Boosters of proprietary formats love to say that the e-book business will do just fine if the hardware is right. Yes, better screens will help. But it also won't hurt to tear down the Tower of eBabel and banish Draconian DRM. If you want an eyewitness account from someone who witnessed the Gemstar e-book debacle, very much eBabel- and DRM-related, then I would heartily recommend an MIT Technology Review post from Wade Roush (photo). Yes, he's the same guy who, along with Glenn Sanders, ran the late and lamented eBookWeb. Read Wade and see why consumers, schools and libraries should steer clear...

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The good news: Sony believes there's an e-book market out there (and don't we all!). The bad news (how do I break it to you?): Sony's gonna bomb. Big time. As my friend Mike Cane puts it, "The eejits!"...

Sony did a pretty good job--unwittingly, of course--of setting back the cause of e-books when it released the Librie with a horrid, DRM-hobbled proprietary approach. The E Ink technology was sensational, but the company's handling of it verged on the mean-spirited. Commercial books vanished after X number of weeks. And at first the Librie, shown here, did not even offer the ability to read nonDRMed books. Now Sony is at it again, with talk of a new e-reader to be released with the iPod business model in mind and selling for $300-$500. Beware. Maybe the interface will be slick, but short...

Here, via Wired News. The Writely program is only in beta, but based on a brief try that I gave it, there's promise here. I did not experiment with the blog feature, which is to work with WordPress and other popular choices. Yes, it can do Word format. ...

Recap: lib.ru is a massive Russian-language digital library, with both public-domain and copyrighted books, that is largely the work of Muscovite Maksim Eugenievich Moshkow. He recently answered some questions for the TeleRead blog. This is the last in a series of four posts from that interview. Catch up on the beginnings of the library here, e-books vs. p-books and how his site is helping the Russian publishing scene here, and his thoughts on file formats and the ideal e-book reader here. Today: one man's hobby-- the amount of work it takes to run the library, and the payoff of that effort. Managing the...

So is O'Reilly really comfortable with people being able to read so much for free? How about those books with short sections that slip past the cut-off filters--and end up entirely readable through Google Book Search? I still don't know what's on the mind of publisher Tim O'Reilly, shown here, but if you go by email from my friend Andy Oram, this issue could be far from settled. Andy, a veteran O'Reilly editor, emphasizes that he is just "speculating." But he did give me permission to quote him by name: Thanks for pointing me to this. An editor here also...

Excerpt: "The 770 is a bit of a geek's toy, but one even a borderline geek could get the hang of. Just make sure you've got great eyesight, and a willingness to periodically update system software." Spotted via Mike Cane. ...

Recap: lib.ru is a massive Russian-language digital library, with both public-domain and copyrighted books, that is largely the work of Muscovite Maksim Eugenievich Moshkow. He recently answered some questions for the TeleRead blog. This is the third in a series of four posts. You can read about the beginnings of his library here. His thoughts on copyright, e-books vs. p-books and the Russian publishing scene are here. Today: Format and reader issues File format Lib.ru provides e-books in plain text, and some in html. (Either one or the other--no Gutenberg-like format options.) The information available varies for any given book. Title and author are...

Here, from Poughkeepsie Journal....

Here, from Wired News. Excerpt: Enhanced podcasts can be viewed in iTunes and on the color iPod and the nano (the audio will play on earlier iPods, but they won't display images, of course). Video requires a brand new iPod, but most video clips will appear in the iTunes Video menu, and can be played in iTunes and added to any playlist. Yet another goody in Wired News: Shop 'Til They Lock. You might want to buy your tech toys now--for example, TV tuner cards with recording capabilities--before the makers hobble 'em with Draconian copyright controls. But before you act, read a...

Is this true and new? A somewhat well-known blogger has found "a significant" flaw in the security of Google's book searching service, and supposedly millions of books are in jeopardy. He tested his books-for-free hack on some titles from none other than O'Reilly, whose owner, Tim O'Reilly, just happens to be one of the main advocates of the Google service. I myself think the service is cool. But could it put in jeopardy the books that are done in short sections--not just programming guides, but also cookbooks and travel books? Or is the hack too much trouble to bother...