The guy down in that small Southern town--the place with a thirty percent illiteracy rate--chatted with me yesterday about e-books and other do-goodin' stuff. We're thinking Last Mile, the whole works, and inevitably WiFi came up. It turns out that Florida has a horrible law--industry-bought, of course--that can possibly wreak havoc on jurisdictions trying to do WiFi. So what's the lesson for e-books? Well, in the cases of both WiFi and e-books, laws have been used to bolster short-term commercial interests, harming the long-term interests of even the companies themselves. Far from cutting out commercial WiFi providers, MuniFi should...

The library world has been kicking around the definition of Library 2.0 and what's truly new. Meanwhile Rochelle has a pretty good take on 2.0 from a somewhat different perspective--as part of a discussion on libraries and the concept of community. Ideally the library world will spend a little less time spelling out the details of "new"--and a lot more time discussing specific ways for Library 2.0 to come about as a community-builder to augment the old-fashioned brick, mortar and sneaker variety. As Rochelle correctly sees it, an important part of Library 2.0 is the ability of readers to "discuss and...

Here, from Slashdot. That's good news for OpenReader since we want to an OpenOffice plug-in to serve as a creation tool for individuals and small publishers....

"According to the Lowell Sun, U.S. Rep Marty Meehan's staff has been heavily editing his Wikipedia bio, among other things removing criticisms." - Slashdot....

"Assume the industry successfully establishes an XHTML-based reflowable document format based on the evolution of OEB, with an associated single-file container package with pluggable DRM, then I see no strong raison d'etre for Mobi, BBeB, or any of the other OEB-derivative eBook formats to hang around forever. That doesn't mean BBeB will go away overnight and indeed Sony has discussed taking steps to make it more open and accessible, but in the long run I believe the momentum behind interoperable XML-based formats is unstoppable." - Adobe exec Bill McCoy. Related: MobileRead reaction. ...

Over at Scobleizer and Business 2.0/CNN, they're mentioning the TeleBlog's observations on cellphones vs. MIT's laptop project for Third World kids. Robert Scoble says he can read better off a nice, big screen--but that when he goes to London he sees folks reading with phones, not laptops. He himself reads "thousands of words per day on my cell phone." Heck, Robert, that's cool, but with a larger screen it might be tens of thousands of words. Furthermore, typical TV screens, which billg wants used with cellphones via adapters, are excruciatingly fuzzy now and probably will be in the near...

Bill Gates is talking about using not laptops but cell phones with TV and keyboard connections to get Third World kids online. Me, I'd much prefer MIT's $100 laptop approach since it'll lend itself better to e-books. Typical TV screens now lack the resolution that the MIT approach will offer. Hey, I appreciate billg's broaching the topic of a cellphone-TV duo. But from a literacy perspective, the MIT plan is much better. Besides, what about places in the Third World that are beyond locals TV signals, and where the poor can't afford satellite dishes? (Via the New York Times.)...

Adobe e-book boss Bill McCoy just can't stop. This is a hoot--a giant Proprietary Formatter like Adobe going on a jihad against the OpenReader Consortium for supposedly not being open enough. As a board member of the clubby International Digital Publishing Forum, the Smoke-Filled Room of e-bookdom, Bill should quit before he embarrasses himself yet again. Thanks to Bill, however, for thousands of dollars in PR. Buddy, you've crossed the Rubicon. No longer can you credibly deny now that OpenReader counts. Meanwhile latecomers should check out earlier posts from OpenReader founder Jon Noring and me. We're talking about a very dark...

"Best-selling science fiction and fantasy author Darrell Bain is the 2005 Fictionwise E-book Author of the Year. Mr. Bain is one of the top selling authors at Fictionwise and his works maintained an extremely high average rating from Fictionwise members. Authors Lois McMaster Bujold and Anne McCaffrey were second and third, respectively. Mr. Bain's books also outsold such notables as Stephen King, Michael Connelly, Michael Crichton, and other nationally known authors whose books appeared in electronic form as well as in print." - News release....

Do you live in a small, rural community, and are you extremely interested in bringing free e-books to it, including perhaps some modern titles at the popular level--not just classics? LibraryCity would like to hear from you. Just yesterday, a small Southern community contacted me--a place where the illiteracy rate is 30 percent and the income level is a long way from that of Palm Beach. In the past, I would have said, "No, we're still gearing up." But thanks to our new relationship with the LINCT Coalition, we have more resources now. LINCT and LibraryCity can't do the majority of the work--our...

Bill McCoy of Adobe has challenged the "openness" of the OpenReader Framework specification that the OpenReader Consortium is now developing. Some of his points I agree with — others I don't. I won't analyze everything he wrote; this is a commentary, not a novel. Instead I will focus on a few of his major claims. Meanwhile I'll remind the Biblically inclined of Proverbs 18:17, which admonishes everyone to get all the facts, from different perspectives, before deciding on anything. Now, first, let me thank Adobe for the informal, unofficial technical advice already provided for the OpenReader format — both the framework...

"Forty-eight university libraries in Taiwan and Hong Kong have purchased more than 50,000 OCLC NetLibrary eBooks under an extraordinary cooperative agreement that crosses geographical boundaries." - OCLC news release....