Storage cards have been on the minds of plenty of PDA users lately, especially owners of the Dell Axim. They may want to check out some information from San Disk. To keep up with this and other issues, why not subscribe to the Axim X5 list?Meanwhile Mobipocket acknowledges that some people with Version 4.8 may have problems transferring information from their PCs directly to the storages card on their PDAs. No hassles. Just go to My Software within the My Mobipocket section of the Mobipocket site and download a newer version of 4.8. Worked fine for me.A few more...

"The Public Interest Research Group goes further, recommending that new books and new editions should be published entirely online to save on printing costs." - The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.The TeleRead take: Triggering these sentiments is a rise in student spending on textbooks. The National Association of College Stores says it rocketed from $619 in the 99-2000 school year to $807 in 2002-2003--or 30 percent in just three years. As reported in the PI:The Public Interest Research Group, a national consumer and government watchdog organization, pins much of the blame for the high cost of books on publishers "producing new editions...

Tiny eBook Reader version 2.0--available for the Pocket PC, though not yet the Smartphone--now can read unencrypted or unlocked e-books in the Microsoft .lit format. It also does ASCII files, including zipped versions.I haven't tried the new flavor yet--but intend to. If you want a fast, no-frills reader, this $12 program may be It, based on my experience with Version 1. One negative: No HTML. But perhaps that'll be on the way in Version 3.0. For .lit books in the public domain, check out such sites as manybooks.net, the University of Virginia etext collection and one of my favorite...

A fascinating item from Trudy W. Schuett, author of the e-book pictured here:I've had several books published in e-book form since late 1999/early 2000, and I thought I'd give the blog form a try for one of the early novels. I've been serializing Sweethearts and Monsters, a couple of pages at a time, since November of last year. We're getting close to the end of it, but as far as I can tell, I've got about 15,000 readers.As you can imagine, this is way more than the number that purchased the original e-book. But I'm one of those...

More details in the New Scientist:The most flexible electronic display yet developed has been revealed by researchers at electronics giant Philips. The company says it plans to begin mass producing such displays within a few years.There are many projects aiming to develop "electronic paper". Such a display could, for example, be used create a fully updatable newspaper which could rolled up into a coat pocket. Flexible displays could also be used to create new mobile phones and other easily collapsible gadgets.Philips's new display was made possible by the development of a way to print organic electronics onto a thin...

Is the Open eBook Forum going to do the right thing--both for the public and the e-book industry--and get serious about a Universal Consumer Format? And maybe even give us a schedule for UCF development? This morning via Google I ran across the following in the Guardian in the UK:Nick Rogaty suggests that compatible file formats and a good ebook reading device, something as desirable as one of Apple's iPods, would help e-publishing break out of the geeky male ghetto. Improvements in digital rights management (DRM) are also needed.Actually that's Nick B-o-g-a-t-y who's exec director of the OeBF, and...

What Cory Doctorow writes about music certainly applies to e-books in many ways. I still have yet to buy a book with proprietary DRM. Freebies, gifts, books from the KnowBetter.com library--well, I'll put up with DRM in those cases. And maybe there'll be a special case where I just can't live without a specific title. But so far, when I want copyrighted books, I order the good old-fashioned paper variety if I can't find non-"protected" titles. You can bet that would change with the introduction of a Universal Consumer Format and sensible DRM. Meanwhile I'll do the wallet-vote act...

People are still spending just seven hours a week on books, magazines and newspapers--the same as in '96. The good news is that the Net might be stealing time from TV instead of books and the rest. More at LISNews....

Should people in developing countries pay less for e-books than do readers in the States? I've made that argument before. Without some price discrimination, many in, say, Bangladesh may never catch up with the books in a meaningful way at all except through piracy. Needless to say, I've also suggested the solution of well-stocked national digital libraries, which, by increasing the audience for books, could help lower the prices for everyone. Perhaps in the end, then we could have universal global prices for e-books.Now, in the latest Wired, Larry Lessig writes about drug pricing, and some of...

"There aren't enough trees in China to make enough schoolbooks for their kids. And kids are trudging around in their 40-lbs. backpacks here." - Michael McCreary, vice president of advanced research at E Ink, as quoted in a UPI article on the latest in flexible displays. (Via Pocket PC eBooks Watch.)...

Yo, Steve Potash and the Open eBook Forum! Care about e-books globally? Then check out a generally upbeat article from Australian Personal Computing, which, however, says on its Web site: "The sadder side of the story is that there's no standard ebook format, even on a single platform." I know. The purists will pick that one apart, but the point is that e-books are a far cry from video tapes or audio CDs, and it's the industry's fault. The Aussie article in effect serves up an example of how the e-book industry is living up or down to the...

With PDAs so important to e-bookdom, here's some good news for the season. CNET reports:"The worldwide market for handheld devices totaled 3.4 million units in the fourth quarter of 2003, an increase of 3.2 percent year-over-year and a whopping 52.7 percent sequential jump from the third quarter, IDC said in the report, released on Tuesday.Cameras built into the very latest PDAs made them hot items during the Christmas season. Would that better e-book standards and more interest in our favorite medium have been Sales Booster Number One instead! Moreover, yearly PDA shipments in 2003 actually slipped to 10.4 million...