Ka-Ching! I can just hear the sound of the cash money being alchemized earlier into the sleazy PIRATE Act, which, among other things, would let the feds bring civil suits against those accused of copyright infringement. In a week or so the Senate will vote on the act. Details at Copyright....

Earlier we told of the PocketMac iPOD edition as a way of reading e-books on your iPOD and enjoying roomy hard-disk space. Another approach would be software from iPODLibrary.com.Frustratingly, the iPODLibrary requires a special format and limits chapter sizes to 4K because of Apple's own restrictions, meaning that authors apparently will have to do a lot of breaking up. Just the same, this could be useful for, say, reference works. Let's hope that Apple itself does an iPOD someday that can be a true e-book reader. A bookPOD? Meanwhile a collection of facts from Apple history is among the...

Stupid, overDRMed e-book software is one reason why the Tablet PC hasn't taken off. Another reason, however, is hardware prices.One of the models in Averatec's new 3500 series of Tablet PCs could help by bringing the discounted price under $1,000. It comes in at least two versions.(Via Tabula PC and Engadget.)...

Public librarians love to talk up library databases as a free way to access high-quality information. But wait. There is something you may give up in return--your sanity, considering the Rube Goldbergish tortures that librarians or at least their database vendors often inflict on innocent users.So far this morning I've struck out in my efforts to use two of the three databases that I've tried from the library system here in Alexandria, VA. One worked but lacked the article I needed, while two others won't let me use the information on my library card--those 14 infuriating digits. Adding to...

From the BBC: ...New Zealand researchers have developed a way to overlay detailed animations and images on textbooks, children's picture books and any other title that uses illustrations. The 3D images are seen via a handheld viewer that watches where a reader is looking. With a flick of a switch the viewer can also plunge readers into an immersive virtual world that lets them explore the book's subject in more depth.... (Thanks to Mike Cane.)...

Oh, this is sweet justice if true. To head off a lawsuit, Microsoft reportedly is to pay Opera $12 million for having teaked the MSN portal so certain Web pages did not display properly. Possible indirect ramifications for the Open eBook Forum? The organization, after all, has displaced honest standards-setting organizations and refused after all these years to come up with the once-promised consumer format to avoid a VHS-vs.-Beta situation. Anti-trust fodder? Remember, the lack of a universal format makes it more difficult for small programmers to come up with reading programs to compete against the proprietary offerings from...

From a Kodak news release from the 2004 Society for Information Display (SID) conference in Seattle:...Kodak has developed a groundbreaking OLED formulation that includes four colors: red, green, blue, and--for the first time--white. As a result, manufacturers will have the flexibility to choose the panel architecture that best suits their device design and production needs. Kodak's new materials are ideally suited for both passive matrix and active matrix displays. The material set provides efficient red, green, and blue formulations for full-color active matrix displays designed with a red-green-blue (RGB) array of pixels, as well as white formulations for panels...

The goal at the Million Book Project--involving Carnegie Mellon, the Internet Archive and other organizations: A million books digitized by 2005.Number of books scanned so far: 80,000.Fully processed and now available for download: 14,000.Sources: An Internet Archive Web page on the project and a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article and LISNews.More details from the Post-Gazette:The National Science Foundation has provided three grants totaling more than $3.5 million for the project. Much of that money has been spent on computers and scanners. The partners in China and India, including the Indian Institute of Science, the University of Pune, Nanjing University and Peking...

From the Lessig blog: Jamie Knox sent along Iraq’s newly amended copyright law (as if THIS was where we needed to worry about rule of law in Iraq). I’ve just begun going through it, but there are favorite tidbits so far: collections of data can be protected; readings of the Koran are protected; and collections of government documents can be protected. But significantly, the term is life plus 50! More disharmony… Hmm. Didn't Washington--and this is no joke--hire Hilary Rosen as a consultant during the writing of the revised...

A new service called Mazarin is one of the easiest and fastest way to retrieve Gutenberg books--plus, it offers full-text searching as well as spiffy HTML. Its interface uses a Google-style minimal approach.Wait. Slashdot has highlighted this site and generated so much traffic that "fast" may not be true for the moment because the server is so busy. But normally it probably will be.(Thanks to Steve Sakoman of GutenTalk, another well-designed Gutenberg-related site.)...

Don't think that access issues are important in e-books, or on the Net as a whole? Well, consider the following stats from Access Through Technology--an article by Marti Goddard in School Library Journal:Census 2000 figures indicate that more than 19 percent of the U.S. population aged five and older are people with disabilities. The estimated 50 million individuals who comprise this group especially need access to computers in libraries. Citing data from the 1999 Survey on Income and Program Participation, a report published by the U.S. Department of Commerce states, "People who have a disability were only half as...

Webmaster Finds Gaps in China's Net offers some encouragement to those who believe that technology will ultimately lead to political freedom. It won't happen immediately, but it's clear that the old farts are losing their grip on the young. Who knows, maybe the same will happen here in the States in regard to Draconian copyright laws. From the Washingtn Post (reg. required)....