So far Liviu seems to be able to read Google PDFs on his Nokia 770. I haven't been so lucky. Ironically, I got only some irritating legalese when I tried to display Bleak House on my Palm TX using Documents to Go, and the TX rendered the pages too small when I resorted to PalmPDF. Bill Janssen, who's far more enthusiastic about Google's PDFish approach than I am, says Google is using an image compression scheme that many PDF viewers can't understand yet. Nonproprietary e-book standards, anyone? Meanwhile I'd welcome other people's observations and advice on the issue of reading downloaded...

Google's horrendous treatment of the classics makes me all the happier to learn that Blackmask's David Moynihan has several hundred books back online, via boysbooks.org, a Wiki-based site. He and an attorney representing Conde Nast are still at odds and are awaiting a ruling from a federal judge. But my hunch is that Blackmask will be back in full, except for the disputed Doc Savage and Shadow titles. Best of luck, David. I, too, would like to see a restored Blackmask available in time for the school year. May you and Conde Nast reach an agreement soon. For now, Washington, D.C.,...

Amid all the elation over Google allowing PDF downloads, keep in mind that the company is watermarking its name on every public-domain page. Bleak House, shown here, is among the targets of this corporate graffiti. I can understand Google claiming credit at the start of books and even requesting that its graphics remain there. But branding of every page is obnoxious. It just isn't going to increase search engine business that much, or even grow brand awareness. Google, Google, Google---millions of people can't avoid the name anyway when doing the usual searches. Furthermore, no anti-business sentiment at my end exists against...

Planet PDF and the TeleBlog obviously see PDF in different ways, but I know their hearts are in the right place. Here are concerns that Planet PDF has about Google's treatment of PDF: If you haven't heard yet, Google has just announced that a bunch of the books it has been scanning for its Google Books Library Program are now available for free download as PDFs. There's no doubt Google needs to be applauded for the idea, but the execution (i.e. the books they've produced) could definitely do with some work. The PDF books are difficult to download, large in size,...

U.S. writers, beware. If the robotic competition doesn't impoverish you, maybe outsourcing will. That's an exaggeration, but in the future, yes, I think we'll see robotically written e-books---a variant on the novel-writing machines in 1984. Of course, some critics of mass culture would argue that robots have long dominated the best-seller lists. (Via Wired News and LISNews.)...

The first eight chapters of Variable Star, the last Robert Heinlein novel, finished by Spider Robinson, are going online over the next few weeks. From the book's related site: In 1955, Robert Heinlein began work on Variable Star, a powerful and passionate science fiction book about two young lovers driven apart by pride, power and the vastness of interstellar time and space, only to set it aside to focus on other sci-fi novels. The detailed outline and notes Heinlein created for the project lay forgotten for decades, only to be rediscovered almost half a century later. Now the Heinlein estate has authorized Hugo...

Today's question: can you recommend an ebook that is well designed or laid out? What is a well-designed e-book anyway? Where can one find a well-designed e-book? For normal books, you can browse at a bookstore or at a library. But where can you browse e-books to appreciate good functional design? (My city library lets patrons view some e-books through Net Library, but the result is not pretty). Mainstream publishing has its own notions of what constitutes good design: good cover, typography, organization and graphics. And some of these same principles carry over to e-books (not to mention websites)....

It's Now Officially 2B1: The Children's Machine (via DailyTech). Grrr! As a booster of the project, I wish the OLPC people would make up their minds. Related: 2B1 Camera: VGA 640×480 (via One Laptop Per Child News). Imagine all the photos and perhaps videos that the kids will create---among other things, providing fodder for illustrated e-books on topics of interest of them. Well, maybe. I'd like to know more about the focus range and confirm that moving video is definitely planned, not just stills. The term "video" in a computer content doesn't necessarly suggest moving pictures. Meanwhile here are a...

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Web site is pointing to my Publishers Weekly article on the Tower of eBabel. Great. Academics might also be interested in a standards-related article that OpenReader founder Jon Noring recently co-authored with Prof. Terje Hillesund for a peer-reviewed journal. In addition, an OpenReader-related piece has appeared in Innovate, a journal devoted to distance education....

Attention, book publishers: P-magazines for young people are on the way out. What does that say from a book perspective? On top of that, a TechDirt fan tells of loving the New York Times without having ever bought a paper copy---just fished one out of a recycling bin. Time for carefully done ads in appropriate e-books? This model might be especially appropriate in countries such as China, without copyright enforcement as strict as here in the States....

Just when you thought it was safe to buy a new E Ink machine, Philips is teasing the blogosphere with promos about the READUS E-Reader with a roll-up screen. See jkOnTheRun, the TechEBlog and Gizmodo, including a video viewable via the latter site. Prototype has a five-inch screen with 320X240 pixels. Details: Actually you may still want to buy the iLiad or Sony Reader--not everyone wants to make do with a mere five-inch screen. On another matter, I wonder if the spelling of the READUS is new and improved; see earlier mentions with an i before the u. Other hardware news: Cut the...

"Although many worried that piracy would be a major issue online, as bigger portions of books are published, it has emerged as a major problem with print copies of books in China and other developing countries." - Wall Street Journal, via MobileRead. And DRM is supposed to be a solution? P-books = scanner fodder. Meanwhile good luck to HarperCollins with the China initiative discussed in the Journal....