Sounds basic. But many people--and I'm one--have not done it often enough. Instead of just raving on to a friend about the glories of e-books, why not give a demo?"I showed my Palm Zire 71 to a friend last night at a party," Brad writes in the ePublishing Blog, "and told him there were over 40 books on that device, many of them free. He was amazed and went and showed it to his wife. This despite the fact that I had been telling him about PDA's and ebooks for months on an online forum. Like so much in...

Philip Roth once bemoaned the scarcity of American readers interested in truly serious literature.I don't remember what statistic he came up with--just that it might have been not much more than small-town-sized. E-book technology, of course, could help more of the right books reach more of the right readers. Readable sample chapter So can brilliant writing that is just plain good reading. And such is the case with Roth's The Plot against America, a sample chapter of which I've just downloaded from National Public Radio--after taking in Robert Siegel's audio interview with him, via a link on the same page. In...

Just how obtuse can the High Lit world get? Here we are--in the era of E Ink, with e-books ahead that will have flippable pages, just like paper. And yet Anne Fadiman, the departing editor of The American Scholar and author of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, is uttering such malarkey as: I worry that electronic books will become increasingly sophisticated and therefore increasingly popular. The content may be the same, but there's no substitute for actually holding a book in one's hands and taking it to bed at night. The difference between an e-book and a...

Hurt by weak sales, Toshiba is leaving the U.S. market for PDAs, according to an article and accompanying editorial in Brighthand and a scoop in BargainPDA. Here's another warning to e-book publishers not to bet everything on the PDA platform.Among the biggest reasons for Toshiba's departure, I suspect, is the trend toward PDA-cellphone combos--not to mention the fact that the market may simply be saturated right now. But the bungling of the e-book industry harmed Toshiba to at least a small extent and maybe much more. If it weren't for clumsy DRM schemes and the Tower of eBabel, then...

Blogger Glenn Reynolds wisely suggested to the Republicans that they could make an issue of the Democrats' sellout to Hollywood--given all the millions of music downloaders. That hasn't happened yet. However, the possibility has grown, now that the American Conservative Union has run a hard-hitting ad against INDUCE-style legislation. We see a movie threater marquee announcing: NoW PLAYINGThe S.2560 Horror"Chilling!"Here's the remainder of the advertisement (PDF alert)--discussed on CNET and also by Dan Gillmor's blog:Hollywood is once again trying to crush innovation to maintain its entertainment distribution monopoly. And this time they...

In the eBook Culture blog, Richard MacManus continues to plug away on the need for e-bookdom to develop a true standard--just as HTML is the standard for the Web world.Richard is eager to see OpenReader in action. Jon Noring and I and the rest of us feel the same way and are looking for qualified standards-setters from the publishing and XML worlds. The press can help by spreading the word. I expect we'll be up against the 'tude of many journalists and nonjournalists alike--namely that the status quo will endure forever. Mentions in the big-time press could help energize...

No, PDAs aren't the solution for all who want to read e-books--screens are smaller than many readers would like. But it would be nice to see certain journalists at least acknowledge PDAs' existence, as opposed to making readers think that a Web browswer needs to be the norm. In the Kansas City Star, book critic John Mark Eberhart writes that he won't read e-text because of "eye strain" and goes on to say: I still find it much easier to read a printed page than sit in front of a computer screen. There used to be a couple good...

Ian E. Wilson is the new Librarian and Archivist of Canada. (Found via LISNews.)...

Check out this Techdirt item and a BBC report....

Bruce Lehman, a copyright zealot and a thuggish one at that during his days as Bill Clinton's IP czar for cyberspace, says he is "playing a relatively minor role" on John Kerry's Technology Committee.The word "minor" would contradict an earlier rumor mentioned here. Another Kerry flip-flop? Anyway, an anonymous source tells the National Journal Tech Daily that Lehman "is not part of Kerry's core group of advisers." Here are other details from the Lessig blog:...whether core or fringe, why is he part of ...

Isn't it a little silly to force libraries to buy "copies" of e-books for each borrower allowed to access them at once? That's often the case in today's e-book business. Imagine the mess that results when there is a sudden spike in the demand for best-sellers.An interesting alternative is one that TeleRead has advocated for years--the concept of public lending rights, with fees paid per access. The Wikipedia has a nifty little article on the concept, with a mentions of countries where libraries pay for lending rights to paper books....

Musician David Byrne "compared online file-sharing services to free public libraries, and pointed out that those institutions once were a new concept, too. He said: 'If you were a publisher, you didn't say, "Oh no, Mr. Carnegie, don't go build those libraries--it's going to destroy our business."'" - This Compilation CD Is Meant To Be Copied and Shared, in the Wall Street Journal.The TeleRead take: Andrew Carnegie did not invent the concept of public libraries. But whoever did must have encountered opposition--which is unfortunate. Libraries and bookstores can indeed complement each other, the former helping to build demand for...