"Hollywood's Internet Avenger?" is what a Washington Post headline called Dan Glickman, the newly appointed president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America. But you never know. Is there at least a small chance that Glickman can avoid being Jack Valenti II? Can he help Hollywood befriend the Internet, not just the politicians it buys off with massive campaign donations? Here is some germane history. Puppetmasters from the biotech industry pulled Glickman's strings during his term as secretary of agriculture under Bill Clinton. But he was sensible enough to show sanity in the end and acknowledge his...

Dan Glickman, an ex-congressman from Kansas and ex-secretary of Agriculture, is replacing Jack Valenti as head of the Motition Picture Association of America. I've got a few constructive suggestions for the new guy. Coming in the next day or two.Related: Hollywood's Internet Avenger?, from Cynthia Webb in the Washington Post....

The best fix for the Sony Librie, the crippled technowonder that can't even display public domain books in HTML because Sony is so DRM-fixated, would be an OpenReader approach. That's what Jon Noring and I have been pushing.But what if Sony at least allowed nonDRMed HTML to be imported into the Librie format as a temporary measure--or, better, used a popular reading system like Mobipocket that already permits HTML imports?Just putting that idea out there. Sooner or later the market will tell Sony that a truly standards-based approach is better. But the importation strategy could work out in the...

When will Sony listen? Yuri Kageyama, an Associated Press writer Tokyo, is the latest journalist to complain about the Librie's Mission Impossible approach to DRM--books that self-destruct after 60 days. Like most everyone else, he loves the screen and the machine overall: it's the DRM that makes him uneasy. His thoughts:...you can't copy and paste passages to another computer or device. And copy protection built into the software garbles your books into useless data after two months. There's no way to digitally archive texts for later reference. That's a lot of restrictions, though the books available for this first...

What if you couldn't buy a Chevy or a Honda without a buggy whip? Alas, the buggy whip mentality is alive and well in some e-book vendors' dealings with libraries, which can lend only one copy of one e-book at a time. Want more library users at once to be able to check out a title? Then, in many cases, you need to buy more copies. Imagine the headaches for librarians, who cannot always predict what the demand will be.Now, however, Ebook Library, a partnership between EBooks Corporation and Dawson Books, is offering better approach, which will start out...