"Search engine giant Google is preparing to publicly release some of its underlying software code only months before it undertakes a multibillion-dollar stock-exchange float." - The Age, in Australia.The TeleRead take: This is a Good Thing, of course, as long as a meaningful amount of code does go public. See related Slashdot item....

TeleRead is keen on e-books for students--but should schools lean on parents to buy $1K iBook laptops for their children? Talk about the Digital Divide. Here's part of a San Diego Union-Tribute story out of Carmel Valley, California:Some parents who were encouraged to buy or rent laptop computers for their fifth-graders at Ashley Falls Elementary as part of a new technology program are fuming over a public school making the request. Ashley Falls recently advised parents to purchase Macintosh iBook computers and certain accessories for about $1,080, or possibly rent them from the school for $435 a year. The...

The free Skype telephony service works in Linux as well as Windows and supposedly is spyware free. You can reach me personally via the username of davidrothman....

Intel, Sun Microsystems, Verizon Communications, SBC and other tech heavyweights are worried that U.S. copyright law is too skewed in favor of Hollywood. So they're creating a new organization called the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition. Among other efforts, it will support Rep. Rick Boucher's efforts to mitigate the damage from the DMCA. Perhaps the new group, in turn, can support a concept such as the Digitial Media Users Association. (CNet, via Techdirt.)Related: Rx for Washington's bullying: An NRA-size group for all digital media users....

Those hoping for relief from the Tower of eBabel--the oodles of proprietary e-book formats--will be pleased to find that the OpenReader Consortium is gaining traction."I was...happy to see that your roadmap includes MathML in 1.0.," writes Paul Topping, president and CEO at Design Science, a MathML-hip company. "I look forward to hearing more about your project. Perhaps we can help with the MathML part somehow." Much appreciated!Meanwhlie, following up on the favorable reaction in O'Reilly editor Andy Oram's personal Web log, items have also appeared in the Software Documentation Weblog, the blog for XML.org, the Semantic Wave Blog and...

See the latest in the New York Times on libraries vs. Google and other online searching. We've mentioned this question before via an item headlined Web-oriented students avoiding university library--and proud of it. If libraries don't want to be Googled and Amazoned away, they'll get serious about e-books and the rest--not just search engines. (Thanks for the link, Alev. Google will never replace you!)Related: The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative to Google, from the Chronicle of Higher Education....

You can now enjoy an online recording of an eBookWorm discussion with Michael Moodie, Deputy Director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), a division of the Library of Congress. Last Thursday he discussed the future of digital books for the blind and others with disabilities. The audio file is in WMA (Windows Media Audio) format.Also online is an Audio Avenue Meeting of the Minds discussion about Bruce J. Schulman's book The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. Here's the WMA audio link for discussion of the '70s book.Due to...

Walt Crawford, past president of the ALA's Library and Information Technology Association, is bashing e-books again in his "Empire strikes back" mode. Darth's newest rant is more or less the same old same old with fresh examples to distort. Especially I'm charmed by the way he cites an Australian e-book study that does not even tell the kind of hardware used to read off the screen. Walt himself is proud, proud, proud that he doesn't own a PDA. That's understandable. Shudder, what if he gave the technology an honest try and liked it? And to think of Walt owning...

Even Japan isn't a good testbed for the format-hobbled Librie if one goes by a much-appreciated note from Yutaka Ohno.Giving Sony the benefit of the doubt, thinking that Japanese customers' priorities might be different from those of Americans, I wrote: "I just can't get over how out of touch Sony is with U.S. consumers." But Yutaka Ohno educated me. Turns out that hatred of stupid proprietary formats--presumably including the accompanying DRM--is alive and well in Japan.A nice, wry response"Sorry for not being smart," Yutaka wrote me wryly, "but Japanese e-books lovers/ advocates like myself are mad about Librie's proprietary...

"A forthcoming bill in the U.S. Senate would, if passed, dramatically reshape copyright law by prohibiting file-trading networks and some consumer electronics devices on the grounds that they could be used for unlawful purposes." - CNET.The TeleRead take: The bill, pushed by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, could even help undermine the legality of VCRs. Ka-ching, ka-ching! How much more in campaign contributions will this one net Hatch and colleagues? More via Slashdot...

So will new technology like Sony's Librie--the highly readable e-book device marketed just in Japan so far--make a difference to the industry? That's the topic of E-Books: A new chapter or same old story? in Smalltimes.The TeleRead take: I just hope Sony doesn't blow it with brain-dead DRM and a proprietary e-book format. Time's ticking away. Better technologies will be along eventually. As an e-book booster, I'd rather that Sony kept the machine out of the States than taint the e-book market with yet another Gemstar-style failure. The cure is simple, though--an ability to run Mobipocket and later a...

O'Reilly, among the most clueful and successful of technical publishers, has refused to go in for DRMed e-books. That jibes with Cory Doctorow's observation that DRM is toxic to profits.Now, in a personal blog, a veteran O'Reilly editor named Andy Oram is championing the OpenReader concept as an alternative to another scourge of e-bookdom, proprietary formats. Here's the full text:Read, reference, and comment--an online format that does it allAnyone who does serious publishing or design, or just wants to get information online in a well-structured and attractive way, knows how limited online formats are. Finally we have a framework...