If you're ever rushed to the hospital and the ER physician needs information in a hurry, you just might benefit from some essential medical facts being handy on a PDA--perhaps even as an e-book. A good starting place to learn more about PDAs in healthcare would be a highly focused resources area from OSF Saint Francis Medical Center Library & Resource Center and the University of Illinois at Chicago Library of the Health Sciences. It is full of goodies on hardware, software, databases and other content for health professionals. What do you look for when selecting PDA hardware? How...

While the world at large begs for an e-book format standard at the consumer level--something that runs on a variety of machines without publishers having to struggle with different flavors--Microsoft on its own could be moving in that direction. Check out an eWeek article and related links listed there. Looks as if ePeriodicals just might end up an Adobe/PDF competitor in the worlds of e-books and other electronic documents, not merely magazines. In a speech extolling the Tablet PC yesterday, Bill Gates called ePeriodicals "an extension of the eBook work that Microsoft has been doing for a number of...

Are you reading this via our VoidStar address for RSS Version .92? Don't worry if your RSS stops working. Most likely it'll be because we're changing to a new address as part of a site upgrade. The details will be coming later on. Drop by http://www.teleread.com/blog for the new .92 address when the old one stops working. The RSS .91 address most likely will stay the same. Speaking of RSS, the initials stand for "Rich Site Summary." If you don't know what that jargon means, check out Jenny Levine's slideshow. Simply put, RSS is a way to spread...

"The Democrats in the Senate tend to be more pro-business than the Democrats in the House... With respect to the entertainment industry, I don't think these things have been particularly partisan." - Chairman and CEO Hilary Rosen of the Recording Industry Association of America, on CNBC tonight, when asked how the elections would affect the copyright and trademark scene.The TeleRead take: True, true, true, or at least that last sentence of hers. Indeed the Democrats are among the worst offenders. Bill Clinton did some wonderful things to get America online but appointed a copyright lobbyist to mold his copyright...

Bill Gates hoped that donated PCs would reinvigorate rural America and otherwise help close the digital divide. Alas, many bright young people in farm country are using library computers to find jobs in the cities, and in a New York Times interview, he comes across as far less of a gung-ho Carnegie than before.Meanwhile, via board talk on the LISnews site, some librarians say his PC gifts not have been a full blessing. One says the machines "caused an already understaffed, stressed-out-to-the-max staff to be further screamed at when people could not use the word processing. Also when they...

E-book format guru Dorothea Salo, who's put in her share of hours to help develop Open eBook standards, has offered a thoughtful reply to my plea for a consumer e-book format that would work on most any machine.Key paragraph: "I...

"Microsoft faces a tough competitor, the dominant player in the business-meeting note-taking market. It's a rugged, crashproof portable that accommodates any writing implement, feels just like paper and costs .02 percent of a Tablet PC. If it's prestige you're after, you can even tell your friends that it has a fancy name: Windows XP Legal Pad Edition." - New York Times, Nov. 7.The TeleRead take: Times columnist David Pogue correctly writes up Tablet PCs as too expensive for the extras they offer (at least for the typical user). It'll be interesting to see who is right--Pogue or Microsoft. This...

David Moynihan's silly little jihad goes on against TeleRead. We're an advocacy site about ideas, such as the goal of well-stocked national digital libraries in the States and elsewhere; and yet Moynihan is scolding us for not digitizing books ourselves. "You've never lived on a frontier, have you?" David has written me. "Hence your distaste for labor..." Apparently I must take time out to skin Grizzly bears or maybe build a hard drive from scratch. David M's blog, too, suggests that he's beaming in from, if not remotest Alaska, then maybe Pluto. No, eBookWeb isn't a do-nothing waste--it...

Republicans, already a House majority, have won control of the Senate. The good news is that Democrat Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, one of the leading champions of Hollywood at the expense of PC users, apparently will lose control of the Senate Commerce Committee to Republican John McCain. In another change, Republican Orrin Hatch will replace Patrick Leahy as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Hatch, although enlightened on some copyright matters, is more of a pal of Hollywood. As a part-time musician, however, Hatch is sensitive to the way the recording industry has ripped off musicians. Meanwhile Howard Coble of...

"To thwart hackers and foster on-line commerce, the next generation of computers will almost certainly cede some control to software firms, Hollywood and other outsiders. That could break a long-standing tenet of computing: that PC owners ultimately control data on their own machines... Programs found to be illegally copied could be rendered useless remotely. Sensitive e-mail, which might be useful in investigations, could vanish. And e-books could be subjected to virtual book burnings." - Associated Press, via Toronto Globe, Nov. 5.The TeleRead take: So will unshackled computers eventually become like bootleg whiskey? Will government codify the anti-user greed? Maybe...

David Moynihan puts out an excellent Web site called Blackmask Online, an e-bookstore whose offerings I would highly recommend. It appears, however, that on occasions the man lives in a world of his own. Contrary to a bizarre implication in the Moynihan blog, I've never claimed to be the first to think of e-books. The initial piece on TeleRead, in Computerworld of July 6, 1992, said: "For years, computer hackers and librarians have dreamed of being able to read any book on-line." My opinion article, as I recall, even appeared with another writer's profile of the valuable Project Gutenberg....

China isn't the friendliest territory for that Western invention known as copyright. A Washington Post article, dated November 1, chronicles the outrages committed against the author and publisher of the Harry Potter series. Chinese pirates haven't just copied existing Potter books. They've even been brazen enough to commission the writing of new ones. According to the New York Times, "more than 90 percent of the movies, music and software" in China are "illegal copies sold for a fraction of the original price."The TeleRead take: Yes, the copyright interests can be greedy and obnoxious, as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term...