As grumpy as I am about PDF's reflowability problem and the rest, it's the format that I hate---not Adobe or the users. I'll do whatever I can to help people mitigate the pain, such as through use of Documents to Go software. In that spirit, meet the Foxit series of programs for PDF---everything from a free reader to the more fully featured Foxit Reader Pro ($39). You can also download a Windows Mobile PC Beta, a desktop Linux version or one for embedded Linux or U3 ("walk to any PC and open a PDF file, without worrying about whether the huge...

Here, from jkOnTheRun, one of my favorite mobile sites, MobileRead being another. JK, I can answer one question. DotReader's price for end users, as now planned, should be $0. Instead OSoft will get revenue from other sources---for example, from customizing its open source reader for publishers and others deploying it. Meanwhile imagine all the unofficial customizations. Perhaps Jane at DearAuthor can lobby for a pink-dominated interface or one color-coordinated with her purse. Suggestions cherished from all! The PDA version will be out later this year or early next. That's one I'm most impatient to use. For latecomers: I'm among the ringleaders...

In hopes of once more being able to read PDFed books from Wowio via the Documents to Go program, I wiped the regular Adobe Reader off my Palm TX. Maybe that would also get rid of a possible DRM-related file that the Fairfax County Public Library's system might have placed on my Palm. No luck. DTG had stopped working on Wowio files after I tried it on a DRMed Adobe book from the good folks at FCPL, my favorite library system. To the considerable credit of OverDrive, which may or may not be the offender, the company's support folks got on...

Randy Stross, a freelance business columnist writing regularly for the New York Times, is an accuracy guy, if you go by his past attack on Wikipedia. "Wasn't yesterday's practice of attaching 'Albert Einstein' to an article on 'Space-Time' a bit more helpful than today's '71.240.205.101'?" Stross asked. Oddly, however, he himself has virtually no biographical information on his Web site despite a friendly suggestion last year from the TeleBlog. Worse, if you factor in his sloppy reportage on Freeload Press in the paid-textbook controversy, you may not want to trust Stross in the future. Badly sourced dreck Freeload CEO Tom Doran---D-o-r-a-n, Randy,...

Hey, Fritz, I'm glad too. Thanks for the update. Doesn't it say something about U.S. copyright law when a valuable public domain site goes down, and people almost instantly start thinking, "DMCA"? Unlike Blackmask's David Moynihan, Matt McClintock, the manybooks.net guy, is running a by-the-book operation. Meanwhile, no, I haven't heard anything new on David M. Has anyone else? I still hope that Blackmask can somehow make peace with Conde Nast and return with its much-missed multiformat collection....

Publishers Weekly is the trade publication for the book industry in the States. This morning you can go to PW's site and see my essay, Razing The Tower Of e-Babel: The reason e-books haven't caught on is simple: they're too complicated. My pet example comes from the Fairfax County Public Library, which, along with many other institutions and people, is an eBabel victim. I tell how my borrowed Pepper Pad could not "handle the Fairfax County Public Library's digital editions of Mike Wallace's Between You and Me, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. The Pepper Pad, it turns...

Below are the TeleBlog's highlights from the past week. Graphic is from Reading Wowio's free books (and other PDFs) on a PDA. Schools and libraries Google vs. libraries Writing and publishing Blogs and creativity: F. Scott Fitzgerald as a WordPress guy Ambulance worker's book offered free on Net Freeload Press makes New York Times column 'Publishers Fight Back against Google with New Book Search Service' Tools for creating e-books Reading and listening ‘The New Yorker magazine: Coming to a portable hard drive near you' Test-drive of the HarperCollins Reader Public Domain Books, Ready for Your iPod' ...

Kudos to the Friday Project in the U.K., for offering Blood Sweat and Tea for free on the Net via a Creative Commons license. Details: On Monday we released the creative commons edition of....a book based on the blog of Tom Reynolds, a London EMT who has been writing about his life and work for the last three years. The publication of the online version coincides with the print edition and we believe that by offering the book in this way we will widen its audience and so increase the potential market for purchases of the print version. Download the book here. I...

How would the old literary gods like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe have fared in this era of the blog? I have mixed feelings. Might Fitzgerald have spent too much time parked at his computer, and less time living out the events that he so well transmogrified for his fiction? And would Thomas Wolfe's Blogger routine have sucked away energy he otherwise might have devoted to Look Homeward, Angel? I know. Those are ancient questions. But this topic flared up anew when I read Guttentype's observations, prompted in part by an earlier TeleBlog item on Holtzbrinck's blogging initiative: It's not...

Everyone: My friends at DearAuthor.com have their own take on women and PDAs. Along the way, I've offered a take on their take---which DA served up in response to a TeleBlog item on the PDA-purse connection. Got that straight? Jane: Next time I'll consult with Mrs. TeleRead when I run a purse graphic. Meanwhile I'm pleased to repro DA's photo of a purse that "a self respecting chick lit heroine" would carry. A heroine-fit PDA: "I went PDA over a dedicated device (like the Ebookwise) because I wanted to use the PDA for ebook reading but I still wanted to be able...

MobileRead's take on an Aussie writer's feelings about e-books vs. p-books. Surprise: Yes, she is more open than you'd expect to the possibilities of the digital variety, at least for younger readers....

Manybooks.net has been down for a few days now. I'm 99 percent sure it's a routine technical glitch again---not the result of a horrid legislative glitch. Hey, Matt, what's cookin'? Update: 2:30 a.m., Washington, D.C., time. Still down....