Wesley Clark's campaign will go the open source route via the Clark Technology Corps. According to a story in Wired News, Clark's people will "organize volunteers to write software for the Clark campaign and release their work under open-source licenses." This follows similar efforts by Howard Dean's operation.Great! But Netfolks shouldn't let pols' actual tech toys serve as a distraction. At least based on my previous efforts, I've found the Clark campaign to be rather closed-sourced when it comes to discussion of matters like the DMCA and copyright term extension. I'd also like to see some top-secret information on...

Amos Bokros, a teacher in Bradenton, Florida, is an e-book booster who, though bright, must cope with serious learning disabilities. I'm going to let Amos tell his story in a post that should be up by late tonight and maybe before then. No holiday angles exist here but the most important of all: Amos's eagerness to share his enthusiasm with the children who could most benefit from it. The already-previewed "OeBF Christmas Carol" will appear later this week. Meanwhile, happiest of holidays to all our readers!Housekeeping: I've made a number of tweaks to Post-OeBF: Two replacement groups to...

Have you ever checked out a paper library book and smelled the smoke from a previous reader? Maybe you want to try e-books instead. Roy Lewis posted the following this week to the eBook Community list:I just picked up a copy of Welcome to Fred by Brad Whittington on the new books shelf at my local public library. The book seems like an interesting title and book, but the copy I picked off the physically stinks like old smoke. When I read a book on my GEB2150 or my REB1100 it smells like me or maybe warm battery or...

U.S. schools are crying out for up-to-date textbooks, and the kids are relying more and more on the Internet as a research tool. Yet a well-stocked national digital library system is but a dream right now. Meanwhile in India, in Latin America, in Africa, university students line up for scarce copies of paper library books. Oh, and don't forget another little detail: E-book sales are a disgraceful $10-$12 million a year, a fraction of Tom Clancy's typical annual income. Ten million is just speck of a speck of the tens of billions of the yearly revenue from p-books. Can't...

KnowBetter.com has compiled a handy list for last-minute shoppers. Hey, suits the medium! Remember, too, the public domain possibilities available free via Project Gutenberg, 10,000 eBooks and the Black Mask e-store. Some suggestions from KnowBetter: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, On The Twelfth Day Of Hanukkah, My Muses Gave To Me by Steven David Horwich, and The e Before Christmas by Matthew Beaumont....

"One of the first experiments I tried with my Rocket eBook was laying it face-down on the platen of my scanner and making a scan. It came out perfectly." - Daniel P. B. Smith, on the eBook Community List.The TeleRead take: Perhaps e-book protection has improved since then. Just the same, Smith's crack is one more argument against building the whole industry around tech-related measures--rather than coming up with a business and legal model to reduce the incentive for piracy. Remember all those dangerous paper books out there--almost crying out to pirates: "Scan me, scan me!"DMCA or not, I...

The e-book industry was as dead as a door-nail. How did it happen? With apologies to Charles Dickens and offense meant toward no faith, we revisit the sad story of Scrooge and the publishers. If only Dickens were around to write about software-pushers, the Tower of eBabel and format converters! Coming later this week in the TeleBlog....

Live in Europe? What VATs are you paying on e-books and p-books, and under what circumstances? Just what's the full story? We're keen on fighting discriminatory taxes if this will help, but need the full facts. In Spain a reader says he pays taxes on both kinds of books, while elsewhere we hear that in the UK, only e-books get taxed. E-mail us the lowdown. Between our readers and much-appreciated help from the Association of American Publishers, which is contacting European counterparts for the latest on these issues, we'll get the full story. Thanks!Meanwhile, Margot Milner, to whom we're...

TeleRead got Slashdotted yet again--this time over our battle against proprietary consumer-formats and other joys from the major sponsors of the Open eBook Forum.Catching my eye, amid the many Slashdot messages, was one from an eager reader of pirated e-books. Yes, I'm against the bootlegging of e-books. Still, if I ran the forum, I just might want to reshuffle my business priorities after mulling over the e-book fan's note. It might help me understand why e-books will bring in just $10 or $12 million in revenue this year--not because of piracy but because of the Tower of eBabel and...

A clueful critique of Adobe's e-bookstore comes from a veteran newspaper consultant blogging on the site of the Poynter Institute. No bomb-throwers here. Poynter is a well-respected outfit that trains reporters and editors and provides a treasure trove of journalistic resources. And the writer, Katja Riefler, is a seasoned journalist who runs a consulting firm for German newspapers. Here is what she says of the Adobe store:You can get best-sellers there in PDF format at big discounts, but it's worth taking a closer look at the digital rights you really buy.If you chose, for example, "Dude, Where's...

Still think book publishers can trust the Open eBook Forum--dominated by pushy software vendors? Guess again. Complex software, as documented by KnowBetter.com and Electronic Book Web, is one of the biggest reasons why e-books are just a $10-million-a-year cottage industry. Yet so far the forum either can't learn or refuses to. This is a splendid example of the structural problem you have when Microsoft and the like can boss around the group, aka The Proprietary Formatters' Forum. It's like printers prevailing over Random House and Simon & Schuster, not just the small guys. Who cares if the business...

Book people--whether editors, writers, publishers or librarians--hate it when bean-counters and politicians tell them how to run their business. So how about Microsoft, Adobe, Palm Digital Media and OverDrive? Do we really want them to intrude on book people--and balkanize our readerships by e-book formats? The format war is no small reason, according to a HarperCollins executive, why e-books sales of perhaps $10-$12 million a year are still a speck of the industry total.So let's start 2004 right and encourage publishers and librarians to kill or at least boycott the misleadingly named Open eBook Forum that has become a...