Here via a SearchEngineWatch article and Gary Price....

In his essay on the Problem of Length and the Novel Michael Allen writes:We must always remember, however, the effects of survivorship bias. When we look back at the past, and see big thick books which became famous, we are seeing the survivors. A select band indeed. We do not see the big thick books which were bloody boring and of no real interest either to the literati or the hoi polloi. Neither do we see those novels which never achieved publication at all, because they were judged to be too short. Who knows what lost masterpieces were in...

Korea, having left the States in the dust in the area of broadband, now even has mobile TV. And that's probably good news on the whole for the e-book industry--since the same hardware could be used for e-books. More from Colin at MobileRead. Also in MR: PalmPDF V0.8 released....

Here, via an NL article in Search Engine Watch....

Will LCD prices drop as a result of 3M's patent expiring for brightness-enhancement film? Details from Digitimes....

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"Last week, there was a heated discussion on the 1600-member Yahoo Groups videoblogging list about the idea of a videobloggers launching a 'war on text'--not necessarily calling for book burning, but at least promoting the use of threaded video conversations as a way of replacing text-based communication online." - Lisa Lynch in if:book, commenting on this post and others. The TeleRead take: Oh, great. Just when the Net is encouraging young people to write Web forum message, e-mails and IMs, some v-zealots want a "war on text"? I myself see video and text as working together, and I suspect that...

Here and here on the eBook Community List. New Yorker ordering info here. $61 Amazon deal here. Before ordering, read what Amazon customers say about the severe technical limitations--such as the inability to consolidate the eight CDs on your hard drive....

Here, from KC Star. Vendor is NetLibrary, which also supplies e-books. Not surprisingly, given NetLibrary's limitations, the KCPL isn't stirring up that much interest in e-books for pleasure reading. Excerpt: According to the library's Web site, "NetLibrary digital audiobooks cannot be played on iPods," and it currently isn't possible to download eAudiobooks to Apple's desktop or laptop computers. NetLibrary chose the Windows-based format because it offers stronger copyright protection, a big concern for publishers, Gammon said. ...

Price gouging and the less-than-optimal PDF format--those are among the complaints that an IT-Director.com article makes against e-book publishers in the U.K. Via LISNews. Excerpt: Many e-book systems are based on Adobe PDFs, which, while adequate, does little but reproduce hard copy in electronic form. The way forward lies in creating dynamic models, which will enable very cost effective and flexible access to the greatest number of readers, but at the same time does not reduce the benefits to publishers of making books available in e-book form. The technology to satisfy and reconcile the economic interests of all stakeholders in the development...

"Having a devl of a time figuring out these words? It's text messaging meets the classics. Test your decoding skills by taking our quiz. C Pg 3." - The Washington Post. Warning: I could find only the promo link. It'll be interesting to see The Real Story. Menawhile let me offer a serious angle. Some English teachers fret that text messaging is corrupting The Language. Any thts, 1wy or anthr? Update: A full story on text messaging and the classics--from the Book Standard, which reports that U.K. students can now get summaries of the classics as text messages. Cool! Please...

Motion Mountain's PDF file here Online viewing option, too. Spotted via Boing Boing, where BB's Cory Doctorow found "loads of great examples. I haven't had a chance to do more than skim, but this looks like a great basic text, and it's fully searchable, which makes it perfect to dip into when you have a particular subject you want to get up to speed on." Also in Boing Boing: Washington Post asks readers to remix it. In a future post, I'll have a few thoughts on the remixing, which happens via RSS feeds and APIs....