So much for DRM as a protector of e-books. The latest Harry Potter was pirated off paper and uploaded into Microsoft Reader format. Talk about tunnel vision by the e-book business. So what's ahead? Perhaps scanner-proof paper? Or, as some joke, cops dispatched to homes to keep readers in line? Whoops. In the era of Orwellian Hatch, humor can always become reality.Needless to say, well-stocked national digital library systems would be one way to help reduce the incentives for piracy. Meanwhile the e-book industry should stop letting DRM considerations get in the way of a standardized consumer-level format. Have...

Personal Digital Assistants and e-books would be easier on kids' backs than heavy textbooks, a high school student wrote on Geek.com. A great discussion follows. I myself can see a role for PDAs, but question the poster's belief that the Adobe PDF format is the answer. With PDF, it's hard enough for readers to contol the display on desktop PCs. Moreover, with PDAs used, students might need supplemental material on desktops to handle illustrations and other material that won't show up well on small screens. A better solution, when prices drop? A tablet-style computer--exactly what TeleRead has advocated...

Wanna know which book to read--something that matches your mood? Or track down a novel about which you're vague? Check out a nifty little service, which apparently works mainly with p-books now but undoubtedly could be incorporated into a TeleRead-style library. The name is, fittingly, whichbook.net. OK, so you're after a book that's "extremely disturbing, violent, sexy and unpredictable"? You can even use sliders to decide just how disturbing and the rest you want it to be. Books, though, won't necessarily live up to their billings. At MetaFilter, someone reported getting a rec for a Hardy-Boys book on tape...

Few are as prescient as Sir Arthur Clarke--whether on communications satellites or toll-free long distance. I suspect, too, he was far ahead of the pack in bestowing electronic books on characters in his novels. But here's one e-book-related prediction he flubbed.Two decades ago when I interviewed him for The Silicon Jungle, ACC said "information networks" would replace telephone directories and encyclopedias. But about e-books he was a harsh skeptic:Nothing will ever replace books. They can't be matched for convenience, random access, nonvolatile memory (unless dropped in the bath), low power consumption, portability, etc.Convenience and random access? Well, I can...

The Supreme Court--even without more seats purchased in Washington by well-financed moralists--has backed up an obnoxious law that forces local libraries to install filters to censor Net content. This just after Senator Hatch said he wanted Hollywood to be able to "destroy" our computers if Big Bro suspected us of piracy? What a nutty town lies across the Potomac from me. So what's next, a Library Morality Agency? Filters have a place--for example, when parents control them--but not in the way the pols envision. The scary thing here is that this is a direct attack on the very...

"Sales of e-books were up 268.3 percent in April, with sales of $900,000. The category is up 160.8 percent for the year, according to figures just released by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). While the nascent e-book market is growing fast, it is still a diminutive part of the industry with relatively small sales figures compared to all other book categories in the AAP domestic sales report." - AAP press release, via the eBook Community list.The TeleRead take: Great news! Of course the industry could grow even faster with a standardized consumer-level format and a well-stocked...

The pulped-wood version of Living History, the $28 Hillary Clinton book, is on sale at my neighborhood Safeway in Northern Virginia for around $20, and that's with printing and distribution costs built in. Shouldn't the e-book sell for less than $10? And yet Simon & Schuster wants us to pay $15.12, even if we're in the free S&S book club. What a contrast to The Great Gatsby, which is finally available from S&S in an e-book format. Gatsby costs members $3.50--a much fairer price (even if the fairest would be $0, which it would have been without the copyright-extension...

Gemstar's e-book unit is fading away. Could it be a metaphor, in a sense, for the United States as a whole? The salient traits of Gemstar have been greed, sleazinesss and a hatred of individual rights--in the context of something very private, people's reading habits. The letter below, from publisher-writer Ed Howdershelt of Abintra Press, an author of science fiction and sem-fiction, offers yet another reminder of the atrocities that Gemstar commited against readers under ex-CEO Henry Yuen and like-minded Gekkos. I'm not exactly amazed that Yuen ended up being charged with securities fraud. If his e-book episodes...

The SEC has charged ex-Gemstar CEO Henry Yuen and a henchwoman with securities fraud--within days of the announcement that Gemstar would shut down its e-book unit. Yuen, of course, is the parasite who hoped to make big bucks off the brilliant work of Nuvomedia and Softbook. Both those companies relied on proprietary formats, but at least understood the importance of customers being able to create and use their own content. ...

TeleRead CTO James Linden, our e-book format expert, visited the ALA convention earlier today, and next week we'll post a few comments from him. ...

Nice going, ALA. Glad to to see an "Accessiblity" page in the Web area for the Toronto convention.Trouble is, the Toronto kind of accessibility doesn't mean that much to David Faucheux, a blind graduate of the Louisiana School of Library and Information Science who can't even find a library job despite a stellar academic record at LSU. Read David's poignant essay for an ALA magazine called Interface. Sara Laughlin, editor of Interface, can vouch for David's abilities. In fact, she believed in David Faucheux enough to send $1,500 to his brother to buy David a computer. That made...

The economics of writing are just as rotten as ever these days, and 2Blowhards on the whole sums up the truth well:Trade-book publishing, the wing of the industry that fills up your local chain store, is a very modest subset of book publishing... It's rather irrational, makes very modest profits, is full of well-meaning ex-English majors, and is forever being invaded (and wreaked havoc on) by conglomerates that think they can run it like a conventional business, and who always fail to turn the trick. Despite the celebrated star authors and the occasional celeb execs and agents, there's rather...