Did Bill Gates invent the Amaya editor to make people appreciate FrontPage and stop caring about Web standards and freeware? Amaya is the free WYSIWYG software from hell with an interface that only Rube Goldberg's hacker grandson could love. Forget about Amaya in most cases if you want to do XHTML Web sites or e-books. It's too sucky. But now there's a new kid on the block--the free Nvu editor, also WYSIWYG. It's standards-compliant, includes an integrated CSS editor and is based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine. Nvu does both HTML and XHTML and comes in flavors for Windows, Linux...

Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO, is pushing the idea of free, open-source textbooks. Laudable. But let's not see that as a panacea to reduce the urgent need for less-Hollywoodish copyright law--and for educating copyright wimps like John Edwards. Meanwhile here's the lowdown from ZDNet via LISNews on an initiative that McNearly is pushing: The effort, called the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC), produces curriculum materials such as online books for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. McNealy envisions the replacement of expensive and quickly out-of-date textbooks by shared online instructional materials, testing, grading and assessment tools, all created by experts....

Just to tease people, here are screen captures from the actual Nokia 770, not the emulator. Example below. And here's a first-person write-up of the 770 by someone who used it for more than an hour. Related: Nokia 770 full-screen mode revealed and the new 770 Fan blog. - Roger Sperberg ...

Several publishers, including M.J. Acharya, author of BreakUp Workbook, now the number one best-seller at eBookAd, have separately complained that the firm has ignored correspondence on payment issues. What's going on? eBookAd had assured us that the situation was under control. I am not an auditor, and I'm not up in the Toronto area to go through eBookAd's records, so I won't reach any conclusions here. But it would be terrific if Dustin Revin, the company's hard-working president, could take time out to give us the latest on what's happening. I'm rooting for eBookAd to thrive. That means good communications...

Isn't it interesting--the most recent choices of e-books at one pirate site--probably in Europe or the States: 1984 (apparently an audio edition), Brave New World and Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil? The site isn't storing the books but rather linking to them elsewhere. Regardless, might there be a message here? It's one thing to pirate or encourage the piracy of ephemeral music. But what do you do when modern literary classics and other serious books become pirate fodder--including those on matters of human freedom such as 1984? Perhaps content-providers...

Roger Sperberg, an author and e-book pioneer who has worked for Random House, Conde Nast Publications and the Electronic Directions consulting firm, is the newest contributor to the TeleRead blog. He is an important and much-cherished addition. TeleRead has always advocated a smooth transition from paper to electronic books, and that means the participation of people with traditional publishing industry experience--not just them but also them. Beyond that, he brings a wealth of technical knowledge about e-book standards. And best of all, rather than fixating on the past, he is looking ahead--as shown by his just-posted article on the Plucker...

Here are screen-captures of Plucker Viewer running in the Maemo SDK's virtual machine for the Nokia 770 internet tablet. These are the first shots of Plucker running in full-screen mode....

More from Jay Rosen, via the Huffington Post, which continues to have a much-better S/N ratio than I'd expected. "Mailer's first two tries at the Huffington Post I choose to call practice swings," Rosen writes. "Mailer the blogger has not yet appeared with a bat in his hand. Of course he was correct in 2002: writing seriously for the Internet (and learning to think with a link) 'would use up what I have left.'" My take: Can one really write seriously for the Net when we don't even have bleepin' permanent links? I hope Mailer sticks with books. Needless to say, a...

So you thought you were safe when you deleted cookies that snoopy online sites wanted? Guess again. From InternetWeek, via Mike Cane: United Virtualities is offering online marketers and publishers technology that attempts to undermine the growing trend among consumers to delete cookies planted in their computers. The New York company on Thursday unveiled what it calls PIE, or persistent identification element, a technology that's uploaded to a browser and restores deleted cookies. In addition, PIE, which can't be easily removed, can also act as a cookie backup, since it contains the same information. Comments Mike: "Hey, wait til the RIAA and...

As wrong as Michael Gartenberg can be on DRM, he's absolutely on the money about the significance of the new iTunes to podcasting....

Why not use movie PR to tune children into e-books? I made that point earlier this morning, and almost instantly Ellen Hage replied with credible advice--and other suggested pegs besides films. If nothing else, check out her just-made comments on the Juice Box (screenshot) and interactivity or lack thereof. - David Rothman Ellen Hage's e-book tips for mothers With all the interactive activities out there such as video games, MP3 players, DVDs, etc., reading a book can seem awfully dull. Reading then becomes a dreaded chore. And yet we know that children will perform poorly in school if...

Now that War of the Worlds is invading movie theaters, why not read the free e-book from a site such as Gutenberg, Blackmask, Manybooks.net or GutenTalk? You can also use the Wikipedia to find out about H.G. Wells--a brilliant popular-level writer, plagiarism notwithstanding. Here's the Internet trailer for the Spielberg film starring Tom Cruise and based on one of Wells' scariest and most famous works. Oh, and speaking of Martians, don't forget Edgar Rice Burroughs and A Princess of Mars. For parents: What's the lowdown here? Is it okay to tell your child, "Read the e-book and we'll go to the...