So where is epaper--which includes E-Ink--headed? Check out Epaper: The Flexible Electronic Display of the Future, Geoff Daily's article in EContent. Excerpt: Despite repeated promises of a paperless office, paper continues to be the primary method of distributing and viewing textual content, and with good reason. "The paper that we read today is a fantastic display—lightweight, easy to read, and rugged—except for the fact that it's completely static," says Darren Bischoff, senior marketing manager at E-Ink, which manufactures electronic ink imaging film. The challenge, he continues, is "how do you make something that's dynamic but also has some of these...

Jessamyn West and Jason Griffey have some good posts on DRM insanity. Now consider a message from veteran e-booker Lee Fyock on the eBook Community list--adamantly insisting that certain live writers and estates are dead set against e-books without DRM; in fact, against e-books period. Heavy stone tablets vs. Lite Protection Let the marketplace settle this one. Of course my own thinking is that without DRM the e-book business would be at least ten times its present size, now a miserable $50 million or less in annual global sales. But forget about that. Let's just carry the clueless authors' paranoia to its...

I loved A Dying Craft, or a Dying Business? As part of his post, Dan Gillmor warns against letting media companies mooch off citizen journalists who are actually doing the work of traditional reporters. Far from an enemy of the citizen journalism movement, Gillmor is one of its mainstays. But he writes: "I've heard through the grapevine about newspaper executives who think the answer may well be to encourage some form of citizen journalism--meaning, in their construct, getting people to do all the work pro journalists do today but for no compensation while the business collects the revenues. Now there's a...

Mobipocket sucks for serious academic publishing and similar purposes--we still need OpenReader for that reasons and many others. Still, Mobipocket has its possibilities for recreational reading. I was not surprised, then, to read that Franklin had sold its Mobipocket shares to Amazon. What's next? Will Amazon start encouraging publishers to use Mobipocket rather than Microsoft's neglected Microsoft Reader and the cumbersome Adobe Reader? ...

"Freelance writers have reached a settlement worth as much as $18 million with The New York Times Co. and other defendants in a copyright infringement case involving work posted online or in databases." - Reuters The TeleRead take: I'm happy to see the settlement, given how abused writers are. Of course, publishers are now forcing writers to sign contracts that make them give up syndication and database rights anyway. So while this is a legal victory, is it a practical one? The other issue is that writers don't just create content, they also consume it, especialy in their research. What will...

Nope, you're not paranoid if you think that the Washington bureaucracy is reducing the amount of useful information released to the public. Oh, the ironies. At the same time Washington is as eager as ever to peddle press releases disguised as news. (Via ABC and On the Media.)...

"This past week I launched an open source social bookmarking competitor to delicio.us - de.lirio.us. After running it for a while open to the public, it appears to be running relatively bug free so this is the invitation to the Slashdot crowd. The code is entirely open and the content is cc licensed, so I'm sure it won't take too long for folks to cook up some additional tools aside from the blogging feature." - Slashdot contributor known as comforteagle. Note: Comforteagle's site is down right now--apparently from the Slashdot effect. Meanwhile here's background on social bookmarking....

Craig Swenson, provost of the University of Phoenix, the e-learning giant, will speak at an Open eBook Forum conference on April 14 in New York City. The topic: "How Professionals Learn Today -- Intentional Learning and the Irrelevance of Textbooks." Other conf details: During the one-day conference, attendees will hear from leading educators, publishers and technology vendors on advances in the access and delivery of digital academic content. In addition to Dr. Swenson, presentations will be made by executives and representatives from WebCT, Connections Academy, Virtual High School, Blackboard, OverDrive, Thomson Learning Labs, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Microsoft and others. Hey,...

Seventy-five hundred people joined OurMedia in just eight days, according to J.D. Lasica, a cofounder. Read the transcript of a chat session with him, via mediacasting. Oh, and it looks as if the early predictions are panning out. Big-time media are approaching J.D., he says, to "tap into this network of freely shareable content."...

When I proposed a well-stocked national digital library system in the 1990s in Computerworld, I suggested a mix of TV-set taxes, general revenue and subscription fees determined by income. A distributed network of librarians in many cities, I said, could develop and manage the TeleRead collection, and authors could be paid based on download counts. In my book NetWorld I advocated the use of trusted third parties to preserve the privacy of library patrons. Other private companies could do audits--anything to reduce the Big Brotherish threat from Washington while maintaining the integrity of the system. Since I made the orignal...

If you love e-books, there's a good chance you're younger than the average p-book reader here in the States. Chance are you're also open to technologies such as file-sharing, which could drive down the cost of book distribution, especially with more imaginative buisness models in use. An important P2P case is before the Supreme Court today. With interest, then, I just heard lawyer Theodore Olson, a lobbyist for the RIAA and MPAA, say on C-SPAN that his 16-year-old granddaughter had to explain to him what peer-to-peer file sharing was all about. Pathetic! As if that isn't enough, the Washington Post today...

When will Sony listen? Exceptions exist, but generally the world hates propretary standards--whether for the PlayStation Portable or e-book devices such as the Librie. In the current BusinessWeek, tech columnist Stephen Wildstrom goes after Sony's PSP. Urging an "attitude adjustment," he writes: Sony has made much of the PSP's music-player abilities. But three years into the iPod era, it's amazing the company got it so wrong. There's no concept of automatic sync, standard on other players for loading songs. Instead, you must find the music files on your computer. Then you copy them onto the PSP's Memory Stick memory card, either...