Wilson Rothman---no known relative, although gadget-love might just be in the Rothman genes---has the details at Gizmodo. Also see AP/Chicago Trib. The TeleRead take: I'll worry less about the price increase---sooner or later the $100 laptop will live up to its name---than about the darker side of the growing closeness to Microsoft. Will Redmond-style DRM follow in time? Will linux suffer, given all the money that Bill G can throw in? On one hand, if publishers insist on DRM, it would be good for the OLPC machine to have this "feature" via software. I'm not a DRM cheerleader and rejoice in...

David Haskin decried—with justification—DRM and eBabel and other reasons why e-books have fallen short of expectations. Now another Computerworld columnist, Mike Elgan (photo), has spoken up, in an article headlined Why e-books are bound to fail. It's already drawn a response. Ironically, Computerworld is where I first published the TeleRead plan, which would have addressed the issue of consumer costs—mentioned in the article—and a host of other questions. Frustratingly, Elgan focuses on the here and now and in the end comes up with such gems as that most people prefer the touch of p-books. As if zillions of children aren't growing...

Jack Valenti, one of the planet's foremost copyright zealots as president of the Motion Picture Association of America, is dead after a stroke at age 85. He had a good side, too, including some kindness he showed to me personally when he blurbed a XyWrite guide I'd written. And he'll be widely missed in Hollywood and elsewhere. The Valanti-promoted ratings system for films was far from optimal, but it could have been worse, and it helped keep at bay some of the Bible-thumpers who would have wanted to censor everything. What's more, he could be surprisingly open minded about copyright-related matters...

There's a place for brevity on the Web, but it's not overdo it....

"The Mobipocket Reader will be available on the iRex iLiad ER 0100 from April 30, 2007 onwards." - News release received in the last few minutes. I'll reproduce it in full. Related: Earlier item on what this means in the iRex-vs.-Sony battle. PRESS RELEASE Mobipocket Reader format available on the electronic paper solutions from iRex Technologies Eindhoven/Paris, April 25, 2007 IRex Technologies BV, the Netherlands, and Mobipocket SA, France, are proud to announce that the Mobipocket Reader format available on the electronic paper solutions from iRex Technologies. The Mobipocket Reader will be available on the iRex iLiad ER 0100 from April 30, 2007...

Some are understandably bemoaning the fate of book sections in newspapers. But the Washington Post has laudably stepped up efforts to support its own section, complete with a dedicated ad rep---and apparently with some success. Just the other day, a full-page ad for the Sony Reader appeared on the back of the section. A lesson for Web sites as well? With a little imagination, newspapers may find that that book sections are more sustainable than they would think. Meanwhile Marie Arana, WashPo book section editor, along with some writers for the section, has joined with other literary critics in a campaign...

The Mobipocket e-reader is getting closer for the iLiad, which, by the way, is showing up in Japan (via MobileRead). Thought: Has iRex investigated the possibility of more aggressively going after the consumer market---now that the iLiad is finally about to get e-reader software that works with DRMed best-sellers in a common format? Remember, Mobipocket is Amazon-owned. Far many more commercial e-books will be available than with the Sony Reader. Of course, there are obstacles such as the fact that the iLiad costs twice as much as the $350 Reader. Will iRex release a lower-priced model in the next year...

Citing an e-book horror story in the TeleBlog as one example, Rob Beschizza writes in the Gadget Blog at Wired News: "After years of hype, e-books may yet be the next big thing. Even with decent handsets (like the Sony's Reader...) and stabler standards, however, it's a technology tainted by a history of aggressive DRM. Of all the things you'd expect to have gone mobile by now, the humble book still lags behind news, magazines, music and video. If digital takeup is any guide to health, literature is the sick man of media. "The why of that has many faces, but DRM...

"Audio Book sales posted a small decrease of 0.5 percent for February compared to last year's figures with sales totaling $10.5 million; sales for the whole year were up by 9.5 percent. E-books sales rose by 44.7 percent for the month ($2.5 million); the category also posted an increase of 26.4 percent for the year. (E-book figures were compiled in cooperation with the International Digital Publishing Forum.)" - News release from Association of American Publishers. The TeleRead take: Great---at least about e-books! But keep in mind we're still talking about just a fraction of the tens of billions in p-book...

Penguin is expanding in Second Life. A slew of other publishers---ranging from the Bantam Dell Publishing Group to tiny Snowbooks---also have been busy there recently. "Penguin's Second Life strategy has been to take a measured and restrained approach to this exciting, baffling and rapidly changing online phenomenon," writes Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher, in the Penguin blog. "We began with the release of a special sampler of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the book that inspired the makers of Second Life, and will this week be following up with the distribution of the Penguin Virtual Bookshelf - designed to adorn any 3-D virtual...

(1) The one-billion-distributed figure reflect the number of copies rather than titles, and (2) alliances with other companies are involved---in this case, Lenovo, Gateway and Apple. More from VitalSource's Will Moore. Thanks, Will. ...

Pity the publisher trying to promote an e-book. How to alert prospective buyers? How many e-books have you seen piled up at Barnes & Noble? And has Oprah touted an e-book original lately? Oh, and forget about newspaper book supplements, which can't even do justice to p-books and are dying or being folded into other sections. What to do? Could a formula be found through which publishers could spread glad tidings about e-fiction and e-nonfiction alike? Search engines: Important---but just one kind of tool Publishers talk about the use of Amazon and search engines as ways for consumers to find books,...