Again and we've railed against pricey and oppressive Digital Rights Management schemes based on proprietary tech. Yes, an improved nonproprietary variety would help. But meanwhile the e-book industry has a big problem. Via the eBook Community List, one enraged reader wrote about DRM: "I can't afford it. I live entirely on Social Security. I can't pay the extra price for inconvenienced books. Unless it's something I really want and can't get any other way. And I consider waiting a year or two or three to be another way."In response, Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, came...

Think that e-book formats are forever? Or that we should trust the private sector to archive books reliably? Especially when we don't know which novel may be another late discovery like Melville's Moby Dick? Then take a look at a little item just picked up on the Interesting People list. See if the parallel doesn't apply to e-books. From the cdfreaks.com article mentioned on IP: The Dutch PC-Active magazine has done an extensive CD-R quality test. For the test the magazine has taken a look at the readability of discs, thirty different CD-R brands, that were recorded twenty months...

For the second part of the Morse-Rothman dialogue as posted here, see the update at the bottom of Matt rolls his hoovers--with a few thoughts on TeleRead. Later today, perhaps very soon: New ammo for supporters of a universal consumer format for e-books--plus discussion of a Chinese e-book library....

Is Microsoft turning colleges and universities into vocational-education schools by spending lavishly to encourage the use of its proprietary software? The Washington Post reports:Microsoft has lavished $500 million over the past five years on research and teaching projects at 1,000 schools, funding efforts by 6,000 academics in computer science, electrical engineering, linguistics, biology, mathematics, graphic arts, music and other fields.Yes, some good could come out of the gifts. But consider what happened at one MIT event:At the three-day, expenses-paid event, the professors stayed at the Hyatt Regency, dined with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates on tables decorated with fresh peach...

A BBC story provides details on an already-announced prototype of an e-book reader from HP:"We've been looking at the power of the book as a way of consuming information," said Hewlett Packard's Huw Robson. "We've been using them for so long that we're very comfortable with the idea of paging through something". To keep page turners happy, Mr Robson and his team have fitted the e-book with a small but powerful computer that animates a turning page when the reader is ready to move on. The pages are turned by running a finger along one of the strips. Stroking...

Digital Rights Management ain't free. BlackMask publisher David Moynihan, who commendably charges just $1 for e-books, of which writers get a generous 70 percent, recently estimated that he'd end up paying $3-$4 per title with DRM in place to come up with the same 70-cent royalties. So he said on the eBook Community list. His post was a real public service, as I see it, since DRM costs haven't really been discussed that much in the open. Actually, in an informal reply, a Palm Digital Media guy said David M's price would go up to just $1.10 or $1.15...

"Bush's aides say he hasn't shown any desire to download music from the Internet or buy a portable digital music player. No one has seen a digital television recording system in either his White House or Texas residences." - AP story, via Pocket PC Watch.The TeleRead take: Mightn't Bush and other pols be a little more clueful about copyright policy and the Net if they actually used the technology the same way tens of millions of voters do?...

The TeleRead plan, which I first inflicted on a friend back in November 1991, is almost a dozen years old. Oh, the memories. Back in the early '90s, some well-known net.librarians said library software couldn't be powerful enough for a TeleRead-style system. Maybe Google and friends took care of that insight. Then there was the Net whiz for a writers organization who had trouble imagining that affordable modems would someday speed along many times faster than 2,400 bits per second. Over at a publishers group, another tech maven refused to grasp that TeleRead could use tablets for e-books, as...

Will a Mac tablet be on the way, as MacRumors.com speculated earlier this year? That would make sense, given Apple's strong interest in publishing applications, portable devices and education. Either Steve Jobs is lying, the project has somehow been delayed, or else he is a slave to his earlier dogmas but will change his mind sooner or later. If a Mac tablet became a reality, it would be fascinating to see if Apple entered the e-book business as it did the music distribution business--hopefully with gentler DRM than the norm. Meanwhile here's the denial from Jobs, via a mix...

Part of a letter from Michael Hart--Project Gutenberg's founder:As Project Gutenberg moves from 9,000 to 10,000 eBooks in the next 4 months, we only have 2 months' budget on hand. . .so right now it looks as if we will run out of money in October. . . .This month my assistant and I are working with no salary. We might get paid later, if things start looking up.We are going to need people to interface with the MAJOR granting agencies to get a good run [toward] a million eBooks!!!We should approach the Fortune 500, Computer 100, and the...

DRM for the most part still has miles to go in terms of user friendliness, but as E-Commerce Times notes, the music industry has made progress--as shown by the example of Apple's iTunes service. Now if Microsoft and the like in the e-book area can catch on. Interestingly, PalmDigital, which has been one of the most stubborn companies in resisting a nonproprietary consumer e-book format that includes DRM Lite, as I'll call it, has a more enlightened DRM policy than many rivals. A PalmDigital exec noted to me recently on the eBook Community List:Our DRM is not locked...

In our respective blogs, Jenny Levine and I have talked about the usefulness of bloggers' being able to use links from library databases. The articles would at least be available to readers within library systems that subscribed to the databases. Well, here's another convenience-related idea.What if you could immediately get into library e-books--without typing in your hard-to-remember library card number--if you clicked on a button in your Google toolbar, which right now can store information such as credit card numbers? Or maybe the toolbar could be from your local library system or a group of them.Just something to think...