"...to compare the Reader to books is to miss the point. The device is particularly well suited to one thing: traveling. On a long journey, where packing light is required, it's a no-brainer. And there's a compelling case to pack a Reader on trans-oceanic flights or a trip to the beach, given that you're not going to cram eight titles into your carry-on or beach bag. The fact is the Reader can mean the difference between reading a little and reading a lot. That's something worth celebrating." - Conde Nast Traveler blog. The TeleRead take: As I've made amply clear, tastes...

"iRex recently negotiated with Amazon.com, but the online bookseller decided to develop its own closed eBook system, to be introduced next month. 'We couldn't agree on a deal, because the iLiad uses open formats such as PDF and HTML, and Amazon wanted a solution that resembled Apple's iTunes, which isn't open either,' a spokesman told The Register." - Here, in an article also reporting on the use of iLiad as a newspaper reader in France. Photo is of Kindle prototype. The TeleRead take: So the Kindle, or whatever it's called, is apparently still on track? Great! Not-so-great is Amazon's eagerness to...

"Can consumers be trusted to control their own music without pirating the record labels and the artists they produce right into the ground? The answer is yes. People have been buying and selling music for years without DRM, in a form you may have heard of called the compact disc. CDs have never had DRM attached. Off the record, most executives--on the technology side at least--will tell you that DRM is a dinosaur that's waiting for the asteroid to hit. It's just a matter of when the music industry will stop assuming its customers are all criminals." - Lev Grossman...

Details from DearAuthor, which in the past has wondered if Amazon is out of the loop at BookSense.com, the indie bookstore site. Last summer, DA notes, "Amazon refused to carry any ebooks distributed by Lightning Source, the Ingram e-distribution arm." Meanwhile, notice the absence of BBeB from the list of BookSense-distributed formats? Sony should just give up on this-here format thing and go with the IDPF standard. Note: The direct BookSense link doesn't seem to be working for now....

Here and here, from OLPC News. I do know that for reading books hour after hour, the OLPC machine would wallop the Classmate---given the former's ability to fold into a tablet. The Classmate would win in terms of ability to run Windows-based, DRM-infested programs, most of which lack Linux versions....

I'm doomed. My preference is New Times Roman or Palatino, but a Slate item suggests that the typewriter-like Courier family is still the real favorite among literary stars. But guess what. You know whose preferences in the end should count, even more than a publisher's? The reader's. And with HTML/XMLish e-books, that can happen. Yes, as long as I'm at it, I'm also curious what fonts TeleBlog community members like to read in, not just write in. (Via Bookslut, which also carries a pointer to an L.A. Times piece on the deaths of the Carroll & Graf and Thunder's Mouth Press imprints.)...

When Hollywood lobbies for extended copyright and pangs for the eternal variety, studios might consider some unintended side effects---for instance, heirs with nasty conditions on use of artistic properties such as plays and books. Here's a still-under-copyright example out of France, as described in the New York Times: "Since Bernard-Marie Koltès died in 1989 at 41, his reputation as a playwright has continued to grow. In February, for the first time, one of his plays, 'Le Retour au Désert,' entered the repertory of the Comédie-Française, the historic Paris theater popularly known as the House of Molière. "Yet soon after Muriel Mayette's production...

"DRM...is mostly about money, and about the clash between two perspectives: business and culture." - Giles Slade in the Huffington Post. Related: Finnish court rules DVD DRM 'ineffective,' in Webwereld. ...

A Kansas City used-book store called "Prospero's Books" is so desperate to thin out its collection that it started to burn books. Co-owner Tom Wayne says he is unable to sell many of his thousands of books, or even to give them away to libraries and thrift stores, so he started a pyre in protest, according to the Post Star from Glenn Flass, New York. Actually, this is according to at least 300 more news papers. A suspicious person might start to feel that this is perhaps a publicity stunt rather than a protest. From Prospero's Books' website: For $1 a...

Earlier today, on my podcast The Biblio File, I hosted a two and one half hour interview with Dave Howell, the founder of early commercial e-book site Alexandria Digital Literature. We covered a great deal of territory, but here is a summary of some of the more interesting points. Dave originally had the idea for the Alexlit book recommender application while in high school, but shelved it when he couldn't think of a way to get enough people around the same PC. Over a decade later, the Internet and the music-recommendation site that later became Firefly inspired him to revisit the...

Anyone want a Fujitsu Stylistic tablet upgraded with Win XP? Turns out that I'm spending a lot more time reading off my used $155 DT 375, which is CE-based and doesn't even come with a hard drive. The fonts on the DT screen are tack-sharp with uBook, and that counts even more than the greater power, flexibility and storage capacity of the bigger tablet. The point here is that the most powerful gizmo isn't necessarily the best for you even if it may be better for others. So I read with interest---in the unofficial OLPC News---of a proposed $50 laptop. Originator...

As a reminder, today, Sunday, May 27th at 1 p.m. Eastern/10 a.m. Pacific, I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with Alexandria Digital Literature founder Dave Howell on my book-related talk show, The Biblio File. The topic of the interview will be primarily Alexlit's original founding and imminent return, but I will also talk about the ebook industry in general and how it has changed since Alexlit was founded. After I finish my prepared questions, I will bring in any callers for a panel discussion. Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate...