I mentioned yesterday that as part of the Copyright Office’s 3-year DMCA exemption hearings, the office would hear arguments on whether to permit cracking the CSS encryption on DVDs. Although it doesn’t directly have anything to do with e-books, I found this coverage by Ars Technica/Wired of the CSS issue interesting enough to bring up in a general DRM-related sense. As with the last go-round, one of the proposals was to allow filmmakers and other clip-users to decrypt DVDs so as to excerpt clips for use in films and for other fair uses. This use was authorized last time,...

Here’s an interesting post from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the people responsible for the EPUB format. Bill Rosenblatt of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies lays out a proposal for a “lightweight DRM” standard for EPUB that would be more permissive than some of the “heavyweight” DRM systems currently in use. The idea is to prevent “oversharing” such as peer-to-peer while allowing users to make most of the sorts of uses they take for granted with physical books. As Rosenblatt explains, the idea is not to be uncrackable—he specifically admits that “we expect that a lightweight DRM (in reality, any DRM)...

Might an ad-supported Kindle Fire be in the offing? Ad Age reports that Amazon has been soliciting ads to appear on the Fire’s welcome screen, according to an executive at an agency Amazon pitched. The ad packages would start at $600,000 and include both Kindle Fire and Kindle with Special Offers ads, going up to $1 million for additional ad perks. The current Kindle Fire has no advertcising, but Amazon has been reported to have a new model of the tablet in the offing for July and may be looking to start the program then. An interesting note is...

I think unglue.it is a great idea, but after seeing their first selections I must admit that I'm a bit skeptical about their success.  The thing that will make unglue.it work is selecting books that readers want to read and that are unavailable in any form.  Let's take a look at their initial selections: Riverwatch, by Joseph Nassis: this book is available from Amazon in hardback for $19.95 and in Kindle format for $3.99.  Why on earth would I pledge money to get an unglued copy when I can buy it for only $4? 6-321, by Michael Laser: again, this is available...

From South Coast Today: The Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives at the Claire T. Carney Library and the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture of the UMass Dartmouth announce the addition of 14 Portuguese-language newspapers published in California between 1885 and 1940 to its Portuguese-American Digital Newspaper Collections. [Clip] The unique collection, which includes some of the earliest known Portuguese-language newspapers in the United States, such as O Progresso Californiense, first published in July of 1885, may be accessed through the Internet for free and without a password at http://lib.umassd.edu/archives/paa/PADigitalNewsColl.html. Each issue of the newspapers in the collection may be browsed in its entirety or...

Good article in yesterday's Gigaom about the failure of Plastic Logic.  So typical of start-ups, they had a great technology but were never able to execute.  I remember being blown away by a demo of the product when it was first shown to the public.  Putting a display on plastic made it pretty well indestructible. Here are a few snippets: On the surface, Plastic Logic had it all. When the British company first emerged 12 years ago, it looked as if it could become a technology giant: after all, it was spun out of one of the world’s great universities, staffed...

New Features EPUB Input: When setting the cover for a book that identifies its cover image, but not the html wrapper around the cover, try to detect and remove that wrapper automatically. When deleting books of a specific format, show the number of books with each format available Linux install: No longer create MAN pages as all utilities have more comprehensive command line --help anyway Add a tweak Preferences->Tweaks to control the default choice of format for the Tweak Book feature Conversion: Allow setting negative page margins. A negative page margin means that calibre will not specify any page margin in the output document (for...

From the Orbis website: Spanning one-ninth of the earth's circumference across three continents, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of humanity through complex networks of political power, military domination and economic exchange. These extensive connections were sustained by premodern transportation and communication technologies that relied on energy generated by human and animal bodies, winds, and currents. Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity. For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express...

I, my wife, and most people who have read the Promises to Keep quartet of ebooks are big fans of indie author Shayne Parkinson. For those of you unfamiliar with the quartet, I reviewed the books 2 years ago in On Books: The Promises to Keep Quartet and again in On Books: Promises to Keep are Promises Kept, and have been waiting for the next book in the series to arrive. My wife and I are still recommending these books to anyone who asks for an excellent read. In the past week or so, we were wondering if Shayne Parkinson had finally released the next...

From Paper Magazine: In the era of e-books, what will happen to the indie bookstore? Will the algorithms at virtual big-boxes decide what we read? And if so, will important, life-changing books go undiscovered? This was a future that Emily Gould and Ruth Curry could not bear to live with.  Gould and Curry are the sorts of friends who are perpetually raving about novels, exchanging them, borrowing them back. And now, they are sharing them through what may be the world's first independent online store devoted to the e-book, Emily Books. "It's crazy that no one else is doing this," says Gould.  Rather than sell every title under...

From Publishers Weekly: NetRead, the Seattle-based company best known for its JacketCaster software that helps publishers organize and transmit metadata to retailers, distributors, and libraries, has partnered with industry veteran Neil Levin to form NetRead Distribution, an e-book distribution service. The new company will use the proprietary technology platform developed for Jacketcaster to distribute digital content to all the major players, including Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony, said Levin, whose background includes a stint as senior v-p for the distributor National Book Network. While NetRead founder Greg Aden will concentrate on the technical side of the business, Levin is working...

I received an alumni newsletter today from my alma mater detailing an overhaul they recently made to the curriculum for English majors. In my day (1996-2000) the program was set up in such a way as to expose students to major works from as many time periods as possible. Following the standard first-year survey course, there were a dozen other categories and you had to choose amongst the offerings so that you got a certain number from various groupings. For instance, one grouping contained courses in Old English, Shakespeare and the Restoration and you had to take two of the...