Japan's e-book market reached a billion yen last year and is expanding by 40-60 percent a year, according to the 160-page "eBook business survey report for 2003" from Impress Corp. A billion yen is $8 million. In the States in January 2003, net sales of e-books were $3.3 million as reported by the Association of Amerian Publishers. Reminder to e-book publishers and retailers: Help the industry by participating in the statistics program of the Open eBook Forum. You don't have to be a member. Current deadline is July 31, with results expected by September 15. (Japanese stats from Kyodo...

Australia isn't just a country with more sensible copyright terms than those in the States. It's also a hotspot for Project Gutenberg. Michael Hart, PG's founder, just sent out the item below to volunteers.Today Project Gutenberg of Australia released their 250th eBook, and a couple more, 8 days before they complete their second year. Australia is a country big on volunteerism, but doesn't even rank in the top 50 countries in population. . .Amazing!!!If we could just get something like Project Gutenberg of Australia started in just 40 of the 240 countries of the world, they would produce 10,000...

So what anti-reader tricks might the big software companies try to pull off in the future? Just what DRM schemes might they use to help businesses gouge readers or invade their privacy? A nasty omen may be here already in the form of eBook Pro Viewer, a product mentioned earlier this year by Web Advantage:Another, even more restrictive DRM solutions provider is eBook Pro Viewer. The combination of their software and site administration gives you the power to control such things as activating or de-activating copies of your ebook, limiting the number of times users can view it, the...

What good will Microsoft's free e-books do if you install Reader 2.2.2 and then can't even read your existing collection? Only a minority of users will suffer. But before upgrading, it's best to check first with the maker of your PDA. The owner of a Viewsonic Pocket PC V37 has written:Now, when I try to open a book, Reader just hangs with the rotating pie "wait" symbol.This device is running Pocket PC 2002 and Reader was preinstalled in ROM...Now I can't use this device to read MS e-books at all.Marc Zimmermann, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Reader questions,...

"Far Eastern Economic Review Malaysian correspondent S. Jayasankaran said the sale of electronic versions of books through the Internet had in fact pushed sales of printed books in places like the United States. 'I would think it is impossible for the Internet to replace a book,' he said." - The Star Online, Malaysia. The TeleRead take: Wrong! Granted, we are talking about evolution, not the immediate death of p-books, which I hope will always be around in limited form--just like horse-and-buggy rides in places such as Central Park. Still, Jayasankaran is extrapolating from present technology rather than looking ahead...

Amazon.com wants to allow full-text searches across thousands of books to help shoppers preview the wares. This could be a major boost for e-books since Amazon will scan oodles of p-books into its database. It's hard to believe that many won't end up online in electronic form for sale to consumers, regardless of what Amazon might say right now to confuse competitors. Some details from the New York Times:Amazon is calling its program Look Inside the Book II, the publishers said. It would expand on a current program that lets shoppers read a table of contents, a first chapter...

So what's a good "handbook" for writers? Here's a possibility--not a dreary manual but an autobiography of one of the Victorian greats, Anthony Trollope. You can download An Autobiography from Project Gutenberg for free. It comes recommended by Washington Post critic Michael Dirda, who discusses the author at length today. The Trollope autobiography is among Dirda's top five introductions to "the writing life." The other picks are:--"Flaubert's correspondence, especially with Louise Colet about the composition of Madame Bovary.--Henry James's notebooks, overflowing with details about the genesis of his stories and novels.--Chekhov's shrewd letters and observations about writing.--Rupert Hart-Davis's life...

Reality: "The recording industry, following through on its promise to take legal action against ordinary computer users who share music on the Internet, is filing hundreds of subpoenas, demanding the names and addresses of copyright violators from Internet service providers." - Boston Globe.Hypothetical but logical: Exclusive! TeleRead has found a secret transcript of a wiretapped conversation between Cary Sherman of the RIAA and Rep. John Conyers, Jr., one of the well-funded politicians behind the proposed 5Y/$250K file-sharing penalty and previous legislation to protect our needy recording executives.Rep. Conyers: Cary, I'm calling to ask a little favor. It's about my...

E-text format hassles have finally become the stuff of fiction. In Grave Secrets, a New York Times best-seller by Kathy Reichs, the problem file is a medical document rather than an e-book. But, yes, it's a PDF--and an overgrown one at that. Planet PDF carries an entertaining write-up, while at the same time noting that Ms. Reichs seemed a bit unfair to PDF. Maybe so. Perhaps a quick download of the latest Acrobat Reader would have helped. And, yes, the creators of the crucial file could have made it smaller, using the right techniques. Still, one wonders:1. Even if...

Could Bill Gates in fact hate e-books? No, but he might as well--given the damage that his people's Digital Rights Management schemes have done to the industry. In Writing on Your Palm, consultant Jeff Kirvin nicely lays out the evolution of Microsoft's Digital Rights Management scheme--and along the way makes an important point about the Convert Lit tool used to crack DRM5, the latest "protection." Convert Lit won't work unless you already own a legal copy of the book in the original Microsoft format. The DRM zealots might say, "But what if the results are then pirated?" That...

Thailand's education ministry plans to "develop up to 60,000 e-books to solve a shortage of reading materials facing rural schools," according to the Bangkok Post. "About 60,000 teachers would be urged to develop the e-books and would be given allowances in return."The TeleRead take: Fascinating. Would that we had more details. Why just "up to" 60,000, and how many will the project have in a year? Does "develop" mean to scan or write? Is this a government version of Project Gutenberg? And, whether the books will be scanned or written from scratch, just what are the copyright details? Not...

What if Russell Weller, the 86-year-old driver who accidentally killed 10 people and injured more than 40, could have read e-books and helped libraries and schools without even leaving home? That's what I was thinking when the Washington Post reported that "he has been engaged in his community as a volunteer at schools and libraries and has a mind that still seems sharp." So was Weller actually on the way to the library when his Buick inflicted mayhem in a packed farmers market in Santa Monica, California? I don't know. But he could have been. How to keep his...