The Denver Public library is playing up e-books to the hilt and has a spiffy-looking new area powered by OverDrive, complete with offerings in the Mobipocket format. It's a welcome change from the increasingly outdated Palm Digital Media alternative that OD had been featuring. Adobe, as usual, is also a choice. Details via an OverDrive press release:The Library's eBook collection includes bestsellers and classics, fiction and non-fiction, from popular authors and leading publishers such as HarperCollins, McGraw-Hill, Zondervan, and John Wiley and Sons. Patrons download free reader software and then use their Denver Public Library cards to check out...

What's the future of the audiobooks--for "adults, children, the visually impaired, the learning disabled, and more"?That's the theme of Audio E-Book Expo: Exploring DigitalBooks and Content...

Sony's Librie reportedly has debuted in Japan with a library of just 400 books. That's not all. Your purchase, er, your rental, will vanish in 60 days after you've plunked down your $5 or so.The "moldy list of books," as one early Librie buyer describes it, includes some public domain titles that normally would be free and yours to keep forever.While the $375 Librie is officially available only in Japan, this is an insult to readers all over the cosmos, especially since you can't even use the machine right now to read newspaper and magazines.Gouge bad for Sony's hip...

How to blend pictures and sounds into e-books and not forget the blind, visually impaired and hard of hearing?The National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), a joint project of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and WGBH in Boston, has been addressing that issue. Check out the Beyond Text page. Of special interest might be MAGpie 2.01, aka Media Access Generator. It's "a free application from NCAM for creating closed captions and video descriptions for digital multimedia." MAGpie prototypes are available for LIT, PDF and OeB formats.Also take a look at the handy comparison chart of e-book and digital talking book...

A lawsuit over the use of the JPEG format for images could spell trouble for Adobe and other prominent high-tech companies in e-books and other areas. If Forgent wins, damages might be well into the tens of millions and maybe even higher. From Wired:Forgent Networks said Friday it sued 31 major hardware and software vendors, including Dell and Apple Computers, for allegedly infringing on its claim to an algorithm used in the popular JPEG picture file format. If the suits are successful, they could lead to an increase in prices for tools and software used to create and modify...

While the glories of e-books are apparent to the open-minded, even some techies still don't grasp how far the technology has come along--with or without the Librie.Evil Genius Dave Slusher has analyzed Slashdot readers' reactions to a Librie-related news item and neatly broken down the cluelessness into four major categories:--Paper books are just fine. Why do we need ebooks? --The screen sizes are too small/the resolutions are too low/I don't like reading off of screens all the time.--You can't read ebooks in the tub. --I like the feel/smell of paper books.Pretty tedious, huh, just as Dave observes? The Luddites...

Lee Fyock, loyal defender of proprietary e-book formats and also a much-appreciated contributor to the eBook Community List despite numerous differences with many of its members, especially moderator Jon Noring and me, may leave Peanut Press/Palm Digital Media. The possible Fyock departure follows a merger between PP/PDM owner PalmGear and Pinpoint. Operations are moving to North Carolina, and Lee says he most likely will want to remain in the area of Maynard, Massachusetts.In a note received since the original post of this item, he says: "Ask me again at the end of June." OK, Lee. I guess I was...

One of the dreams of Mary Bono and Jack Valenti is that copyright be eternal or within a day of that. This on top of registration no longer being required for material to be copyrighted!In honor of the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and death--the first happened on April 23, 1564 and the second on April 23, 1616--I'll reproduce a relevant excerpt from a newspaper columnist for whom I created a Web site a few years ago. Notice all the tantalizing questions raised by Bruce Kauffmann in his History Lessons column on The Bard? Even genealogy, it appears, would be...

The gang at OverDrive might want to read what Virginia Postrel has to say about one of the main values of Internet commerce--to be exact, choice. Time to stop gouging one-book publishers and remove those $300-a-year storage charges? Better treatment of all publishers, in fact, would hep....

The Manchester Guardian's detailed review of the Librie has come out just in time to refute a clueless academic who'll forever cite outdated studies. Excerpt from J. Mark Lytle impressions in the Guardian:The quality of the display will come as quite a shock to any seasoned user of mobile devices; it looks more like paper than the computer screen it is. The closest comparison is to think of old-fashioned ink on pulp you're likely holding now, unless you're reading this online, in which case the Librie looks far better.In fact, as it's a reflective screen, it looks the...

OK, better late than never. Via Library Journal, here's a detailed report from the Open eBook Forum conference for librarians. Notice? The Tower of eBabel is high on the list of librarians' concerns. Pricing matters, too:...the current business model is "whatever the traffic will bear," said Tom Peters of TAP Information Services. netLibrary's Gillian Harrison and others noted that "we're looking to test new models, [but] we're caught between the established library market and the established publishing industry," which currently dictate the one book, one user model.Yes, time to get past this anachronism! For years, TeleRead has advocated pay...

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