"An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When we wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive." - Ambrose Bierce's definition of a politician, from The Devil's Dictionary.The TeleRead take: Applicable to the copyright debate? Sorry, couldn't resist....

MIT's free courses are a hit with geeks--some as far off as Ho Chi Min City, according to a recent Wired article.Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City's relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing...

Big deal. As of this writing, Microsoft is offering Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass as part of the campaign to bribe you into using a Reader program with stronger DRM. An unencumbered Leaves is free, however, at Project Gutenberg. Just click here. You can even download Leaves in Microsoft Reader format, without payment or DRM complications, from one of Abacci eBooks' convenient links to the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center. And meanwhile a few apropos lines from Leaves...Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,Tickets buying, taking,...

Just what would Henry Adams have thought about the copyright controversy--to be exact, copyright's sometimes-harmful effect on the spread of uppity ideas or muck about politicians and bureaucrats? Here's a little clue from The Education of Henry Adams, where he recalled his struggle to place an important business-and-political expose:...Any expression in an English review attracted ten times the attention in America that the same article would attract in The North American. Habitually the American dailies reprinted such articles in full. Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright, his highest ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of...

Deliberately or accidentally, AOL is blocking links from LiveJournal, according to a Slashdot post. Hmm. Doesn't the parent company, AOL Time Warner, do a little book publishing? Just what will this mean for the future when--at least in theory--books will be able to easily and reliably link to each other? Will AOL and other large conglomerates discriminate against competitors? Another argument for a TeleRead-style library. Even if the AOL block is accidental--and for the moment I'll be skeptical that it is--this shows how corporate priorities can differ from those associated with the general good. The problem should have...

Here's a heretical idea, which I've expressed before. What if publishers of e-books and other providers of intellectual property charged lower prices in countries where standards of living were dramatically lower than here in the States? I don't think profits would suffer that much. In fact, the reverse would happen. People in Swaziland (flag shown above) or Bangladesh would grow more accustomed to the publishers' wares and keep buying them as incomes rose--perhaps eventually reaching the point where prices could be the same as in the States. With developing countries in mind, I've long advocated a global network...

Color e-ink for electronic books--could it end up as a practical reality far ahead of time?A New York Times article this week discusses Magink Display Technologies mainly in the context of billboards. But the impression also arises that E Ink and rivals just might have some serious competition breathing down their necks in a varietary of additional areas, too, including e-books and home entertainment products. From the Times:By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like...

"If you write and publish eBooks, sooner or later you will probably be faced with a dilemma--should you create your eBooks as .exe files or .pdf files?" e-booker Michael Southon asked last year.But, look, isn't it possible you should not use either format?As even some PDF boosters will admit, typical readers may find it difficult to get to the customization features to adjust the on-screen appearance of the text to their liking. Plus, PDF documents can be slow going on some PDAs, assuming that they have the capability to use the format in the first place. PDF, if you...

If you want your computer to read aloud to you, a forthcoming spec from an Open eBook Forum working group may help you in the future--by making it easier to move around in the e-book you're listening to. The spec, scheduled to appear sometime in 2004, will also allow your e-book to link precisely to material in another e-book."First of all, we are currently planning to greatly improve the representation of the navigational structure of e-book documents," Jon Noring, acting vice chair of the OeBF's Publication Structure Working Group, tells me about the navigational capabilities of Version 2.0. "Better...

"'At Tamuning Elementary, our library is not well supplied and private school libraries are probably better equipped,' Duenas said. 'They don't give so much to us because they know their kids are taken care of, and our kids are lacking books and stuff.'" - Guam Pacific Daily News article on the education of politicians' children vs. the schooling of ordinary citizens'.The TeleRead take: Ah, the info gap at the local level! Same idea applies to national digital libraries. Many in the elite don't care; the plebes do, or at least should. ...

You may already know of the risks of upgrading to the new version of Microsoft Reader. If you do want to go ahead to enjoy the e-book freebies, however, you can check out tips from Jim Karpen, a columnist with Pocket PC Magazine. Actually you'll find the real meat in an accompanying forum.Do keep in mind the purpose of the "free" e-books--not to promote literature but to encourage you to switch to a version of Reader with "improved" Digital Rights Management. Good to see Karpen remind people of no-strings alternatives to Microsoft-style freebies--to be exact, the Abacci eBooks site...

The spiffy machine to the left was not dreamed up in Peoria. Where? Try China. And we're talking about sophisticated technological development--not merely routine manufacturing. Mainland China just could be the next E-Book Central, especially considering Washington's less-than-full enthusiasm about national digital libraries and nonmilitary high-tech R&D in general. Zillions of e-books in the hands of ordinary Chinese? This is more of a "why not" than "why." With millions of students to educate, China must worry more than the rest of the world about the costs of printed textbooks. And given all the complexities of reproducing Chinese characters, the...