You needn't be an Evil Genius to hate onerous Digital Rights Management, but it helps. Dave Slusher has laudably kicked the habit of buying DRMed e-books. His original skepticism of DRM was a little more at the abstract level. Dave had worked as a software engineering team leader for the server side of Intertrust's PDF publishing system, and he obviously knew how messy the technology could often be.But now Dave has a more practical and personal reason: his own pain and suffering as a past buyer of DRMed books. Technology marches on, but you may be stuck with...

A young film-maker from Dallas went to the Sundance festival this year and won the Grand Jury Prize for the best drama by writing, directing and acting in his own film. Shane Carruth edited the 16-millimeter film digitally on a home computer. Meanwhile other film-makers were shooting digitally to begin with. In fact, this year almost half the film-makers at Sundance used digital video cameras to shoot films, far more than the 12 percent of three years ago. They enjoyed good technical quality at a fraction of previous costs.So what does this mean in the context of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act?...

An interesting new blog editor called BlogJet, now in beta, offers the ability to include .wav files with posts so visitors can hear bloggers. Apparently either I'm messing up or the voice feature isn't enabled--I can't get the "Listen" link at the bottom of this item to function. Still, the potential is there for Lori Bell, Tom Peters and others working with the blind and the visually impaired. And if the blind/VI folks themselves can master this software, then so much the better.Listen to Voice attachment...

"Getting books scanned quickly is not a problem for us since we can outsource it. Our major problem is creating the five different ebook editions of the book, MS Reader, PDF, PalmDoc, HieBook and Mobi. This takes time and effort by highly skilled people who require the knowledge to mark up the text properly, create the required files and then put it through the ebook convertors to create the final ebook editions. This currently takes us three to four hours per book which is far too long and costly." - Chad Sichello of Second Chance Publishers, posting to the eBook...

A reminder: Got news of genuine interest to the e-book world? Or views? Want to comment on an item we ran? E-mail dr@teleread.com....

Stanford University intends to scan millions of books--a worthy project, just so the results will be accessible and affordable for ordinary people, not just the usual suspects in academia and corporate R&D.But even a well-funded institution like Stanford can do only so much on its own.So I was pleased that Stanford librarian Michael Keller said the following to The Book and Computer:We're talking about gargantuan-sized memories and massively parallel supercomputers to whiz through this stuff. Not many institutions in this country have that kind of capacity. Maybe it will require a national effort to really do this.Exactly--like TeleRead,...

Wouldn't it make more sense for OverDrive to focus on distribution and retail operations and wind down the one in format conversion? I've said so before, and now it looks as if the company has quietly been doing exactly that. Good move!I asked OverDrive head Steve Potash, also president of the Open eBook Forum, for comment on Dorothea's Salo's recent blog item about format conversion. Too, I requested a report on the financial well-being of his company--on which so many small publishers depend. Here's the lowdown from Steve directly:Winding down of our conversion business has been ongoing for nearly...

We've always been keen on The Memory Thing--putting local news archives, genealogical information and similar items online. Who says a TeleRead-style library effort should involve e-books alone, as important as they are? For a hint of the possibilities, check out NewspaperARCHIVE.com. Self-description of topics covered:What made the news in the 1700's? What about world events on your birthday? Was your great-grandparents' wedding announcement posted in their home town news? How about your ancestors' obituaries? Monthly membership is $12.95, and the yearly amount is $79.95. For your money you get access to a collection of small-town papers and some from larger...

A $10,000 grant from ALA will go to create a project called "E-Books Open Up the World of Print to Visually Impaired Readers." The one-year effort will help determine how e-books can aid the blind, visually impaired, the dyslexic and the physically challenged--a topic thoroughly worth exploring, since e-books can help special-needs people even more than the population at large.Coordinating the project for the Mid Illinois Talking Book Center will be Tom Peters of TAP Information Services. He'll work with staff from the center (especially Lori Bell, another e-book-hip librarian) as well as OverDrive, the distributor-retailer which is fast...

Oh, I like this! North Carolina now wants Michael Eisner fired as boss of Disney--and has told state pension fund managers to vote against him. It joins funds in half a dozen other states, including California and New York, already committed to this noble cause.Now, imagine the same tool used against the Sonny Bono Copyight Term Extension Act, which will send billions to the copyright elite over the years at the expense of schools, libraries and consumers in the Tar Heel state and elsewhere.Time for state pension managers to pressure Disney and other big corporations into calling for a...

For as little as 25 cents in some cases, you can now buy audios of Project Gutenberg texts without onerous DRM (those two words go together all too often)."New unabridged audiobooks are released every Friday in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats," says TellTale Weekly. And you can copy them to your MP3 player, your PDA, your desktop, you name it, without worrying about brain-dead DRM schemes. A lesson for the big-timers in the e-book biz?First titles released today are are:--Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death by Patrick Henry--Stories from Asheville vol 1 by Justin Meckes--A Dog's Tale by...

Our old friend David Faucheux, who has been blind since youth, dropped by the TeleBlog yesterday and said that he had trouble navigating it with his Jaws screen-reader--perhaps in part due to our three-column layout. Hey, that won't do. So overnight, via a new RSS feed, we've created a special one-column version, which, as long as we're at it, also offers large type for the vision-impaired. Could be that we won't worry about the large type if enough VI folks write in and say, "Hey, my browser already takes care of that." Speak up!A major attraction of e-books, at...