From the Fictionwise list:Today is the very last day for the $99.95 special. The price of the ebookwise-1150 goes to $129.95 after midnight tonight. The $20 content credit will remain in effect, however, for a while.eBay Department: Current price on my RCA REB1200 color eBook is just $112.50 with a 128M memory card and spare battery, and the auction ends tomorrow, sob, sob. Go ahead. Exploit me!...

"The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp." - The hundred-buck PC, in Red Herring (links added to quote).The TeleRead take: That's good news not just for the Third World and Silicon Valley but also for the e-book industry and consumers. The Red Herring article says: "Mr. Negroponte's idea...

OK. Jon Noring and I have made it clear. We'll have DRM in OpenReader for interested publishers--and let the marketplace sort out the issue. Many smaller publishers actually hate it. But if Random House loves DRM, we'll allow it and do our best with the implementation--just so book-buyers can vote in the end. We've got a top network security expert ready to work on this.In this blog today, guest contributor Scott Redford, owner of Diesel eBooks, eloquently passes on a retailer's perspective on the complexities here, and we want to be responsive.At the same time, it's important to remember...

E-book readers, writers and publishers aren't the only victims of the Tower of eBabel. Retailers suffer, too. Below, L. Scott Redford, president of Diesel eBooks, a 35,000-title virtual store based in Richmond, Virginia, speaks out on the need for standards in DRM and formats. He hopes that the marketplace will create them; and that's our wish at OpenReader, too. We believe that a XML/CSSish consumer standard, carefuly crafted with input from stakeholders ranging from librarians to e-bookstores, will prevail in the natural course of things. - David RothmanBy L. Scott RedfordJust how do we make the "e" in e-books...

David Faucheux, a TeleRead volunteer, normally reviews books and other forms of cultural from the perspective of a blind MLIS. But today's post in his Blind Chance blog is on different and especially urgent topic: The blind-hostile DMV: Blind pedestrian safety questions scarce on drivers tests. Check it out. Any journalists out there care to write on this? Its importance will grow as America ages and the number of the blind increases--along with elderly drivers in need of training to cope with less-than-youthful coordination and vision....

I can't help expressing my joy that AT&T will vanish into the maw of SBC.What a loathsome outfit. AT&T's VoIP service, contrary to the advertising, didn't offer three-way capability when I used it. I cancelled and went through billing hell, with AT&T at one point unable to tote up the exact amount owed--but still threatening my credit rating when I refused to pay without a trustworthy figure. I was hardly the first victim of AT&T's mix of sleaze and incompetence. Believe me, the smile on that lady in the ad is most misleading, at least as applied to my...

The Last Time I Saw Paris, the 1954 Liz Taylor-Van Johnson movie, based on Babylon Revisisted, the classic short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is online for free via the Internet Archive. Did MGM slip up with the copyright? Whatever the explanation, the Archive lists the movie as being in the public domain. Enjoy. That's what I intend to do. Comcast has just increased its download speed in my area from 3 to 4 mbps, and since QuickTime streaming from the Archive isn't working on my system, I'll download this as an MPEG4....

The Toronto public library now offers 5,000 titles, directly or indirectly, and even lends out Rocket eBooks. (Via Anidada's Live Journal.)...

Project Gutenberg has bombed in the library world--for two reasons beyond the usual fears of e-books.First, Gutenberg in the past has not bothered with the requisite cataloging rituals. Second, while the texts are catnip for recreational readers who love the classics, many are worse than useless for scholars. They're nuke-level career risks for academics. How can you cite e-texts when you don't know which paper editions were used as sources? And what about the typos that mar scads of Gutenberg books not processed by the quality-minded folks at Distributed Proofreaders, the heart and soul of Gutenberg these days?Well, to...

"Spotted in Japan: vending machines that sell software, ebooks, and games for Palms and Pocket PCs. You just pick the one you want, select your preferred memory card format (CompactFlash, SD, or Memory Stick), and out pops a card with your software loaded up on it. It seems they...

The Cybook and Librie are my hardware fixations of the moment, since they apparently have the best screens of the dedicated e-book machines that are already on the market. I'll also track the Gemstar devices because of the revival by Fictionwise/eBookwise and eBoook Technologies, Inc., as well as the tricks that Steve Breen's GEB eBook Librarian will make possible. Yes, Steve has more wrinkles on the way. Needless to say, I'll welcome readers' suggestions as to other here-and-now technologies in the e-book area that I should be tracking closely.Meanwhile here's more on the Cybook in a library environment, from...

Rochelle Hartman, the Raccoon of the Tinfoil+Raccoon blog, is trying out a Cybook, and she can easily read Bob Dylan's new autobiography off the screen.So much for Prof. Geoffrey Nunberg's silly comparison between e-book reading and touring Normandy by looking through a bombsight. Reading off a computer screen, Rochelle says, "um, like you're doing now," is not "unnatural." My friend, a librarian in the Midwest, writes: "I didn't even give a second thought to the medium once I launched into one of the best-written, most compelling books I've picked up in a long time."The bad newsOK. I figured I'd...