"Gutenberg" isn't just the name of the printing-press guy and the public domain collection. Now there's a New York show, Gutenberg! The Musical!. And a short Gutenberg bio shows up in Characters of the Information and Communication Industry, a new book. The author is Prof. Richard Bellaver, a communications and human factors expert at Ball State University. You may recall his e-book-related articles. Excerpted from the new book, Prof. Bellaver's Gutenberg material follows. CHARACTERS OF THE INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION INDUSTRY Chapter 1: In the Beginning By Richard F. Bellaver Until the invention of printing, the public had to be satisfied with whatever information it was...

Top: when wrapping plain text, Microsoft's text editor Notepad displays jagged edges. Bottom: an HTML version of Anna Karenina in Microsoft IE.Last week I demonstrated how to remake Project Gutenberg's (PG) e-texts into well laid-out p-texts or e-paper texts by converting an HTML document from the project into a PDF file using a word processor. But what if the e-text is only available in PG's much maligned text format (what I call PVT: Plain Vanilla Text)? In that case you need to put in an extra conversion step, from PVT to HTML. Such a conversion step can also be handy if...

Sony is among the worst of the copyright and DRM trogs nowadays, despite the good work it did eons ago in the Betamax case. If the company hates two new calls for copyright reform, I'll hardly be surprised. Take the Librie, the predecessor of the Sony Reader. It debuted along with Sony-supplied books that expired after only two months. You couldn't own them for real---just one example of Sony's oft-consumer-hostile ways. But what if the Sony Reader defies my expectations and is a wild success, not just a niche gizmo? Could the Reader accidentally help the fight against the Hollywood-bought Sonny...

The ladies at Dear Author read a lot of books, so I can imagine why Jane worries about the Sony Reader pausing even a second or so between pages. Check out a You Tube video review for yourself and see if you agree with her. I read my own share of books and would rather not suffer the delay, but could live with it; my beef is over the screen contrast. Ayrkain sees the contrast issue as "over-exaggerated." A poster on a Librie list reports that the background is a "bit" lighter than on the Librie, which I once owned....

In Peggy Sue Got Married, the Kathleen Turner character ridicules her dad for driving an Edsel. Wikipedia describes the Edsel, unveiled for the 1958 model year, as "one of the most spectacular failures in the history of the United States automobile industry." What can you say about a car where the automatic transmission controls replaced the horn doodad in the middle of the steering wheel? People kept shifting gears when they wanted to honk. Monochrome Sony vs. colorful rivals So will the endlessly touted Sony Reader be the Edsel of E-Ink? Or are rivals such as the iLiad doomed---a conclusion...

Read the Limewire countersuit against the RIAA. (Start at Page 22; that's where it gets good). Ask yourself, do Limewire's complaints about exclusivity agreements (and dead end licenses, i.e., licenses that forbid redistribution) apply to ebook distribution as well? Limewire's brief (which I find brilliant and far-reaching) makes introductory claims that Limewire gave music companies the opportunity to submit hashes for any protected content. Submitting these hashes would have allowed limewire to filter out requests for this content. Instead of offering this information to Limewire(which could have substantially reduced copyright infringement...

Should you buy a Sony Reader, or will it be the Edsel of E Ink? I'll share thoughts on the Sony vs. other possibilities, including one you might not even have thought of. Drop by around 1 p.m., Washington, D.C., time. Update: The actual post. Related: Matsushita, others to set up e-book joint venture, from Reuters. It appears to be targeted at Japanese consumers....

A commercial Web service is a library not. Don't ever assume that your favorite social site will be around forever. Even giants such as MySpace could shut down if their popularity waned--wiping out the site to which you devoted so much time. In fact, the same could happen to, Flickr, a photo-sharing site to which many librarians are turning. Unless libraries make backups, they should use FlickR only for content they can afford to lose. A reminder of the need for such prudence came within the past hour when I ran across the following notice from the SquawkBox commenting service for blogs: SquawkBox...

Details from TrustedReviews, via Engadget and Techmeme. Cost is a mere $2,663---I'll wait for the garage sale. ...

Newspaper people tend to work in bright, fluorescent-lit offices. Might this help explain why major dailies have lavished so much good ink on E Ink machines like the format-hobbled Sony Reader? I myself see potential here. But could many prospective users be less than gung ho despite the Reader's high res? Could they be worrying about lighting-related issues? I personally owned a Librie, and I disliked having to use the machine under a strong lamp to enjoy even a mediocre contrast ratio. Now Jane and Jayne at DearAuthor.com are polling readers on the back light issue---E Ink machines like the...

I'll explain the photo in a moment. But first an excursion into the land of the ridiculous: The so-called $100 laptop, now dubbed the 2B1, will be legally sold on eBay for $450. "The laptops are expected to go for $450, with a $350 tax deduction, and the surplus would go towards buying a machine for needy children," reports Engadget. Is this really the best way to discourage gray-market sales? Shouldn't the price be lower? I'm a booster of the laptop project, but, in this case, One Laptop Per Child is making a major mistake. Meanwhile the unofficial OLPC News has raised...

Here's an old definition of an editor---someone who doesn't know what he wants until he sees it. And mightn't the same apply to readers? It is sheer folly for publishers to pump out tens of thousands of new paper titles each year without first seeing if the market is there. Rather than immediately arranging for printing and physical distribution of a first novel, for example, why not start with an electronic edition that readers can try without spending too much? An argument could also be made for "free," but we know how most publishers feel about that. For a role model,...