The eBook Community list, the town square of e-bookdom, will be eight years old on January 5. Jon Noring moderates and says TeBC has 1,970 members and is adding a few more each day. Members include everyone from e-book newbies and garage publishers to industry veterans at companies such as Palm Digital Media and Xerox. Among general-interest e-book lists, TeBC is the most prestigious and probably the oldest as well. It started out as the "eBook-List" (not to be confused with the current e-books list, which Jon does not run).When Jon announced the creation of TeBC under the original...

Funny. The "E-books and docs" tab seems to have vanished from my Amazon.com pages as best I can determine. On the other hand, I'm still able to limit my search to e-books if I use the selector at the left of the page. So, Amazon, what's up? Are you playing down your e-bookstore for the moment--or just saying, "A book is a book"? Or maybe in the midst of some virtual remodeling?Detail: I've left a message with Amazon for the lowdown here. Anyone know more?(Via the e-books list.)...

Even William Goldman would agree that not all recent movies stink.One of the best is director Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. Based on a book with a similar title, it's about a master forger in the 1960s, who, if a young hacker today, would be a brilliant social engineer and perhaps a great coder, too. This teenaged high school dropout didn't just forge $2.5 milion in checks. He also passed himself off as a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, you name it, including, just as the FBI was trying...

While PDAs can be great for electronic books in many cases, I've now got even more reason to question the e-book industry's love of this platform.In dealings with PDA buyers, some Ernestine imitators at Dell are slavishly plagiarizing in real life from Lily Tomlin.Relying on outfits like Dell is a great way to screen out booklovers who aren't committed techies or expert bureaucracy-fighters. Customers had better learn to deal with morons in departments with Orwellian names like "customer care."Scary even for geeksMine isn't the only horror story inspired by Dell and other PDA vendors. Geek.com has some beauts.I'd love...

Will Palm Digital Media do a Smartphone reader for e-books? On Monday I raised the possibility that commercial rivalries with Microsoft might get in the way--another argument for a Universal Consumer Format. Without discussing the UCF issue, Craig Froehle, a University of Cincinnati professor, who founded the company that became Memoware, kindly shared his own thoughts on Palm and SmartPhones after seeing my Saturday mention of the topic. He himself said Palm-Microsoft rivalries would get in the way. At the same time, he disagrees with me about phones' potential for e-book reading. I think that screens are already sufficient...

In the early '90s we said e-books could help reading survive the multimedia onslaught.Now comes a depressing headline out of Denver: Library books play second fiddle to videos, CDs. Perhaps the Denver library system and others need to borrow a page from teacher Amos Bokros and think about using e-book-related tech in new ways--just as he did to reach book-hating teenagers. In fairness to the Denver library, it is trying out netLibrary; and, on the Web, the system promotes its electronic text resources well. But that's not enough. netLibrary, for example, is obviously a hassle for Denver...

The PDA is the e-book platform now. But could electronic publishers and their techie overlords at places like Palm Digital Media be betting too heavily on it--without nurturing some more-consumer-friendly alternatives?Palm Digital Media and Microsoft won't even bother right now with e-book-reading software for the Microsoft Smartphone. But wait! Aren't a heck of a lot more cellular phones being sold than PDAs? And won't the displays on phones be growing in size and quality, given all the built-in digital cameras? Mightn't other ergonomical factors improve as well? Beyond that, phones could make it much easier for people to download...

Would William Goldman, the scriptwriter behind the movie All the President's Men and other greats, oppose the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act? I don't know. But maybe so, if you can extrapolate from Goldman's theory on creative clustering. Start with a passage in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?I think the '90s are by far the worst decade in Hollywood history.And then, while allowing for the fact that he just may be an old fart opposed to the new, he eventually says:....

The civilian toll continues to grow in the e-book format wars. At least for now, Palm Digital Media won't release a PalmReader for Microsoft's Smartphones. Once again, OS-related factors are balkanizing and shrinking the potential e-book market. The lowdown from msmobiles.com:As we all know, Microsoft smartphones don't have Microsoft Reader (mistake of Microsoft: Microsoft decided that smartphone users are not reading eBooks), and the only serious eBook reader for Microsoft smartphone is the one from our friends from Mobipocket.com. Unfortunately some people already have several hundreds of Palm Digital Media eBooks and they would like to have PalmReader for...

"If countries agree to pass DMCA-like laws as part of a treaty," U.S. "negotiators may offer better terms for exchanging other goods and services." - CNET story on the acquittal of a Norwegian programmer acquitted of a DVD-related charge.The TeleRead take: So here's the big question. Just what trade protections for nonHollywood types are U.S. officials bargaining away in the name of DMCAism? Won't anyone from the media investigate? Hollywood brags about the money it brings in from overseas, but, in the future, how much of that will be at the expense of other industries? And has anyone done...

Here are 2003's top stories in e-books and related areas, as picked by Jerry Justiano at Pocket PC eBooks Watch. I'll follow up with my own list.1. Burned Un-nobled: Barnes and Noble decision to close its ebook store.2. Ooops She did it again: MS Update its protection. Then within a week, it was cracked again with Convert Lit 1.4.3. Scan Scum Spam: Harry Potter 5 e-books available within days of worldwide release, thanks to the DRM buster Scanner technology.4. Ooops: She did it again 2: Little Girl being Sued by RIAA for P2P.5. AMazingone: Mazingo is dead.The TeleRead take:...

Amos Bokros, the author of the touching story below, lives in Bradenton, Florida, and has been a TeleRead supporter for years. You can reach him at amos.bokros@verizon.net.They're called the VE kids, short for "Very Exceptional Students"--with a hodgepodge of learning disabilities and emotional problems. Some must take powerful drugs to control their rage, or have threatened to bring guns to school.Not the kids you'd expect to love electronic books. But I know better as a substitute teacher in Sarasota County, Florida.In fact, I myself am a VE child grown up, and e-books and related technology have already changed my...