Grease, Animal House and Heaven Can Wait. And we stood in long lines around the block waiting to see Star Wars the summer before.

It was easy then to see and feel the mechanical form of movies. The 35mm film for each new release arrived at theaters in very heavy octagonal metal boxes containing 20-minute segments on several steel reels. The ushers were always given the task of lugging the film boxes up to the project booth so that the projectionist could begin the necessary splicing to make up the full-length feature.

Our theater had transitioned to a “platter” system that held all the spliced together reels of film in a continuous coil that relieved the projectionist of the task of having to do “changeovers,” which entailed loading up the 20-minute reels by hand alternating between two huge Century-brand projectors. The projectionist (most were unionized then) would watch for subtle cue dots that would appear at the end of each live reel and then stomp a foot switch to trigger the start of the other projector with the next reel, and shutdown the live projector. The platter system reduced wear on the film and eliminated the possibility of getting the reels mixed up.

With less to do during each showing, our projectionist began to bring his 35 lb. Apple II computer in two big canvas bags to set up on a desk in his projection booth to help pass the time. The Apple II had a base the size of three stacked medium pizza boxes and an integrated keyboard. A 12″ diagonal monochrome monitor was placed on top and a floppy disk drive alongside. A fistful of data cables and power cords brought the stack to life.

My brother and I had used the desk-sized teletype terminals at our high school to access a mainframe computer, but we had never seen a computer that could be hauled around casually by one person. Our new computer pal was easygoing and eager to show off his new technology, demonstrating the hot new productivity and games “apps” of the day. So it wasn’t long before my brother, who was more technically inclined at the time, became hooked on the Apple II and we had one at home.

We’ve both owned computers ever since. My brother became a software programmer after college. It’s a career that, to this day, has made him an expert in many types of computer hardware and software languages. I, however, became enamored with the arts and entertainment and got promoted to working in that same projection booth through college. I remember being laughed at for bringing the first 16 lb. Macintosh into a traditional graphic design class. I, too, brought that luggable Mac into the projection booth to help pass the time. Apple computers, then laptops, then phones, then tablets, have carried my career through decades of exciting work in print, web and mobile content.

But if I were to revisit the location of the Langley Theater today, the surrounding strip mall would be emblematic of the radical changes that have taken place in media industries. The nearby bookstore and vinyl record store are long gone. Video rental shops came and went. The phone booths have been removed. The newspaper boxes are nowhere to be found. And the theater is no more. These physical media are now digital information stored in vast data centers that are accessed wirelessly from the thin slab of aluminum, glass and silicon in my pocket called the iPhone 4.

Apple will continue to work relentlessly to simplify and miniaturize their products to a point in the future where I think computers themselves might become embedded in our surroundings and largely disappear from our awareness. It saddens me to think that Steve will miss this ultimate singularity of simplicity. When computers become invisible, what’s left will be people and their stories. If that can bring us closer together as a race, a few billion thank yous to you Steve!

Karl Hartig's Consumer Electronics Adoption Chart 1920 - 1998

Fellow AARP blogger Alejandra asked me if it would be interesting to collect a list of consumer technologies that were also born during the boomer generation years of 1946-1964. I found plenty of useful long lists, but to my delight, I rediscovered Karl Hartig‘s incredible chart from the late 1990s showing key milestones and events in the adoption of consumer electronics. Loading the high resolution version in my web browser, I savored the fascinating details of the chart in a long sitting.

In the information-rich tapestry, which covers 1920-1998, Karl plots the percentage of households adopting technologies such as radio, telephone, TV and more. Key cultural events and developments in media and technology are overlayed. The chart, originally developed for the Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition, is available in PDF format on Karl’s web site and is celebrated with links from many blogs around the web.

To make it easier to focus in on the boomer birth years, I cropped the chart and saved it as an image (shown above with link to a large version). Presidents in office are along the top, years and wars along the bottom. Recessions are highlighted in light blue vertical bars. The three colored graph lines that dominate the excerpt represent the household adoption percentage of AM radio, television and telephone. Significantly, television rose from 0 to over 90% adoption during the boomer birth years with audiences transfixed on broadcasts of Miss America, the Tonight Show, Sputnik, John Glenn’s flight into space and the assassination of JFK.

Karl’s full chart ends with the peak adoption of color TV, the VCR, the telephone and the rise of the internet. In our new millennium, we are seeing digital media transforming or subsuming many traditional media. But that’s fodder for future blog posts.

Boomer or not, what communications technologies do you most vividly remember shaping your early life?

On my way to a conference to speak about our mobile apps, a magazine cover caught my eye at the newsstand in the Philadelphia train station. Well, it was more like a whack in the face seeing a photo of an iPad on the front of the March 2011 issue of Philadelphia Magazine with this message overprinted on the screen:

Dear Baby Boomers, JUST DIE ALREADY. (We’ll take Philly from here. Thanks.) xoxo, Generation X

As a proud iPad-owning baby boomer, I was a bit annoyed by the cheap trick, but not surprised. Consumer magazines in the U.S. are seeing tough times these days. Though the story package offers point and counterpoint, it has predictably touched off some strong reactions and was called out by some of my colleagues.

The irony here is that it was Steve Jobs, an iconic baby boomer, who brought Gen X their cherished iPads. And it’s the iPad that may ultimately cause most of Gen X to stop buying paper magazines.

My wife and I decided to order our Apple iPad 2s and accessories online on launch day, but ended up in the second wave of deliveries scheduled for 7 – 10 business days.

Oddly, a FedEx package arrived the next day from a distribution center Jonestown, PA with my Smart Cover. The cover, which comes in several colors, is a mini-event of its own with magnets embedded to allow it to roll up securely as typing stand and viewing easel.

Fiddling with the iPad-less cover on this beautiful Sunday, I decided it might make a great bud vase. Adding a cigar tube and a trio of mini gerber daisies to the rolled up cover, I converted my lonely high-tech artifact into a cheery floral arrangement to ease the wait. With a little luck, the daisies will still be in bloom when the FedEx truck arrives with our Apple products.

Some co-workers and I gathered in a conference room at AARP Headquarters to watch Steve Jobs unveil the new version of Apple’s iPad 2. While the conversation naturally circled around all the new features, and how some of us were going to buy on the first day, our chatter came to the topic of competition pushing back.  As if on cue, Nielsen announced the next day that the market share of Google’s popular Android operating system for smart phones had edged past Apple and RIM Blackberry. This shift was long anticipated by analysts, and we have been readying the Android version of our flagship iPhone App. It will be released for free into the Google Android Market later this month.

Google is helping its partners win mobile market share with Android because they shrewdly developed the operating system years ago to give away to any carrier who would take it. Apple will defend its leading position by delighting its customers with simplicity, beautiful product design and a vast array of apps. For consumers, this battle between two titans (and a raft of wannabes) will, at a dizzying pace, bring falling prices, and ever more capable phones and tablets. Some smart phones already come free with service contracts, and color touch tablets will fall below the $200 mark.

With the two largest U.S. players covered, we’re also hard at work on a mobile version of the AARP.org web site, which will allow us to display on any phone that has a mobile web browser. The new site will also let us feed content into apps for other smart phones, and even internet-enabled home appliances such as connected TVs.

While Steve declared 2011 the year of the iPad 2, and Google might say this is the year their droid army fights back, we say it’s the year you’ll start to find AARP on any internet device.