I've kicked the Dems' butts on copyright matters--especially John Edwards, the textile worker's son whose populism so far isn't making it into cyberspace. That said, here's a P2P-related reminder that the Dems hardly have a monopoly on cluelessness and vulnerability to Hollywood donations. Without doubt, Sen. Orrin Hatch (photo) and his GOP ilk remain the greatest threats. The one bright spot is that, with the Supreme Court having pandered so much to Hollywood, Congress isn't as hot to trot on Induce Act-style legislation. Jeeze. Not that long ago, I thought that cyberactivists were showing increasing optimism on D.C. and the...

Oh, how glad I was to see the Slashdot post on the Ham and Spam of Weblogs. "At times we see upwards of 90 percent of the traffic from Blogspot being spam," says Feedster CTO Scott Johnson--while predicting still more trouble ahead. Feedster and the rest can't solve the problem without admitting it. I applaud Scott's honesty. Within the "ebook" listings, Feedster is filtering out spam somewhat better than before in the wake of a complaint from the TeleBlog. But Technorati has yet to evict the BizboxSolutions blog, a prolific spamster, from the ebook tag category. Yo, Dave Sify (photo)? It'll...

Bill Gates' persistent cheerleading for the Tablet PC is good news for the e-book industry--even linux fans. No small number of high-tech journalists let business types do their trend-setting for them. And the e-book angle? Obvious. Tablets are better than laptops for reading e-books--at least for many, including me. You don't have to worry about the main part of the laptop getting between you and the screen. Meanwhile here are more Gates-related Tablet PC details via IDG News Service: ...he still believes in the form-factor and repeated a prediction that, with better hardware and software, it could still dominate...

More at Anildigital's Blog and Yummy. The concept: Use social bookmarks to help fans of PDF e-books share their finds. And guess what? Behind the site is none other than a print-on-demand service named PrintFu ("Nipping at Kinko's Heels, One PDF at a Time"). I'm not the biggest fan of PDF for reading, but for printing, it actually makes sense. As for the books, they're mostly geekish-computerish. And copyright? You're on your own, bro. PrintFu says that it "never looks at the content of the printed content." Um, I love the idea of the service, but wonder if fallout from...

Check out $8,000 Collection From Amazon.com Conjures Memories of the Dot-Com Boom, in the Wall Street Journal Online, via Jon Noring's post on the Book People List. Bottom line: almost $8,000 for a mere 1,082 paper classics from Penguin, compared to $0 from Gutenberg or Manybooks.net to read many more books. Of course, the Penguin collection includes modern greats such as Saul Bellow. Public domain e-book collections don't. Oh, well, perhaps you could splurge the $8K instead on Kurzweil-blessed life extension products to outlive that problem....

Details from Cnet: The Supreme Court handed movie studios and record labels a sweeping victory against file-swapping, ruling Monday that peer-to-peer companies such as Grokster could be held responsible for the copyright piracy on their networks. Related: Ernie Miller's notes from a pro-Grokster news conference. An anti-Grokster perspective: Charles Cooper. ...

Details via JK on the Run. Guest reviewer Mike Cane likes the forthcoming Nokia 770, especially the screen, which he describes as "just stunning," with "a full-range of brightness controls." The "color fidelity, saturation, and contrast are impressive. Text is very easy to read." Alas, the screen can't do portrait display for e-book fans, but Mike is hoping that a developer can address that failing. I heartily recommend you read the full review. ...

"I want all the books that I'm interested in on one shelf." - Overheard in The Library, a post in Casey Bisson's MaisonBisson blog. ...

Unless you have a VGA PDA, especially one running Windows Mobile 2003, you probably won't find that much to get excited about in the new Mobipocket 4.9. Those are my first impressions based on the specs, anyway. If I'm on the money here, is Mobipocket getting as smug as Microsoft and Adobe? Are the Mobipocket biggies not as innovative as before--now that they have Amazon.com cash? Or have they simply not had a chance yet to turn the Amazon investment into R&D? Either way, the general lack of meaningful progress in e-book readers is still another argument for OpenReader. With...

BBC story, via eBookAd. Of course, keep in mind that the present Google project is extremely limited in the size of the collection and what you can do with it. Let's see if the G Boys live up to the hype. Wouldn't it be fascinating if the French surpassed Google, while positioning themselves as the underdogs? At least Jack Valenti and Dan Glickman don't control French information policy. Jerry Lewis? Maybe. (Photo of French library from BBC.)...

No secret that I've been picking on John Edwards--deservedly. I see some real potential if he'll get serious about fighting poverty and declare his independence from the Hollywood money crowd. Valenti-esque copyright law is the enemy of poor people and of Poverty Fighter Number One, education. It can also harm high-tech job creation by saddling Net-related companies with new legal risks. If nothing else, without doubt, Hollywood-bought laws like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act will jack up the costs of digital libraries. Instead of worrying about his friend Jack Valenti, Prof. Edwards would do better to consider a...

Last night I finally got around to trying a beta of the PDF reader for the Cybook. Yes, it works. The bad news is that you're stuck with one font size, which is too small even on a ten inch screen (although the final version of the software will offer a zoom feature). Also, just as fellow Cybook user Ellen Hage discovered, the present beta is running slowly. Meanwhile, take it from me. Through the Brazilian Wilderness is vastly more enjoyable with uBook or Mobipocket than with PDF. At any rate, now that PDF is actually running, this should be good for...