I recently became aware of an interesting new development in the world of podcasting. Called Talkshoe.com, this site combines a conference-calling phone bridge with a chat client, streaming audio, and digital recording to create the first automated call-in podcasting system. If Podcasting and Shoutcasting are the Internet's broadcast radio, Talkshoe is its call-in talk shows. It's a fascinating idea, elegant in its simplicity: a host creates a show, guests and listeners phone in, and after the show is recorded, it is then made available for download or RSS syndication. As a result, I'm doing a call-in show called The Biblio File....

Who cares about textbooks? Now you can watch "a killing spree on a reflective dual mode screen"---via a video of Doom in action on the One Laptop Per Child laptop. So we learn from One Laptop Per Child News. Less fun is a quarrel between OLPC and the developers of AbiWord. They understandably don't want their baby reduced to what the decidedly independent OLPC blog calls "a glorified Microsoft Word viewer." Yep, if Abi survives on the shipped OLPC machine, it may well be just for gazing at e-books and other documents in an unholy format. No creation! Could...

Stephen Cole, owner of eBooks.com, is an old-time bookseller whose academically oriented library branch, EBL, is notable for a variety of e-lending models. It lets libraries allow more than one copy of a book at once to be floating around. Good stuff. eBook.com offers more than 40,000 books. Now they'll reach a wider audience through a new pact with YPB Library Services, a Baker & Taylor division that calls itself "the world's leading provider of materials to academic libraries." The extra books will be out there in first part of 2007. Congrats to Stephen. More details from news release, spotted at DearAuthor.com....

Here, from the Register, via Peter Brantley. Related: UK music biz might not get copyright terms extended from 50 to 95 years....

A few weeks ago on The eBook Community, in three lengthy articles (1, 2, and 3), I outlined some thoughts and requirements for an open standards/open source e-book mastering system intended to be used by smaller ebook publishers. This article is a progress update. We are actually working on the system! To summarize, the e-book authoring system is envisioned to enable “almost push button” conversion of a single and fairly simple master XML document into most, if not all, ebook formats in use today and tomorrow. Example formats of interest include OpenReader, OEBPS, native dotReader, Mobipocket, LIT, PDF, Plucker, Palm Reader,...

I continue to be intrigued by the potential of online 3-D virtual reality. I became interested in it earlier this year after hearing about Second Life from an eye-opening blog article written by Richard Charkin, the CEO of Macmillan UK, who wrote about the potential of 3-D interactivity with digital content. Soon after joining Second Life to see it for myself, I wrote a TeleRead blog article describing the Misadventures of Jon Olmstead, my Second Life personna. Two news items appeared today relating to 3-D virtual reality that might be of interest to some who follow the TeleRead blog. Building the 3-D...

The Sony Reader and I finally met up with each other in meat-space last night. Human readers of the TeleBlog will recall I owned a predecessor, a Librie, and the low-contrast E Ink screen failed to impress me. Sony, perhaps because we're so uppity around here, never obliged with a review loaner of the Reader. Meanwhile I've been put off by the Reader's lack of a word-search feature and its exclusive reliance on Sony's proprietary BBeB format for DRMed books. So what happened last night? Nothing. CompUSA's demo unit at the store in Alexandria, Virginia, was a dud---kaput or at least...

Even with the dotReader just in early beta, some books in a dR-readable format are now on sale at the DPP Store. Among the offerings is First to Last, described as "the true story of a soldier's life through the motorcycles he has owned and the most prominent action events that have occurred on those bikes and during his lifetime. The [book] has an international tone with a heavy accent on Asia, is action oriented during peace and war, and spans the generations in its common appeal to motorcyclists, hobbyists, adventurers and romanticists of all ages. It is a...

Darren Reid, sci-fi and fantasy author, is releasing free books for the Nintendo Wii and DS. So what other titles are available on games platforms, and does anyone have tips for owners? Talk about offbeat formats. Separately, the tireless Matt McClintock of manybooks.net offers a PSP section of classics and Creative Commons titles. Related: Opera Web browser cartridge to be sold for Nintendo games machine; e-books next?...

"Pretty much Google is trying to set themselves up as the only place to get to these materials; the only library; the only access. The idea of having only one company control the library of human knowledge is a nightmare." - Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, in an Elektrischer Reporter video interview, via Google Blogoscoped and if:book. Related: Google makes slight improvements to book search interface, from if:book....

More videos and better blogs are among the recommendations that Steve Outing, a veteran watcher of the online journalism scene, has for online newspapers. He grades them B-. The e-book angle: How about home page links to e-books for in-depth looks at newsy subjects? Ad-supported, multimedia "newsbooks" just might be a hit. Time for Reuters and the AP to think about doing newsbooks, perhaps in partnership with book publishers? About that image: Today's Washingtonpost.com was showing a video, but far too low on the home page. Normally you'd see an a preview image of a story. But if you pass your...

The International Digital Publishing Forum, City Hall for the e-book establishment, has become a little less Tammany-like with the creation of a Web forum for public discussion of e-book standards. Anyone can participate. This is A Good Move. Not many postings from users are on the forum yet, but ideally that will change soon. I hope people will speak out on the need for a comprehensive standards solution, including standards for DRM (of course, true nirvana would be no DRM). Also, I continue to believe that an OASIS technical committee would be a better, more objective venue for standards-setting than...