I perp the TeleBlog from a brick building on a grassy hillside in the state of Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. But as with Branko Collin, a native Netherlander based in Amsterdam, not that far from iRex headquarters, our regulars are everywhere. And today we welcome Snappy from Asia, a Chinese-speaking geek who wrote the informative Jornada 720 post above. Here's Snappy's self-bio: I'm a tech geek who has been programming since the mid 80s. Upon graduating from college with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, I worked as a R&D software engineer in a multimedia tech firm...

Put yourself in the place of a large publisher. Should you discount your e-books for cash-strapped students in developing countries? This concept, which make sense right now, will not be practical in the long run as e-books catch on. Even with DRM as an attempted enforcer, nothing is certain. If the MIT-originated $100 laptop project succeeds, which I fervently hope, the challenges will be still greater. Volume and XML-based tech as helpers The solution, as I now see it, should be universal global pricing--with the volume of business more than compensating to publishers for the lower prices. XML-based technology could help...

Simon & Schuster's S&S Online division is to be S&S Digital. Here are details, from the Book Standard: The division will be headed by Kate Tentler, as senior vice president of digital media, formerly vice president and publisher of S&S Online. "We're excited about all the opportunities that the digital world will open for us," Tentler told The Book Standard. "Search-and sell-technologies, the newest generation of electronic books, the unknown developments around the corner, all should be very positive developments for publishing." Tentler will work with the same staff to develop a digital archive and rights management system, as well as continue to...

Posts tagged E-books per day for about the last year.Get your own chart! Expanded chart here. Tag minus the hypen here (ebooks, not e-books). So how to explain the peaks and valleys?...

Among other topics, a BBC video tells of the boom in short cellphone-based novels in Japan. Just in one summer, a high school student is said to read 1,000 titles, and some novelists are training other authors to write for tiny screens. Hello, Sadi? Almost surely the Japanese agree with your advice on sentence and paragraph lengths. Of interest to the Association of American Publishers, the popularity of e-books for cellphones in Japan is said to be increasing interest in reading to the point where even paper books are benefitting. In the video I noticed a quick mention of a subscription...

Good or bad? The "Do no evil" guys at Google are hiring D.C. lobbying firms, and among them is PodestaMattoon. Yes, that's the same Anthony Podesta whose brother, John, worked in the Clinton White House, which cared squat about fair use and the public domain. Meanwhile Anthony himself did a great job of paving the way for Draconian copyright laws via his work for the Creative Incentives Coalition. Will Google educate Tony Podesta, or the reverse happen? Except from the New York Times: It's sad," said Esther Dyson, editor of the technology newsletter Release 1.0 and former chairwoman of Icann, a...

"Sony hopes to offer thousands of titles when the store goes live this spring, but Bogaty says ebook titles haven't been the problem. 'Content has been there. All the major trade publishers release works in ebook form. If you look at the New York Times print best-seller list, probably 70% or so of it is also available in electronic form,' he says. What's held back the industry until now, he says, is the hardware..." - EContentMag.com item quoting Nick Bogaty, executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum. So the Long Tail doesn't count? Not the paper-only classics? Not the first...

"As a final test I took my headphones on a street run last night. I picked out the quietest CD that I have, Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel, which never really gets above a whisper. Walking through Lincoln Center, which was crowded with concertgoers, I barely heard a thing... The final test was a Subway ride. While I can't say that the Subway ride was noise free, the headphones did a wonderful job of blocking all but the loudest noises. I didn't even miss notes when the express train rumbled through my station…" - Amazon customer's review of the noise-canceling Sennheiser...

Here, from Alexander at MobileRead....

Here and here from the Association of American Publishers....

Bill Gates may have sniped at the MIT-originated laptop in part because he sees it as a competitor to Origami-class machines in the K-12 market. In fact, the Origamis might very well be a hit in K-12, at least if prices drop. So what's does a sixth-grader think of this kind of machine? The What Is New blog reports a thumbs-up from a young lady who tried an $899 TabletKiosk version. Yes, she's keen on the idea of e-books replacing the pile of p-books she must tote from class to class: "It isn't as heavy as those evil textbooks your teachers...

Details here, from Tom Peters. Begins 2 p.m. EST Tuesday....