OR Books has a new eBook available called Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet and appropriately, the publisher is selling the eBook through a name-your-price model.

The book explores the history of the fight against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. It includes essays by: Aaron Swartz, Larry Lessig, Zoe Lofgren, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Nicole Powers, Tiffiny Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, and Cory Doctorow.

The publisher suggests that customers pay $10 for the download, but there is a drop down option to pay other amounts including: nothing, $2, $5, $25, $50 or $100.

When OR Books put out Julian Assange’s book  Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet back in December, they skipped Amazon and released it through eKiosk, a site that creators sell eBooks and music outside of major online marketplaces, through a network of smaller online shops.

Bite Interactive’s latest survey indicates that Google Glass is not desirable -  at least, in its current social state. The survey showed that 90% of  Americans simply think it looks too awkward, costs too much, and feels unappealing. Not only are smart phone users uninterested in using the device, sci-fi author Neil Gaiman also thinks it looks too silly.

“Would I wear Google Glasses? Almost definitely not since they look very, very silly.”

Gaiman points to another critique of Glass’s hyper-connectivity mode:

“I think trying to learn to be present while you’re present is a really good thing to do.”

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Are you planning a summer vacation but you’d like input from your friends before your book? Check out TripShare, an iPad app that lets you create and share your itineraries before you book them.

Once you sketch out a plan, you can share it plans with friends who can then give you feedback on your plan and make suggestions to your travel plan. You can then make edits to the itinerary based on your friends’ suggestions. Once you have the trip in mind that you’d like to take, you can price and book your trip through various online travel agencies — Expedia, Fly.com, Homeaway and Viator — without leaving the app.

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The Melon headband is a brain-sensing device that monitors brain activities while you are studying, dancing, or just doing yoga to help you track your progress and productivity.

At Melon we are really interested in the idea of Understood Self, which we are trying to add to the movement of Quantified Self. We want people to have a great feedback system for the data we’re capturing, so it can help with the activities users already do day-to-day, go beyond numbers and scores, and move towards insights and understanding.

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Hearst Corporation has launched the Elle Glassware app exclusively designed for Google Glass. The publication is the first magazine to launch a Google Glass app, though it joins other media companies including The New York Times and Mashable both of who already have Google Glass apps.

Hearst Corporation worked with Google on the app, which includes content from the magazine’s most widely read and shared sections online. The app features stories from ELLEDispatch, Street Chic and Lookbooks, as well as horoscopes. Users can share articles and photos and create reading lists and shopping wish lists using the app. The app is now available to as part of Google Glass’ Explorer launch.

“Hearst always strives to be on the leading edge of innovation—it is at the core of our company,” explained Phil Wiser, chief technology officer, Hearst Corporation, in a statement. “Across our media businesses, we are working to engage consumers everywhere content is consumed, now and in the future. Google Glass encourages us to think about our content in a new way. We are very pleased at the experience of partnering with Google on this project.”

Mobile app developer skobbler has updated the Android version of its maps app ForeverMap 2 adding turn-by-turn navigation which is available both online and offline. In doing so, the company has renamed the GPS Navigation & Maps and added a feature that lets users get directions to where they are going with voice guidance.

Here is more from the press release: “The update combines the one-of-a-kind map features users love from ForeverMap 2, with skobbler’s GPS Navigation 2, the internationally renowned mobile navigation solution with over 3.5 million users on iOS alone, while enhancing aspects of both to create a standalone, next-generation orientation solution.”

“By adding voice guided, turn-by-turn navigation to what was previously a maps only experience, we’ve not only evolved ForeverMap 2, we’ve also fundamentally transformed the orientation landscape on Android,” stated Philipp Kandal, co-Founder of skobbler.

Pompeii, Its Life and Art by August Mau is today’s Free eBook of the Day.

The historical text was created by German Archaeological Institute in Rome and originally published by The Macmillian Company in 1899.

Here is an excerpt:

In the construction of columns and many architraves large blocks were used. Previous to the time of the Roman colony these were of gray tufa, or, in rare instances, of limestone; a coating of white stucco was laid on the surface. From the advent of the colony to the time of the Early Empire, the whitish limestone was used; after that, Carrara marble.

Project Gutenberg has the free download.

For more free eBooks, check out our Free eBook of the Day archive.

The New Yorker has introduced a new online receptacle where sources can share documents and messages with the magazine anonymously. The tool is called Strongbox and it is accessible using the Tor network, a private and secure online network.

The publication will not record the I.P. address or any browsing information from people who share documents on Strongbox. It will also not try to access your computer or operating system, and they will not add cookies to your browser.

Here is more about Strongbox from The New Yorker‘s website:

It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented. Read more

When Hollywood producer Neal Edelstein set out to make Haunting Melissa, a horror film iPad app about a teenage girl that goes missing, he didn’t want it to be just another film. The first directorial production from the producer of Mulholland Drive and The Ring, the film was created the specifically for the iPad.

“The story was designed with the technology in mind,” Edelstein told AppNewser last week over coffee in New York. ”It’s a ghost story that was designed to be watched in the dark with headphones on.” Read more

In this digital age, basic programming is one of the best gift you can give a kid.

The free Hopscotch HD app will help kids explore a simple programming language and create their own games. The brand new iOS app has already found a bustling community of users. Check it out:

So, we launched Hopscotch last week, and it’s been quite a ride since.  It’s been downloaded more than 20,000 times, we cracked the Top 10 iPad Education apps, and were featured in New and Noteworthy on the App Store.  After the initial press we got all sorts of other great coverage on various ed tech blogs. We’ve had folks volunteering to translate it into nine different languages. We’ve had some totally awesome projects sent to us by parents and kids. And perhaps most importantly, we’ve begun our process of refining our feature set based on real data and feedback.

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