Fearful that Google someday may lock up material now easy to access from the public domain, the Internet Archive is teaming up with major research libraries to provide a nonprofit alternative. Details from Information World Review:Ten major international libraries have agreed to combine their digitised book collections into a free text-based archive hosted online by the not-for-profit Internet Archive. All content digitised and held in the text archive will be freely available to online users.Two major US libraries have agreed to join the scheme: Carnegie Mellon University library and The Library of Congress have committed their Million Book Project...

How to get a handle on the collection of classics at Project Gutenberg? Well, PG's new Top 100 page could help. The top three downloads this week: Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, The Art of War and Some Christmas Stories.Related: Free ebooks from Project Gutenberg, in eSchool News....

A recording of a chatcast of Eudora Welty's book The Optimist's Daughter is now online in the Opal Archives. Ahead: an hour-long discussion of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. Below are details from chatcast host Tom Peters.Meting of the Minds, a regular chatcast for blind, visually impaired, and sighted individuals, will discuss Ethan Frome on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 beginning at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 7:00 Central, 6:00 Mountain, and 5:00 Pacific. If you are interested, please feel free to attend. There is no cost to participate, and no need to register. More...

Library automation consultant Roy Lewis raises this possiblity--a class action suit against Gemstar for preventing eBookwise (part of Fictionwise) from bringing DRMed books to old Gemstar machines in a convenient way. Writes Roy:I do not really understand why giving eBookTechnologies [Fictionwise's technology partner] my serial number and login and password is against the law. I am not trying to modify my ebook software, just load it with information. I will give them the data needed to recognize me/my device and they could create a title for it. The Class action would make sense because Gemstar is no longer providing...

"Digital technology is only a few years old, and even in that brief time, the digital world has produced dozens of incompatible, and often unreadable, media formats." - The Electronic Library, an editorial in the New York Times.The TeleRead take: Glad to see the Times mentioning the problem. Sad to see the Times so oblivious to efforts such as Project Gutenberg, which, for more than three decades, has been using "digital technology" in the form of the ASCII format. E-bookdom needs more than unadorned ASCII, of course, and OpenReader should help address standardization issues.(Thanks to Roger Sperberg for spotting...

In good faith, eBookWise/Fictionwise said it hoped to be able to modify Gemstar machines so they could work with new titles in a DRMed format. Gemstar owners rejoiced. This would at least mitigate the horrors of the Tower of eBabel for owners of beauties like the RCA-branded machine pictured here, which uses Gemstar technology and can't read common modern formats such as Mobipocket. My wife and I own the RCA and two monochrome Gemstars 1100s. I'm taking this very personally.So far, however, the greedster mindset is winning out. Here's what Fictionwise, a victim like the rest of us, is...

Gung-ho owners of e-books don't just collect novels and histories and the rest, hundreds of which may lurk on an enthusiast's memory card. How about the machines themselves? "An e-book ranch"--that's what a midwestern friend of mine says he owns, having amassed several machines from the Rocket eBook family, along with a Sony PDA. The most picky of the e-book ranchers can't stop wondering which screens are most viewable, which dedicated readers are built most ruggedly, which offer the easiest-to-use controls and so on.Forgive the mixed comparison, but in their enthusiasm, e-book ranchers are as incurable as owners of...

"The Librie has always been more of a proof-of-concept for Philips' high-res electronic-ink technology than an actual consumer product, so don't be surprised if it vanishes without fanfare at some point in the near future, only for the screen tech to reappear in a Clie or some other real Sony product." - Engadget.The TeleRead take: Ouch! I love my Clie PDA and was dismayed to learn recently that Sony will no longer introduce new models of this product line in the States, at least. Is that still true? But on to the main point here:Now that the Librie no...

Sven Neuhaus and other public-spirited programmers opened up the Librie tablet earlier this year to Project Gutenberg books and others in nonSony-blessed formats. The company itself is now sensible enought to offer its own conversion tools as well, although the Neuhaus-related offerings would continue to be worth paying attention to. See his mailing list and wiki. Meanwhile, from Tokyo, here is the happy news about the Librie from Andreas Bovens' blog:In April 2004, I reported about Sony...

"Adobe Systems has patched two bugs in its ubiquitous Acrobat Reader application that could allow an attacker to take over a user's system via a malicious pdf file attached to an e-mail message. The bugs affect Windows, Mac OS X and Unix." - Adobe patches holes in Reader, in Computerworld, Australia.The TeleRead take: And this is the outfit that pubishers are trusting to copy-protect e-books? Far better to have a less proprietary approach. While copy-protection isn't the same as the system takeover issue, some of the same concepts apply. Here's to the idea of an open source reading system...

Lest info-junkies think that nirvana is here, now that Google and certain major libraries have inked deals, keep in mind some important limits for users. Check out Here's what you will and won't be able to see when searching for library books on Google, in the Detroit Free Press. A TeleRead-style approach, of course, would help address the issue of access to copyrighted material. It would also help integrate e-books and other content with the U.S. library system and schools while preparing librarians and teachers. Equivalents of TeleRead could start up in other countries.Detail: In fairness to Google,...

Here's a follow-up to our Cybook post--a message from Laurent Picard of Bookeen, the company behind the machine:We recently heard from a 97-year-old grandmother (she was 96 when her granddaughter bought it for her), in the south of France, who is now able to read novels in large print. Though we also designed the Cybook to meet this need, it always impresses and comforts us to receive such feedbacks. In fact, a not so small fraction of our customers are vision-impaired people. We develop special "Vision" graphical interfaces for them.What better use of e-books? Speaking of hardware, I've now...