From an 3 Myths About the Recording Industry Debunked by Alec Hanley Bemis in the LA Weekly: MYTH NO. 1: The prevalence of file-trading services and free music on the Internet indicates that recorded music may no longer be an economically viable business.MYTH NO. 2: Record sales are down. The situation is only growing worse.MYTH NO. 3: Musicians no longer need the record industry. The Internet and other new technologies make this a new era of ...

Tom Clancy has made millions off gadget-loving fans caught up in his technothrillers like the NetForce series, but when it comes to e-books, he's a Luddite.He is so paranoid of piracy that he won't let his novels go electronic despite the huge global market this could help open up in time.Clancy's income vs. the industry'sAlong with heavy-handed DRM, the Tower of eBabel and the usual hardware challenges, lack of content is one reason why worldwide e-book sales have been just a fraction of Clancy's income in some recent years."Customers of eReader.com are always requesting titles by J.K. Rowling, John...

Washington, D.C., has a fifth-rate library system, at least from the perspective of the smarter people in the 'hoods. Mayor Anthony Williams, alas, is hardly a gung-ho library booster. Now, adding to the insult, the city wants to fritter away a fortune on baseball while the libraries suffer.Check out Marc Fisher's column in the Washington Post today. Fisher is a baseball fan but is correctly outraged at the prospect of the city approving what the front page describes as a $440 million financing package. I don't know what the net costs to the taxpayers would be, but this is...

A newcomer to e-books complains: "My main problem is that it's not as easy to reread something as it is with print, when the autoscroll is on. This is something I do a lot, since I'm a very fast reader."Maybe," she says, "there is a way to retrain myself to slow down? But, I always read right before bed, in bed, and tend to drop off while I sleep--not as easy to pick up where I left off, since I can't tell how much has scrolled."This is indeed a problem. Depends on the machine, but the auto-shutoff feature may...

Check out No-Guilt Downloads: Free Books, Music, and Movies, from PC World.Missing: A pointer to Blackmask, the most convenient place for public domain e-books in multiple formats....

SF writer James Patrick Kelly, skeptical in the past, is now happily e-booking away on his PDA.I should say here that I have long been one of those saurians who disliked reading for pleasure from a computer screen. But a couple of months ago, for reasons too boring to mention, I popped for a personal digital assistant (PDA) , mostly to keep track of appointments and addresses when I was away from my desk. As it happened, shortly after I made the buy, I went to Florida to attend the International Conference on the Fantastic and to soak up...

"Reading as a primary activity varied greatly by age. The oldest age group averaged an hour of reading per day, while the youngest averaged about 8 minutes." - News release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics., via Bill Janssen's post to the eBook Community List.The TeleRead take: Keep in mind that the stats are for recreational reading and do not include school-related time. Regardless, the 8 minutes is shockingly low.Based on the above, I'd say the real battle isn't between e-books and p-books. It's getting kids to read, period. The 8 minute figure is for both sexes in...

Since the early '90s TeleRead has been pushing for a well-stocked national digtal library system. It would be financed by tax money--at least in part--and would pay by the access. From a TeleRead perspective, I'm glad to see growing interest in approaches similar to the one I advocated in a 1992 Computerworld article. Here is an excerpt from the introduction of Promises to Keep, a new book by Harvard law professor William Fisher:Chapter 6 outlines the best of the possible solutions to the crisis: an administrative compensation system that would provide an alternative to the increasingly creaky copyright regime....

Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, in an interview with Technology Review, explains the concept of the semantic Web. The article is yet another reminder of how primitive e-books are compared to the future and even the present Web. As long as publishers and software vendors have the 'tude of "every book is an island," the medium will never reach its full potenital. Needless to say, an OpenReaderish approach would help.Related: Needed: An HTML-universal standard for e-books....

"After weeks of negotiations, the U.S. Senate could take action this week on a bill that would make it easier to sue 'peer-to-peer' networks like Kazaa and LimeWire that allow users to copy music and movies over the Internet." - Reuters.The TeleRead take: Yes, that's one of the questions here. But isn't it possible that the real issue might be something else--massive entertainment conglomerates trying to strangle disruptive technology, with the help of campaign donations? Why is it that news stories rarely mention the political contributions to Sen. Hatch and other INDUCE boosters, or the Music of Orrin Hatch?...

Earlier we suggested wikis as a new kind of book club--as a way for librarians and patrons to interact in discussing books. Now here's a new twist, from Jeremy Frumkin's Digital Librarian Blog.Suppose that "users could leave behind comments or annotations to a finding aid--providing additional information related to the materials located by the finding aid. It would open the door to sharing research experiences, allowing for collaborative research, and making it easier for future researchers to find the materials they need in a particular collection. Of course, it would also open up the possibility of allowing incorrect information...

"Anywhere Books has piloted a digital bookmobile--a van outfitted with a laptop, laser printer, bookbinding machine and cutter--in remote areas of Uganda to print free books for children since November 2003." - Rural Kids Print, Bind and Read, in Wired News, via ePublishing BlogThe TeleRead take: Print on demand is a terrific transitional technology, but ultimately, e-books will be the most cost-effective solution--and certainly the one capable of giving the kids the widest choice of reading material....