Details from Deutsche Welle, via LISNews....

Podcasting Killed the Radio Star is a headline over a Wired News piece--announcing an all-podcast station in San Francisco. Hmm. Shades of the approach that Al Gore is taking with videos. Related: I Left My iPod in San Francisco and Internet TV Age Is Dawning, but Who Will Watch?, both from the Washington Post, and Podcasting: Making Wave, from Forbes....

Not everything is horrible about the new Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. The latest from the Hollywood Reporter: The FECA law also renews the Library of Congress' film preservation program. It also corrects a drafting error in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that will allow libraries to create copies of "orphan works"--copyrighted materials that are in the last 20 years of their copyright term and are no longer commercially exploitable. Related: Text of FECA and Walt Crawford's FMA: Watching the Way You Want....

Courtesy P.G. Wodehouse--inspiration for author Andy Ihnatko. Composed in 24 hours. MP3 Link. (Via Paul Jones.)...

At this point it still isn't clear whether Microsoft's Metro will include an e-book-oriented reader. One argument against this: the fact that the Metro approach is page-oriented. But could marketing considerations prevail over technological ones? Things are still unclear. And as Adobe shows, some folks will use the page-oriented approach for e-books. Of course, the real solution is OpenReader....

Is Microsoft about to inflict on us another e-book reader tied to Windows, just like Microsoft Reader? And DRMed books that can't be read on other platforms? Via the just-announced Metro effort, Microsoft may be mirroring Adobe's strategy of making an e-book reader part of a general viewer--and then using proprietary DRM to lock in the readers of best-sellers from "protection"-crazed publishers.. Beware. Even "open formats" don't count with closed DRM, especially if the full works will run just on Windows machines. Let's hope that the dots don't connect and that we won't see in effect another proprietary approach like Microsoft...

"The next version of Windows will include a new document format, code-named 'Metro,' to print and share documents.... Metro appears to rival Adobe Systems's PostScript and PDF (portable document format) technologies." - Computerworld. The TeleRead take: The doc-ex technology, personally unveiled by Bill Gates, is XMLish and files can be opened up from Internet Explorer. Could that aspect of it could be aimed at Firefox as well? And what's the e-book angle? Will an encrypted and e-book-optimized version of "Metro" replace Microsoft Reader--adding yet another occupant to the Tower of eBabel? That is just speculation. But it's a natural question. Needless...

When Apple finally does e-books, it undoubtedly would love to be Player #1 and dominate the field, the way iTunes looms over rivals in online music. But would an Apple monopoly or other prominent role in e-books be good for readers? The big issues apparently wouldn't be just price and choice. Turns out that Apple, which once contrasted itself with Big Bro IBM in a TV commercial, has done a BB Act itself. Gone from 103 Apple stores is iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business. In fact, other Wiley books have also vanished from...

Today's e-book devices are like eyeglasses or hearing aids, a highly individual choice. By the time e-books have really arrived, the displays will be so good that preferences won't count so much. Everything will be perfect. Ultimately many e-books machines will be like paper books, with flippable pages. Example of the situation right now: A new acquaintance dislikes the viewing-angle limit of the Cybook LCD. Also the screen is far too big for him. Then again, after a week with her new Cybook, Ellen Hage couldn't be happier. "I am now at the point where I don't want to let it...

Good news, audio e-book fans. The risk of a traffic accident seems to be less than with a cell phone. This is old news but worth revisiting, given the growth of audio books....

This translation tool might help, at least in the case of nonDRMed books. (Via MobileRead.)...

Another free DP release: My Adventures as a Spy, the 1915 book by Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. So how does a caption on Page 52 explain the butterfly? Well, the sketch "contains the outline of a fortress, and marks both the position and power of the guns. The marks on the wings between the lines mean nothing, but those on the lines show the nature and size of the guns, according to the keys below." Sorry, I lack room to show the keys and the rest of the scheme, but why not download the whole book and...