Interactive Television Books, free excerpts

You may use this content (better still, argue with me!), but please cite my ideas as © 2007, Dr. Bruce Klopfenstein. Find any typos! Don't smite me, let me know!

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I'm preparing for 2 classes about the future of television (interactivity, of course) and was looking for books on interactive television (there have been some mainly production-oriented books about iTV up to now). I searched on Amazon.com (not a bad place to search) and immediately found what I assume is an excellent gift to the literature (Interactive Digital Television: Technologies and Applications by George Lekakos, Konstantinos Chorianopoulos, and Georgios I. Doukidis, May 30, 2007). OK, so there's a plug for their book, and I can download the book from Amazon.com for the same price as the hardbound copy. I'm not sure about the economics of doing that; clearly downloading a book is far cheaper than the cost of producing a hardbound book.

OK, with fears of being seen as a laggard (I don't want to be a laggard in cases like this), I found somewhat astonishing was that when I entered the title on Google, I found other books on television and interactive television, and the first hit I looked at gave a free look at a section of the book on Interactive TV Standards by Steven Morris, Anthony Smith-Chaigneau (2005). I've been interested in the Internet since my first days of graduate school and can remember when Usenet was limited to a relatively few "newsgroups" of interest to folks interested in computers. Nevertheless, Google (and I own no stock, FYI) continues to amaze me even as it may be "steamrollering" over objections in its path.

So, to my great students I have to say, here's one more reason you cannot say "But Dr. K, there's nothing out there on [subtopic within iTV]!"

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Please email drbrucek@gmail.com if you see any typos, I'm good at making them.