When the Greensboro News & Record ran "Bus Driver Bob's" obit on the front page of the final edition, it accidentally omitted the continuation on an inside page. In the past there would have been just a rerun of the story and a formulaic apology. You'd never have seen a personal note from Editor John Robinson (photo) appearing the same day in a blog.OK, now here's the library angle. Does anyone know of top librarians of big-city libraries doing their own blogs? Perhaps explaining new services or problems with the old? Or sharing the enthusiasm for certain authors? Must...

A beta version of the GEB eBook Librarian lets you adjust your font size and margins and also bold the text that you import into the eBookwise-1150 and other machines that use Gemstar technology, including the RCA eBooks.Download the beta from this page. To access the new features, choose "Advanced" within the "Create New" menu.Great for people with vision problemsFor the moment, the option will work only with .txt files you bring in, but programmer Steve Breen will soon be offering capabilities in other formats as well. Hey, way to go! Thanks to Steve, the Gemstar-related machines will be...

So is the quality/crap ratio deteriorating in the free regions of the Internet? Here are some thoughts from Adrian Viegas in Techtree.com: India's High Tech Daily:I had depended on the Internet a lot when I was doing my first year of masters in English Literature. My work didn't give me the time to visit libraries, but it opened the entire Internet to me. Information was very easily available. More important was the quality of the essays and reviews posted on the Internet. Quite often I needed information and quotes of a critic on a particular text and it was...

If you doubt that the Tower of eBabel is a turnoff for prospective converts to e-books, check out a clueful post by Rochelle Hartman--a librarian friend of mine in the midwest. Rochelle is not a programmer. But she is far, far more tech-savvy than the typical librarian. In character, in the Tinfoil+Raccoon blog ("looking for the new and shiny in libraryland and beyond"), she warns of the harm that proprietary formats can do.Rochelle says that if she were to pay $18.50 for an autobiography of Bill Clinton in electronic form, there would be "no guarantee that I could use...

Remember one of the little nits I had about the Cybook? I noted that aRMiTaG3, author of a generally pro-Cybook review, worried that dust particles might show up under the screen of the e-book reader. He had an easy fix anyway--keeping the stylus in place. Now, Michael Dahan at Bookeen, the company selling the Cybook, has even better news in an email to me:1) For the time being the dust problem has been reported by only one person (Sorry Armitag for this issue).2) We checked all our screens before shipments and we never noticed any kind of dust under...

Yes, I get it--why Laurent Picard has included uBook, not just Mobipocket and Boo Reader, on his Cybook. You should see Crime and Punishment on a ten-inch screen in double-column landscape mode. I can even read the smallest type of uBook's five size-related choices. Forget about that with Mobipocket, even on the Cybook. The type would look too dot-matrixy. What's more, with uBook, I can adjust the type size more precisely.I'm hereby telling Laurent that he and David Jean at Gowerpoint (the uBook outfit) may want to do some cross promo. As I've said before, Cybook's philosophy is the...

From MobileRead--an informative post by Morpheus:David at Gowerpoint has just released a new version of his wonderful Pocket PC e-book reader uBook - version 0.9b.Here's what's new:-- New e-book formats supported (eReader, MobiPocket -> if not encrypted, PML, Rocket eBook, CHM, PDF -> if not encrypted)--Increased (artificial) limit of num words per minutes to 1200.--Fixed images, nag, tables and stream bugs.--Updated manual--New skin: n0de by Marcus KoppClick here for a full overview of all ubook features including screenshots.ubook is a shareware product. A licence costs $12US and works for all versions of the reader. The unlicenced version is not...

Below are the six biggest news stories in e-bookdom in '04:1. The creation of the OpenReader Consortium. I'm a founder but would feel the same way if I weren't. We need to raze the Tower of eBabel, and some heavy-hitters have now expressed their support for the OR concept. A list of them will appear in early '05.2. The library/Google's convergence and competing efforts from the Internet Archive. Speaking of convergence, let's hope that this event converges soon with #1. Libraries, Google and the Archive all will benefit from OpenReader.3. The Librie, of course--the first e-book reader with E...

IBM's OmniFind program will offer"unstructured information management architecture, or UIMA" and,, according to I.B.M., "will lead to a third generation in the ability to retrieve computerized data." - James Fallows in a New York Times column headlined At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday.The TeleRead take: Here's a page with more details on how the product could fit into IBM's vision. Possibilities for libraries? The same column discusses other companies' search-related efforts, including those for the desktop.Related: Slashdot reaction (via LISNews)....

The big hassle with e-books on cellphones is that the screens are too small. But what if you could just roll the screens out? Details from Yahoo News, via eBookAd:Cambridge-based Plastic Logic is to work with US firm E Ink to produce what could be the nearest computing has yet got to electronic paper.It has also signed a deal with Siemens to develop flexible screens for mobiles.The company, which was spun-off from Cambridge University, has demonstrated a screen that can bend to a radius of 5mm, a format that would enable its use in mobile displays that scroll out...

Emma Bovary, a denizen of the French provinces, was fed up with the selection of romantic novels from lending libraries. Might electronic books be a solution?But she disliked the small print and all the scrolling needed on PDAs. Nor would she buy one of the e-book devices designed by Gemstar; even beauties like the RCA color machine lacked sufficient resolution for her. She almost purchased the Sony Librie. But the E Ink screen was monochrome, and in keeping with her artistic tendencies, she wanted color.Then the town druggist told Madame Bovary about the Cybook, perhaps the most stylish of...

Jason Epstein, one of the grand old men of publishing, who helped popularize quality paperbacks, has a piece in the MIT Technology Review on The Future of Books. He's especially keen on print on demand technology, just as he is in Book Business: Publishing: Past, Present and Future. (Found via LISNews.)...