"The important thing, from my point of view, is that we don't repeat a Beta vs. VHS disaster. In the VCR field, consumers delayed their choices. Ultimately, if they wanted to watch movies or tape shows, they had to pick one format or the other. With e-books, if there are 6, 7, 8, 10 incompatible, narrow, non-interoperable, competing standards, the public doesn't have to choose any of them. They can simply go with what's worked for the last 1,300 years: paper books. In this particular arena, it may not be that we duke it out and the winner survives....

Editor's note: Amos Bokros, long active in TeleRead, lives in Florida and will soon enter teaching. He has a reading disability believed to be caused by a combination of dyslexia and Attention Deficit Disorder. Below he proposes a better gizmo to turn written words into spoken ones.When I hear books, not just read them, I can concentrate and understand much better. At first I used recorded books on tape. Then I tried Optical Character Recognition software like OpenBook (not to be confused with Open eBook). It enables a scanner to scan a book page by page and then...

Turns out that John de Jong, a coauthor of the literacy report mentioned by the BBC, saw the TeleRead blog directly from his computer in Holland--without the BBC having forwarded our request for his email address. Oh, the wonders of Google. Meanwhile, from his contribution to the e-book Reading for Change, here is some wisdom for librarians, educators and policymakers in countries everywhere: "Reading has pervaded human life for centuries, but the set of skills required for successful reading changes continuously. Looking up information on the Internet is becoming an everyday activity for a growing number of people and...

The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism is the classic expose of media coverups. So TeleRead is reproducing nine chapters of Upton Sinclair's book--perhaps the first time that so much of it has appeared on the Web. The rest of the free text will follow via our efforts for Project Gutenberg; you can e-mail us if you want to be notified when that happens. Meanwhile, for proofing help, we're grateful to Betsy Connor Bowen, a TeleRead volunteer, writer and ex-English teacher. Please note that TeleRead is an e-library advocacy group, not a publisher, but this is one book we...

"Children's interest in reading has more impact on their academic performance than their socio-economic group, research suggests. Young people from even the most deprived backgrounds could outshine their more affluent peers if they regularly read books, newspapers and comics outside school, the report Reading for Change says. While socio-economic background plays a role, it is not a dominant factor in predicting involvement in diversified reading. The report authors say the findings are highly significant and suggest that encouraging reading for pleasure could be one of the most effective ways of bringing about social change." - BBC, November 20, via...

Last June certain bloggers dreaded the forthcoming debut of a copyright-oriented blog from the graduate J school at the University of California at Berkeley. Why let the establishment co-opt the medium? Mightn't the writing be sterile? So far, so good, however--based on the actual blog. The bIPlog is often opinionated, and that's good since we don't need blogs that just ape the standard news formulas.The TeleRead take: Let's hope that the Berkeley experiment is replicated well at other schools--and at real-life newspapers and magazines. Dan Gillmor set a good example. And speaking of synergy between blogging and institutions, don't...

"Widening its adoption of the Linux operating system, International Business Machines Corp. Friday said it would collaborate with Sharp Corp. of Japan on a handheld computer that runs the open source software." - Associated Press via Yahoo. The TeleRead take: Let's hope hope this helps set back the idea of Windows-only e-book formats for consumers. MicrosoftReader has its glories, but needs to be available in Linux, too. A TeleRead approach, of course, would address the format issue....

"Someday, the textbooks Language of Literature and American Nation may join the ranks of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Color Purple: banned from classrooms. Not because they're too controversial; rather, because they're too fat To avoid creating generations of back-pain sufferers, schools have been searching for ways to lighten the load that children carry in their oversize backpacks. Solutions include buying classroom texts, using more worksheets, allowing more time to get to lockers, and demonstrating how to properly pack and carry bags." - The Philadelphia Inquirer via Education Week and Library Stuff.The TeleRead take: "One reason why...

From Luke Francl:Dan Bricklin, creator of VisiCalc and pen computing pioneer, reviews the Toshiba 3505 Tablet PC he purchased. Bricklin has an interesting perspective because he was co-founded Slate, which developed software for the Newton, Microsoft's earlier Pen Computing platform, and Penpoint. In his review, Bricklin addresses specialized e-book readers:If reading on screen is so important, why not just build an electronic book for reading? The answer is simple. You need to have a portable general purpose machine like a laptop anyway for composing, calculating, and running specialized applications. By the time you build a good enough "book" machine...

Minus handwriting recognition--but also minus an outrageous price tag--an approximately $500 tablet machine should be shipping in the next few months from Lindows.com. Can it handle e-books in the MicrosoftReader format, say, or the one for the Adobe eBook Reader? We're not sure how a LindowsOS emulation of Windows would do in this case. But if you're looking for a cheap way to display books in HTML and other nonproprietary formats, the new Lindows portable just might be the way to go if it lives up to its ballyhoo.We couldn't agree more with Lindows founder Michael Robertson about the...

"If you want to read about a dumb idea resulting from lack of coordination by sectors of the publishing industry, then this is your lucky day. Here goes: Imagine if you had to use the AOL browser to visit any newspaper's websites, but had to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 to visit any magazine's sites, but had to use Opera 6 to visit any broadcaster's sites, but had to use Netscape 6 to visit any e-commerce site. OK, that's far fetched, but something similar is really happening in regard to the new Tablet PCs: Zinio and the magazine industry...

"Despite growing evidence that a dynamic school library increases reading scores, what was once the academic backbone of Florida's schools is becoming little more than a warehouse for old, useless books. An Orlando Sentinel investigation of school libraries across the state found a system educators call a national embarrassment. Outdated books occupy shelves. Untrained clerks oversee dozens of media centers. Libraries close frequently for testing and picture days." - The Orlando Sentinel via Education News and Library Stuff.The TeleRead take: E-books to the rescue--at least as part of the solution? For years TeleRead has been noting the desirability of...