So what will Wi-Fi and the TabletPC mean to newspapers? Steve Outing takes a perspicacious look in his August 28 column for Editor and Publishing.The TeleRead take: Back in the early 1990s TeleRead was advocating small tablet machines that could be used not just for books but for a variety of purposes--full-fledged computers that could work with a well-stocked national digital library system. Such a system isn't online yet. And tablet technology at a TeleRead level isn't as cheap as it could be. But the TabletPC, which also vindicates Roger Fidler, who was in this area as far back...

OverDrive has launched a free locator--for the public and librarians, not just publishers--to search through listings for thousands of commercial e-books from 400 publishers. URLwire has the details about the eBook Locator. The TeleRead take: Good move! The new service is definitely a step in the right direction, as long as it is not confined to the offerings of paying customers. No problem with ads on the home page. It's only reasonable that OverDrive look for a sustainable business model for the service. Of course, the locator is no substitute for a powerful TeleRead-style catalogue that could search e-books...

"Imagine living in a country where anti-capitalist books are banned from libraries, the only reading materials available are fluffy novels, and librarians are anarchist outcasts. If the privatisation of libraries continues, writes Jane Mackenzie, that is where we are heading." - Library Juice, Aug. 12-16, 2002.The TeleRead take: See our earlier item from summer 2000, The Rise of the Unlibraries....

"...Wade Randlett, of consumer rights group DigitalConsumer.org, said the entertainment industry's efforts have criminalized behavior that used to be legal, including letting teenagers excerpt portions of copyrighted works for book reports. He told the story of a friend whose daughter wanted to compose a multimedia report for school. Because she could not legally obtain an excerpt from a DVD, she ended up using material whose copy control mechanisms had been cracked with a program that courts have ruled illegal. The student, he said, 'put it on a disk, took it to school, and committed a felony.' Such examples, he...

How can universities securely preserve the research of their faculty members and others--without giving away the goodies to greedy commercial publications, which then turn around and overcharge schools' libraries? Or at least without being quite as dependent on the gougers?Earlier we listed MIT as among the institutions interested in do-it-yourself archiving. Now, via a Wired News article, come details of DSpace, a joint project with Hewlett Packard. Encouragingly, this could lead to a model for other universities to use--hopefully with easy simultaneous access to the archives of all the schools.The TeleRead take: While these archives are for research institutions...

"I have never met a kid, or teenager, who didn't want to know more about something. I also know many, many such young people who watch their lust for knowledge slowly die off, like a battery, slowly at first, then more rapidly, until one day, there is no more power left." - James Linden's Gnosium Blog, Aug. 1.The TeleRead take: James sees e-books and other portable electronic resources as a way to keep youthful curiosity alive. What's more, he notes that they could help libraries to fit in with the lives of active teenagers--with trips to the beach or...

Not all oldies are goodies, as a recent Toledo Blade article shows. Seems that some public school libraries failed to cull obsolete books from their collections, making it harder for students to find up-to-date ones. Imagine having to wade through history books that went back before the Vietnam war or the lunar landing.The TeleRead take: With e-books and the right cataloguing system, of course, it would be a snap for students to use date-based filters to focus on the truly contemporary in searches where this mattered. (Found via Library Stuff.)...

Check out Jenny Levine's thoughts on copyright, the new media and libraries--and a related item elsewhere on the threat that the so-called Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act would create for consumers and libraries. Sen. Hollings's bill would lead to a technological nightmare and interfere with fair use. South Carolina, his state, doesn't exactly have the highest family incomes. In fact, South Carolina is the very kind of place where electronic books could eventually do the most good as a resource-stretcher. Shame on Hollings for placing Hollywood's interests over those of his constituents. Too bad South Carolina librarians...

Rep. Howard Berman and the RIAA/Hollywood crowd would do well to read a BusinessWeek article quoting the Business Software Alliance--hardly to be confused with the Free Software Foundation. As BusinessWeek sees it, "Legislators shouldn't be willing to consider something as outlandish as Berman's bill until entertainment companies have proven first that they have exhausted the other legal avenues already available. Instead, the entertainment industry and Congress should take a look at the BSA's most recent piracy report, which explains why the the BSA has been successful in the past, and why it now faces new problems." BusinessWeek goes on...