New Pixar film due out next summer.

Yun Xie interviews Vikram Savkar for Ars Technica. Savkar is the Senior Vice President and Publishing Director at Nature Publishing Group.

According to Savkar, it seems there is a huge interest in digital textbooks:

Ars: How will you introduce digital textbooks to university professors and instructors? They’re the ones who will ultimately choose textbooks for classes.

Savkar: California State University is the first to adopt the interactive textbook, so they’ve helped spread the news. We only announced our plan for the textbook about a month ago, and 800 faculty members from colleges signed up the first day to get a demo.

I’m not surprised. The opportunity for digital text books has got to be wide open. Textbooks are a multi-billion dollar market and cost the average student $700 per semester. For the cost of one semester’s worth of textbooks a student could instead buy a tablet computer and then purchase cost-efficient, backpack-friendly textbooks at a lower rate for the next 7 semesters.

However, after reading this answer from Savkar during the interview, the future of digital textbooks suddenly seems a little less bright:

Ars: Would a student be able to read these interactive textbooks on laptops, iPads, Android phones, and other devices?

Savkar: Our textbooks are born digital, which means we created it for what digital can do. As I said before, we didn’t write a regular textbook, make PDFs, and put it online. Our textbooks will be available for iPad, smartphones, Androids, and other devices. These textbooks are born accessible.

What does it even mean these are “born digital” and “born accessible”? I fear it means they will be awkward, buggy, and frustrating.

If 1,500 blog posts are published every 60 seconds I wonder how many refreshes to Google Reader there are by subscribers.

iLounge reports that “the price of the components required to add a Thunderbolt port to an external hard drive is roughly equal to the cost of a low-end hard drive itself.”

Chris Davies at SlashGear:

The first demo was a raw speed test, reading and writing to the drives with 4GB files. As you can see in the video, the MBP was able to write at up to 352.5 MB/s, while read speeds reached 827.2 MB/s. The company told us that the same setup had hit 870 MB/s peaks in their own testing.

Reading from an external drive at 870 MB/s? That is fast. Faster than the popular OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD is even capable of.

When in comes to hardware stats like this I am still a dilettante, but if I’m understanding this right it means you wouldn’t even notice a speed difference if you had an external SSD hooked up via Thunderbolt. If you were simply buying an external to run backups to, there’d be little point to get an expensive setup like this. However, if you had one of the Thunderbolt-equipped iMacs with the non-user-replaceable HDDs in them and you wanted an SSD as your boot disk, it seems you could get one of these instead.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, answers the question: “If it’s still Amazon’s philosophy to make bold bets, I would expect that maybe some of them wouldn’t work out, but I am just not seeing that. So, my question is where are the losers?”

Aaron Mahnke:

According to Wired Magazine, JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series of books (which, as of yesterday, had no sign of ever hitting the eBook market), has decided to skip her publishers and release the 7-book series on her own in digital format. If you need help processing the news, let me help; this is huge.

A huge thanks to AppStorm for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote their current bundle of Mac Apps.

The bundle is $49 and has 8 top-shelf apps. And I mean it when I say these apps are top-shelf. Some that I use and rely on every single day — TextExpander, 1Password, and Arq — and the others are among the best of the best: Billings, WriteRoom, LittleSnapper, Radium, and Alarms.

The deal ends in a few days, so if you’re going to grab the bundle you may want to do so soon.

Just posted: episode 16 of The B&B Podcast. Ben and I talk about backing up, wireless networking speeds, the celebration of keeping an iPhone for more than one year, and other things. I even learned a few things in this episode.

Brought to you by InVision and Pulp.

If you use more than 5GB of data (which does not include purchased music, apps, or books) then you’ll be able to buy more. My .Mac email address is my primary email, I’ve been using it for years, I have all those emails saved on the server, and as of today it only ads up to 2.7 GB. I wonder how fast the remaining 2.3GB will get used once I can store documents and backups as well.

Speaking of J. Eddie Smith, IV, if you haven’t checked out his weekly series of one-line tidbits of app advice, you should.

J. Eddie Smith, IV wrote a great follow-up post to my Tale of Two Inboxes article. Smith hits on what was by far the most common feedback I received, which is that Twitter is for the less important and/or high-frequency stuff; RSS is for the can’t miss stuff.

And this line — though it doesn’t work as the obligatory-blockquote-to-sum-up-the-whole-linked-to-article — is the best sentence I’ve read all week:

Too much from too few is a cognitive, guilt-laden nuclear warhead I’d rather not tango with day to day.

Conan’s post-production team doesn’t get what all the hubbub is about, so they made this video statement to voice their support of FCPX. (Via Daniel Jalkut.)

Weird to think that a year ago today I was standing in line waiting to upgrade from my old, crappy, slow, iPhone 3GS.