At the start the weirdos were the public-spirited. How dare anyone demand that Washington stop calls from brokers and siding sales reps from disrupting families at dinner! The special interests trotted out the standard economic arguments, and the pols fell in line, encouraged undoubtedly by campaign donations. But guess what? Votes in the end mattered more than money. Even George Bush, hardly the nation's leading consumerist, has joined the stampede to rein in the telemarketers. A lesson for the RIAA and other zealots in the wake of Brianna vs. the real Sopranos?...

Project Gramophone may have to set up shop outside the U.S. and keep Americans from downloading lush music that is part of our own national identity. Started by my friend Jon Noring, Gramophone is a focused initiative to preserve old recordings by putting them on the Web the way Project Gutenberg has uploaded thousands of literary classics for rich and poor alike. Gramophone "would archive sound recordings made up through the 1920's or 1930's and sometimes more recently, depending on various factors."Problem is, it may not be that simple for Jon and rest of us in Gramophone to make...

Not sure what to make of these UNESCO stats found at NationMaster.com. Canada, with 227 library books per 1,000 people and a rank of 42, is far below the top five countries of Georgia (15,400), Monaco (9,910), Liechtenstien (5,100), San Marino (3,858) and Iceland (3,007). I'll delete the reminder of this paragraph since I have more current info.Librarians: Anyone out there care to add some context? How much do the numbers suggest we're book-starved, and how much do they suggest we're simply library book-starved? If we're to address the famous "savage inequalities" of our schools and libraries, then we...

Project Gutenberg has has a spiffy new page to let you search or browse by author or title....

Tablets PCs are like e-books--exotic to the typical consumer, but still an area of growth. And a new Reuters story says sales are improving; and that's good news for digital publishers. Here are stats from Alan Promisel, an IDC analyst:Promisel said that his firm predicts that in 2003, a total of 500,000 tablet PCs will be sold around the globe, which represents about 1 percent of the total portable PC market. But, by 2007, IDC forecasts that the tablet PC could account for well over 20 percent of the portable market.Remember, those are Tablet PC sales alone. Let's hope...

Sci-fi novelist and copyright-holder Orson Scott Card recently expressed his thoughts on the morons at the RIAA:It only gets stupider the more you think about it. The kids they...

Actually you can annotate Quicksilver and enjoy author Neal Stephenson's blessing--if you do it via the Metaweb project, which describes itself this way:The Metaweb is a collaborative structure for learning. In our first phase, we are annotating the ideas and historical period explored in Neal Stephenson's novel Quicksilver, seeding the Metaweb with an initial base of information. We are currently working on 116 articles, and hope you will expand and relate these and many other entries.(Found via Boing Boing Bloing and O h n o s e c o n d, the latter of which sensibly notes: "This isn't...

Adventures in E-Book Shopping, a horror story found at Publishing Central, tells it all:A recent attempt to purchase an ebook illustrates the danger electronic publishers face if they don't make it easier to purchase the ebooks they sell.In her article, Wendy J. Woudstra concludes: What lessons are there to be learned from this shopping excursion? Ebook retailers and publishers must make it easier to to purchase ebooks in the reader's preferred format--whatever that format may be. As long as it's easier to steal an ebook from a file sharing network than it is to buy it from a bookstore,...

From Web writer to popcorn-sweeper-upper--that's how Barbara Card Atkinson, an underemployed California mother, tells of her fall in the modern American economy. And, oh, yes, there's a school library angle, too, in her Salon piece, alas:In my 8-year-old daughter's backpack last night was a notice from the school's volunteer committee asking parents to help teach art this year. The committee is new, formed to bridge the gap left by the extreme budget cuts made by our town this spring. Included in the cuts were art education, both enrichment and remedial instruction, and all counseling services, as well as drastically...

You already know what havoc has been inflicted on the e-book industry by the builders of the Tower of eBabel--with all those warrning formats that drive consumers beserk. If any industry cries out for nonproprietary standards, it's ours. But guess what. A new proposal would actually weaken the existing standards movement in a variety of industries. Talk about a conspiracy against the commonweal! From an IT newsletter quoted on the list of the Union for the Public Domain:The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is debating a proposal that calls for royalties on three commonly used standards: the ISO codes...

This is progress not. The King County Library System in the Seattle area has killed off its Real World semiannual book sale of 80,000 unwanted books--and replaced it with an online sale by Amazon.com. Talk about stupidity. The Seattle Times says:Such traditions as people camped out at the doors at 6 a.m. in Kirkland, the bags of books for a few bucks and the orgy of book buying are giving way to the World Wide Web and the lure of the virtual marketplace.... Library officials say they will raise more money with less effort but acknowledge it will...

In Massachusetts, a battle is raging over the weight of student backpacks with books in them, and one state representative has proposed lmits--while yet another warns that the more important issue is something else: getting enough books for the kids. E-books, of course, could address both questions. A Boston Globe story passes on a child's perspective among others:Danielle Dickerman, a Sharon Middle School seventh-grader, is one of those still struggling to lighten her load. She estimates that she carries three to four books and binders home daily."Every once in a while, my back and my shoulders hurt. It's kind...