"I've been buying a lot of ebooks lately, which means I also end up surfing onto the websites of many epublishers. I'm boggled by how badly designed some of them are." - mrsgiggles.com....

E-books could help the West balance out the trade deficit with China, a point I made earlier. But, no, this hardly a cure for the defict's root causes---such as unfettered consumerism and the decline of manufacturing in the U.S. and Europe. Besides, as Joscha Bach writes in from Germany and as I totally agree, it isn't as if the Chinese are themselves are short of creativity in literature and other areas. After you read this post for a little context, check out the Chinese-originated comedy shown here. Whether the product is a video segment or an e-novel or a better...

How does the new N800 from Nokia stack up against the 770 for e-reading? Roger Sperberg is impressed overall with the features of the N800, shown here. But for reading himself to sleep, he'll stick to the old machine: ...the top-of-the-device rocker button with the + and - zoom is far easier to use on the 770 than the new formation, and this is significant for use of the internet tablet as an e-book reader. You see, FBReader utilizes + and - to advance (or retreat) in the e-text you're reading, and it's just plain easier. Not to mention that, sans...

Eric Dezenhall wrote a pretty entertaining mob novel called Money Wanders. Now some public-access advocates warn that his pit-bullish PR firm will be spinning some fiction about their efforts to decouple knowledge from money. See Nature article. Related: Sick on the Great Plains: The perils of ‘efficient' information policies, a TeleBlog post from August 2003. Also see Is this the end of the scholarly journal? from the Jan. 24 Christian Science Monitor. Among other things, the Monitor notes: "A year ago, the respected US journal Science was forced to retract two papers it had published about stem cells. The articles had...

"The race to get flexible plastic displays to market is heating up. Philips spin-off Polymer Vision said Wednesday it will work with manufacturer Innos to build its 5-inch flexible, plastic displays." - Red Herring. What this could mean to you: Lower-cost e-paper devices from Philips and perhaps others. Note Innos's interest in nanotech. From the Innos home page: "Formerly known as the world-renowned Silicon Fabrication Facility at the University of Southampton, Innos combines state-of-the-art technology with a team of over 30 engineers, technicians and scientists, all with expertise in applying nanoscale concepts to silicon-based devices." Related: News release. ...

The quote is from a Miami Herald article on e-books on campus, and it's oh so apt. In a $6.3-billion textbook market in higher education here in the States, e-books are claiming just a speck of sales. E-book sales of all kinds are around $200M a year even if you go by the most optimistic estimate. The IDPF puts them at at a fraction of that. As I see it, the best responses on campus and elsewhere would be kinder, gentler DRM that let students own their textbooks for real, the use of cost-lowering ads, interactivity, multimedia and, of course, an...

From an accidental e-book marketer comes this observation: "China is going to become the largest English-speaking nation on the face of the planet." John Edwards, who recently announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, didn't have e-books in mind when he spoke to the New Republic (subscribers only). But I couldn't help but notice his comments in an e-book context as well as others, such as international trade in general. Reading vs. speaking So what does this mean? Will the Chinese---a big enough percentage of the 1.3 billion---end up buying e-books in English if the plots and characters are universal...

...then another Web log migration has happened flawlessly. Feel free to make a comment---be the first! Note from David: If the much-hated Snap Link Preview feature shows up again, it's probably a cache or cookie thing in your browser---since Robert zapped the plug-in and since I don't see it in my Firefox. We'll investigate, however, just to make sure. Meanwhile my major thanks for Robert for his help. Given the complexity of TeleRead under the hood, he did a phenomenal job. Later we'll update WordPress and plug-ins, but for now we'll give the fun a rest. The next post: This...

A real Robinson Crusoe lived and breathed outside the pages of Daniel Defoe's 18th-century novel---so it's believed. He was a Scottish sailor named ...

Ever noticed how e-book features---like web links and multimedia---are creeping into p-books? This is nothing new in the history of books. While the printing press quickly replaced the manuscript in Western Europe, printed books in Russia played a minor role for over a century after their introduction. Instead, manuscripts adopted certain characteristics of printed books. And that's not the only parallel between early Russian printing and modern e-books. The printing press was invented in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg in 1447. In 1563, Ivan the Terrible established the first state printing house, run by Ivan Fedorov, a deacon in the Orthodox Church. Although...

As part of my on-line talk show, The Biblio File. I recently recorded a 3 hour 46 minute interview with Hugo-winning novelist Peter S. Beagle and publisher Connor Cochran, joined partway through by novelist Diane Duane. At one point, the conversation turned to e-books. Here is an excerpt of part of that conversation. To listen to the interview in its entirety, please visit The Biblio File....

I was (re)introduced to the concept of dual screens on the desktop recently. At first I thought having two monitors might be a bit over the top, but when I returned home to my own pc at the end of the day, I missed the second screen. Apparently, I am late to the dual screen game. In an October 2005 article, usability firm 37 Signals report that giving a subject a bigger screen led to a 10 - 44 % increase in productivity; Microsoft claim in an undated article that using two screens instead of one leads to a 9 -...