Could proprietary formatters keep giving us the Tower of eBabel by leaning on e-book publishers to use proprietary add-ons such as Flash? Beware, publishers. For good or for bad, add-ons could matter increasingly as books grow more interactive. Those are Complex Issues. What to do in terms of fall-back choices, for example, for people whose systems can't cope with the add-ons? I've got enough problems with Flash even in a Web-browsing context. Issues like this are one more reason to move standards development out of a frog pond like the IDPF and into an OASIS-style mainstream with enough top-level techies...

Here, from MobileRead. "The PDA is capable of reading printed materials, convert its readings into audio for its owner to listen through a headphone jack." Update: Apologies to Branko. Yep, he Teleblogged this a few months ago....

Three short things. First, the W3 Mobile Best Practices guide 1.0 has officially been made a recommendation today. (Useful reference for designing pages for the web. Also renders great in FBReader!) Second, here's a great comic book describing copyright conundrums and the public domain by Law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins. Familiar stuff to TeleRead readers, but it was cleverly done plus had some interesting points. For instance: did you know Terry Gilliam didn't bother to get clearance for any of his Monty Python animation graphics? Third, looking for web textbooks to convert to simple...

Details from Roland. In other hardware news, check out five new design concepts for e-book machines based on Plastic Logic technology (via Alex at MobileRead)....

Scanned public domain books lately to be read as a PDF or DJVU file on your PDA? Why not share them through The Internet Archive? TIA will take any book it can legally distribute. I wrote a small how-to for Distributed Proofreaders volunteers who wish to (pre-)publish high-quality scans of the books they are processing, and this how-to might be useful to others too. In the USA, where The Internet Archive is based, a work is generally understood to be in the public domain if it was published before 1923. ...

Here. Thanks, Chronicle! Meanwhile Aykain and Dan Jackson weigh in with details. Let's hope that Nintendo and rivals can take steps to be truly e-book-friendly. Related: Original TeleBlog item on games machines as potential e-book readers....

It's PR like cotton candy — sweet, full of air, and not very nutritious. That's the latest news release from the International Digital Publishing Forum, extolling its standards development work for the e-book industry. I wish I could be more upbeat. I know and greatly respect those in IDPF who were probably involved in compiling and drafting the news release. Publishers and others in the digital publication industry, however, should carefully evaluate the claims in the news release, and weigh different perspectives such as this one. As I'll say here, the IDPF plan as described in the news release will not tear...

John Updike's rant against e-books has made the New York Times in printed form. Another literary star, meanwhile, Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, also is looking askance at technology even if she does not discuss e-books directly. An Associated Press story from Monroeville, Alabama, reports: She...writes about the scarcity of books in the 1930s in Monroeville, where she grew up and where she lives part of each year. That deficit, combined with a lack of anything else to do -- no movies for kids, no parks for games -- made books especially treasured, she writes. "Now, 75 years later...

You read here earlier about LibraryThing through which bibliophiles can share lists of their holdings. Now, in a readable, well-researched article, the Wall Street Journal nicely sums up precise tagging--a key feature of LibraryThing: "Tagging" is one of the more highly billed Web 2.0 concepts, a function that allows individual users to ascribe categories to online content. On LibraryThing, librarians tag the books in their own collections to create indexes far more vibrant than anything the Library of Congress could handle. The nation's official repository, Mr. [Tim] Spalding [founder of LibraryThing] points out, has no equivalent to LibraryThing's user-created "southern vampire" tag. With...

Speaking of Project Gutenberg, I ran acoss a video tutorial about PGon YouTube. Also on YouTube now: Jinke Hanlin v8 e-ink reader videos are here and here....

Project Gutenberg volunteers are debating the virtues of a system to rate book by automated readability scores--a wrinkle from RocketReader that could become part of the PG catalog. I say, Do it. The system has flaws but at least would be a start for literacy instructors. A negative from a skeptic on a PG list: "If the problem is literacy instruction, then we should work on a list of books for literacy, not rely on some tool that can't tell the difference between a 17th century children's book and a 20th century one, or how much dialect is used. Again,...

On the TeleRead blog, we often delve into quite meaty, complex, and sometimes arcane topics regarding e-books and digital publishing. So it is refreshing to read a blog article on e-book publishing whose message is so simple, clear, direct and obvious, that it almost hurts. Catherine Hodge, in her blog for Digital Pulp Publishing, has just published such an article, entitled: “White Hats v. Black Hats.” Her argument should be more than obvious to most everyone — e-book publishers, and their authors, will profit when they: Publish e-books that customers really want. Sell them for a fair price. Provide great customer service and value-added perks. Treat...