Umberto Eco, the great Italian novelist and scholar, is clueful about ebraries' potential for reference--but not quite up to speed on the recreational possibilities of e-books.Look, even now, e-book are far more viewable than in the past, given the sharper PDA screens with more contrast. What's more, dedicated e-book readers will improve, offering e-ink and flippable pages in time. And even the old Gemstar e-book readers aren't impossible--I love my REB 1100. Besides, the issue isn't just viewability or other physically related ones; it's also choice.I'm down here in Statesville, North Carolina, but can still pick among thousands...

Check out new goodies from the University of California Press (on many topics) and the University of Oregon's East Asia Digital Library. (Via LISNews and Dailywireless.) Also don't forget the free books from the usual places such as Project Gutenberg, the University of Virginia, the Internet Public Library, the On-Line Books Page, Memoware and other sources. ...

The secret life of tattooed and bellydancing librarians is a fun column--by Shelley Howells, in the New Zealand Herald--that pays due tribute to librarian bloggers.Ideally now, librarians can go on to the next step--encouraging nonlibrarians to blog. One place to start might be Friends of Libraries-type groups at the local level. Imagine library-related bloggers creating political support for libraries in their own cities (although the blogging lessons could be for all kinds of purposes, not just political activism, lest this rub local politicans the wrong way). Needless to say, too, librarians could offer blogging expertise to civic groups in...

In Sharing and Stealing, a copyright paper now in draft for comment, Wayne State law professor Jessica Litman favors a more efficient way of compensating musicians. Litman, author of Digital Copyright and one of the country's most respected authorities on digital intellectual property, compares the vibrancy of fact-exchange on the Net (facts per se aren't copyright protected) with the barriers inhibiting mass enjoyment of digital music (protected). She would like the law to require copyright owners to identify their works in special ways if they wanted copyright protection under a traditional approach rather than through payment via an otherwise...

Jeremy A. Frumkin is an e-library expert at the University of Arizona with some pretty neat ideas in the MyLibrary.gov vein. No, he didn't use that label, but it sure fits. His big premise is that digital libraries should go beyond just offering the services that conventional ones do. Hear, hear--whether the library is the Library of Congress or a TeleReadized version of the library in Fossil, Oregon! Some specifics:--Personal blog spaces. --Researcher's toolbar. [Jenny Levine is also keen on that one.]--Easy, web-based citation management. --Community areas fed by information sharing. [In LOC's case, areas could be subject-related rather...

E-books can be a godsend for people learning special skills, not just for those interested in best-sellers, academic works, and other kinds such as classics of the Project Gutenberg variety. Skeptics would do well to read a cogent essay by Stephen Gambuti, author of Dirty Little Secrets of Magic and other writings. He is a professional magician who has appeared in New York comedy clubs and given an off-camera performance for Robin Leech of "Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous." In his essay below for TeleRead, Steve in effect makes a powerful case for multimedia e-books for skill-builders of...

"Many companies mistakenly focus on the technology when trying to understand DRM and fail to consider the real social issues that managing content involves. For example, DRM schemes that tie content to a single PC fail to address the needs of, say, a child of divorced parents who lives in two homes. Even more common is the person who wants to play music at home, at work, in the car, on a portable player, and at a friend's house. The killer app for digital content is the connected home, yet most DRM schemes undermine consumers' ability to easily move...

"Back-end scanning and OCR done on the cheap and not even slightly proofread. And libraries are paying how much for these resources?" - Dorothea Salo on full-text databases of articles.The TeleRead take: Dorothea says: "It occurs to me that this might be one way that open-access trumps the for-fee competition. Believe me, it ain...

How to help libraries enter the e-book era? LISNews should start an E-Book Clinic, a bulletin board area that would also be blended in with other sites ranging from Chris Rippel's to Project Gutenberg and TeleRead. The E-Book Clinic could explore nuts-and-bolts issues such as how to avoid DRMing public domain books and, of course, how to popularize e-books in a library context. The E-Book Clinic ideally would be involved with LISNews--to be in the library mainstream rather than isolated. E-books sooner or later will be genuinely in the commercial mainstream, via Amazon and Google, and the same concept...

Philip Dick's children are now rich, according to a new Wired article referenced in Slashdot, and from afar I'm glad--considering all the penury they endured in their youth. Then again, do we really want his copyrights to be in effect 70 years after his 1982 death, as opposed to 50 years, the pre-Sonny Bono Act duration?Consider a statement from Russ Galena, his literary agent, quoted in Wired:As for film deals, the estate has become increasingly choosy. "We sort of feel like we have to protect Philip K. Dick's brand image," says Galen. "So we set very, very high prices,...

More children will learn to love books if they can find just the right one at an early enough age. TeleRead is about much more than e-books for K-12, but that's Reason One for the plan--and a key topic of the 1992 Computerworld article on the idea. From USA Today comes this wonderful and highly relevant anecdote in an article headlined Why won't Johnny read?:Adam Cobert taught himself to read in first grade, but it took two more years to find a book he liked.Most books were "kind of disappointing," says Adam, now a fifth-grader at Isaac Fox Elementary...

LISNews founder Blake Carver has further thoughts on the Slashdot moderation system as applied to LISNews, where a poster and I believe that TeleRead has received unfair treatment. Meanwhile, as I wrote in a LISNews message today, there are some specific things that LISNews could do to help libraries and e-books, and I hope that Blake takes me up on my friendly suggestions. The right e-book approach could reduce the chances of the Philadelphia satire becoming reality.Ideally everyone can move on now from the moderation controversy to further discussion of the issues that TeleRead and others have raised about...