"Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. Read more at nature.com." - Gender Genie page at bookblog. Austen vs. Dickens: Based on samples of about 1,500 words at the starts, here are the results for Pride and Prejudice and David Copperfield. P&P: Female score of 2496 and male score of 2231. DC: Female score of 1688 and male score of 1606. Huh? Is something wrong with...

"Now, if mainstream publishers reject their work as too specialized, even the most Beatles-obsessed authors are finding audiences for their books by publishing them themselves." - New York Times. The TeleRead take: At least some of the Beatles books have been out for a few years, and from what I can determine, the titles mentioned in the Times show more care than often goes into self-published works. One even contains a foreword by Walter Cronkite. Anyone know of any good, hyperspecialized e-books on the Beatles or other rockers?...

"It would be much easier and cheaper to send a hundred laptops than a thousand books. A hundred laptops don't replace math teachers but they are better than no math education at all." - Essay in OLPC News by Shankar Pokharel, President, One Laptop Per Child Nepal....

Eight of New Orleans' 12 library branches "were completely ruined by wind, water, and mold," according to Rebuild New Orleans Public Library. Digital books are far from a complete replacement for paper libraries, but they could help. With John Edwards using New Orleans as a backdrop for his 2008 presidential announcement (preview video), wouldn't it be interesting if he called for a well-stocked national digital library system---to serve rich and poor, including Katrina victims? And suppose he also took a strong stand in favor of free WiFi services, something already happening in New Orleans, so students and others didn't have to...

The IDPF membership recently changed its Bylaws and added two more directors to the IDPF Board. For the two new seats, there are seven candidates, all of whom are worthy to serve on the Board. One of the seven candidates vying for the two seats is George Kerscher, the former Chair of the OeBF/IDPF Board, and e-book accessibility advocate and expert. This is a call for IDPF members to seriously consider casting one of their two votes for George this time around. In a recent IDPF Board election, George came awfully close to winning a seat on the Board. Hopefully the IDPF...

You can't own e-books for real---at least not if you suffer a hard disk crash and your faves vanish. Oh, and how about another kind of crash, the eBookAd kind? Just how safe is your online book locker? And so I'm delighted to learn of the Mozy service for online backups through the Net. Up to 2G of storage is free for personal use, and you can buy unlimited storage for $4.95 a month. Walt Mossberg has the details. A similar service, Carbonite, exists, but Mossberg prefers to Mozy around since the related software is more flexible. Important caveats: Don't trust...

Illustration by Lewis Carroll, 1864Lewis Carroll's classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has long been a staple of Project Gutenberg, the oldest and still one of the largest internet libraries. It was the eleventh book to be added (back in the day), and it has consistently remained one of the most requested books, so that it may well be the most downloaded book on the internet. This early version has long been the only one in PG, and so it is easy to overlook the recently added e-text that was created from Carroll's original manuscript, which he created for Alice Liddle, Alice's...

Mac owners are among the biggest victims of the Tower of eBabel. In the usual Mac mode, they can't read Microsoft Reader files, for example, and the Sony Reader has just added to their woes. Here's the latest horror story, along with partial fixes. A friend of mine showed a Sony Reader to someone he knew. The viewer was impressed to the point of using the adjective "delicious" to describe the Reader. A girlfriend, wife or other family member then actually gave him one for Christmas, at which point the misery began: "What she did not know when she bought it...

It's hard to imagine James "Godfather of Soul" Brown not feverishly singing and dancing up there. Brown died just hours ago on Christmas Day at the age of 73. And, yes, I can actually think of an e-book angle, if p-book publishers can apply James Brown's thinking to their own medium---with a different twist: the Cory Doctorow approach. "The Internet is the way to go right now," Brown said when "Christmas for the Millennium & Forever," his first officially downloadable work, hit Emusic.com. "I'd rather go on the Internet first 'cause those young kids are gonna jump up to it,...

Check out Christmas-related music from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. The project's collection of more than 6,000 items includes The Awakening of Scrooge, a digitization of an Edison wax cylinder released almost a century ago in 1909. The recording is brief, but you can always put your MP3 player on repeat or go with other XMASy items in the collection. Thanks to Jon Noring for this find. Via manybooks.net, you can catch up with A Christmas Carol and other works of Charles Dickens. Related: Chanukah music - Midi files, from Jonathan Lehrer. Got any other festive music to mention here---whatever holidays...

For those looking for a reason to feel humbuggish on Christmas Day, here's something. Despite misperceptions, It's a Wonderful Life is not in the public domain. One entertainment lawyer explains: We have litigated this issue often: a derivative work, if thrown into the public domain, does not affect the copyright of the original work. For example, if the film "Catch 22" fell into the public domain for whatever reason---the copyright on the original Joseph Heller novel work would prevent anyone from selling, exhibiting, distributing, etc. the film. Likewise, the film "It's a Wonderful Life" is a derivative work, according to the...

Photo by Petra Karstedt, license cc by-sa/2.5Most book readers are based on the assumption that people will want to use them to, you know, read books. But book reading is such a rare activity, even for avid book readers, that a device designed solely for that purpose and at a price point significantly higher than that of a single p-book is likely to fail. This is why Irex's Iliad is popular among those that intend to use it for 200-dollar textbooks. What's more, a device intended solely for reading ignores the reality that once people have texts in digital form, they...