eBay Deals created an infographic called, “The Great Tablet Debate,” which explores consumer preference in tablets.

According to the graphic, Android tablets have the most market share, but the iPad is still the most popular device. Check it out: “Google’s Android system accounted for 56.5% of the tablet market in the first quarter of 2013, whereas Apple’s iOS achieved 39.6%. iPads still dominated though: Apple sold 19.5 million units in Q1 2013, while Samsung sat in second place, having sold 8.8 million of its Android based tablets.”

We’ve embedded the entire graphic after the jump. Read more

D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Library is proving that libraries aren’t just for books – they’re also for 3D printing and book-making. The library is using its $3.4 million grant to provide a publicly accessible 3D printer and an Espresso Book Machine for on demand book printing – great for students and self-publishers. Printing is five cents per gram plus $1 (they say most print jobs costs between $1-$5). The library also has plans to include a “Dream Lab” where users can collaborate on projects ,test drive tablets and e-readers prior to purchasing, and also publish personal novels.

Library manager Nicholas Kerelchuck is optimistic about the library’s 3D printing service as an educational tool:

They’re learning math skills, engineering skill, hard science skills…this is future job experience. I think that in 10 years if someone has experience using a 3-D printer, they are far ahead of the curve.

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Edward Snowden’s personal email provider Lavabit has shuttered its email service, active immediately. Instead of complying with government orders, the email service provider ended all email service on Thursday and is continuing the fight in appeals court. Further, the company is under federal gag orders, presumably from US secret courts, to remain silent on the details.

Here is the posted message from Lavabit’s CEO Ladar Levison detailing the decision:

My Fellow Users,

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on—the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests. Read more

Most smartphone owners have dropped their phone once or twice, but a new Android app game from Norwegian developer Carrot Pop may lead to an increase in phone accidents. The app is called Send Me to Heaven (S.M.T.H.). It encourages players to throw their  phone as high as they can and then catch it in order to score points. Users can save their scores to the Carrot Pop server and compare them against the scores of other players.

Using the phone’s accelerometer, the app measures the height that the phone reaches as it goes up in the air. The higher its thrown, the higher the points. Hopefully players will actually catch their phones and they won’t end up smashed on the street beneath players. The company’s disclaimer  says that they aren’t liable for any damage to phones hurt in game play.

It may be an app worth downloading, the week before you upgrade to a new phone.

Ever wondered what Wikipedia looks like as it is being edited? Listen to Wikipedia has created an animation that is updated in real time as Wikipedia is edited. Every time a subject on the site is edited, a bubble with the name of the subject in a different colored ball and then fades out as new topics populate the screen. When a new user joins, their name flashes at the top of the screen. Think “Braniff Airlines” next to “Breaking Bad,” “Gholam-Hossein Elham,” next to “squat (exercise).”  All of this movement is happening to the soundtrack of soothing electronic music. It’s pretty cool to look at Wikipedia in this way.

Here is more about the project:

Listen to Wikipedia’s recent changes feed. The sounds indicate addition to (bells) or subtraction from (strings) a Wikipedia articles, and the pitch changes according to the size of the edit. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site — you can welcome him or her by adding a note on their talk page.

(Via Gawker).

Do you have a hard time keeping up your journal? Narrato wants to help make it easy for you to record your ideas and memories through an iPhone app that is as easy to update as Facebook.

Using the app you can create journal entries that are short and sweet or long and thought out. You can write text or select images from your camera roll to share. You can import select tweets and photos and check-ins from Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare. You can even import weather and location details to help set the mood or remember the location.  The journal content appears in a timeline, not unlike a social media feed, but it’s private.

Perhaps you need a journal for a novel that you are working on, and another to take notes for a feature story that you are writing. A cool feature in the app is that you can create multiple journals. It also works offline, which is great for a travel writer who is out of range. Read more

Should babies use apps? The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Fisher-Price and Open Solutions.

The complaint challenges these companies on the claim that “apps for tablets and cell phones are educational for babies.” Laura Moy of the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown Law is working on the complaint with the advocacy organization. She offered this statement in the release:

These companies are violating federal laws that protect consumers by making totally unsupported and unsubstantiated claims about the educational value of their products … And not only are they breaking the law, they are unfairly taking advantage of well-meaning parents who want nothing more than to help their babies get ahead of the curve. The Commission should stop these practices and make crystal clear that if companies want to market apps as educational for babies, they must have evidence to back up their claims.

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ADD cooks like myself are constantly wandering away from the stove to multitask – often leaving our precious pots to determine proper cooking time and temperature to disastrous results. I can’t even count the times where I’ve burned or overcooked things, which is why I was excited to see this Range smartphone thermometer that can send me alerts. The graph feature is an added bonus so I can study my recipe’s cooking temperature over time – for even more precision!

Jeff Bezos‘ purchase of The Washington Post shocked the publishing industry this week and one of the big questions that people are asking is whether or not the paper will survive in the print medium under the management of such a digitally-focused owner.

Bezos expressed his ideas of the future of reading in the new documentary film Out of Print. ”If you look at technology over the last 20 years, most of our connected devices, whether it be, you know, a smartphone, or a laptop, these are very good for reading news articles, email messages, blog posts,” he said in the film. “We humans do more than what is convenient and easy for us and so I think there has been a shift over the past 20 or so years away from long-form reading, from book-length reading, and toward short-form reading.”

The film, directed by Vivienne Roumani and executive produced by Aryeh Bourkoff, also includes interviews with publishing industry experts including best-selling novelist Scott Turow and Harvard Librarian Robert Darnton.

Do you think print will survive under Bezos’ direction?

Slicebooks, a digital publishing platform that lets publishers cut up and repackage eBook content through a widget, has raised a round of seed funding from ICG Ventures Inc., an Ingram Content Group company.

The company will use the funding to help support the company’s technology and the launch of an upcoming Slicebooks Store, a digital retail environment intended to help publishers repurpose existing content, be it books, magazines or journals, and repackage and sell them digitally. The partnership also makes Slicebooks available to any publisher that has integrated with Ingram Content Group’s CoreSource digital asset management platform. Publishers will not have the option to have their files delivered to Slicebooks for slicing.

“The Slicebooks ecosystem is all about helping publishers repurpose content to improve discoverability while also giving consumers greater choice and flexibility,” stated Jill Tomich, CEO of Slicebooks. “Our mission is to make all content available whole, sliced and remixable, and how, when and where consumers want it. Everything we build has that goal in mind.”