So, will e-books eventually enter the mix? Meanwhile this could be Good News for audio books. (Via New York Times.)...

Details from the Inquirer via Robert Webber. Also spotted in the Webber blog: Vendors are keeping too many rights, by Dan Gillmor....

The deadline: 12 a.m. PST, Wednesday. Go to Download.com. "Simply e-mail registerme@opera.com to obtain a registration code." Normal price for adless desktop Opera 8: $39. (Found at ...

...the Samsung X1 might be one way to go, weighing just 3.75 pounds despite a 14-inch screen. My own preference for e-books would be a tablet or PDA. But each to his/her own. E-books aren't the only reason for buying portables, and the big screen might appeal to some, especially on such a light machine. Fourteen inches would be on the large side for e-books, of course. But double-column software like yBook could help address that issue. (Via Chip Chick.)...

I've kicked Adobe, Microsoft and the others around--pointing out the problems with PDF and the rest. Now, how could those companies thrive with an OpenReader alternative? I'll be doing an essay in the next day or so and also pointing to a rather clueful blog coming right from the belly of the beast at Adobe (yes, there is some hope there). Robert Scoble, you've met your match in the Reaching Out Department....

Thoughts from Eric Goldman. Related: RSS: Not on My Desktop, from Publish....

Details from LibraryJournal blog....

Most scientific papers are probably wrong, says a headline at NewScientist.com. The solution, as I see it, just might be a healthy dose of blogging before formal publication--with ample opportunties for others to make comments. If need be, this could happen in private, password-protected areas. Whether in public or private, however, it needs to happen--with ample opportunity for others to try to replicate the results of experiments, ideally before publication. I'm not a scientist, but I can't tell you how much the TeleBlog has improved since I added comment areas. Needless to say, the more people exposed to the scientific...

Years ago, I designed a number of typefaces in an orgy of typophilia. One of them, CircleA, was inspired by the logo of the School of Visual Arts, in which the letters S, V and A were enclosed in circles. I released this font into the public domain, where it had a cold reception. The comment attached to this font to this day: "Not terribly useful."...

Electronic books were supposed to bring about a greater variety of titles--and above all be a growth market. So why is the International Digital Publishing Forum reporting 4,351 titles published in the e-book format in 2004, or 39 percent fewer than the previous year? And at some point was the boosterish IDPF covering up these stats from the public? I don't know. I ran across the numbers tucked away in the just-mentioned Arizona article in the Book Standard, and similar numbers appear in Inside Higher Ed News, which says: "the 23 publishers that responded to a survey made $9.62...

Educational software has been a big, big disaster area for certain publishers, but could it be that they'll have no choice but to return to the scene? Here are two very revealing paragraphs from the Book Standard's excellent article on the Arizona school that threw out paper textbooks in favor of laptops: Despite the growing interest in e-textbooks in education, the teachers at Empire took the digital learning experience a step further by outlining a curriculum that relies almost entirely on educational software and the Internet. Jeremy Gypton, a social-studies teacher at the school, and member of the committee that established...

Press release. Besides LIT for Microsoft Reader, other supported formats include HTML, XML, DOC, and PDF. The latter can be in "tagged" format, which will make it easier to produce reflowable text--so useful on smaller devices. Regardless, Adobe is a long way from taking the prize when it comes to the matter of a system for handhelds. If you want to give users control over the display of text, then alternatives are better....