Sixteen million copyright records from the U.S. Copyright Office are now available in bulk, thanks to the efforts of Carl Malamud (left), Peter Brantley and others. No more will the feds charge tens of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to the copyright catalog of of monographs, documents, and serials. Way to go, guys! Nothing like "a bit of a blogospheric brouhaha" to stir things up, eh? Now, here's the fun part. The government had attracted only two subscribers, given the outrageous fees. Good beyond public domain community and academia Washington's fresh sanity on these matters should be good news not just...

E-bookers should watch the IDPF carefully to make certain that neither Adobe nor any other company turns .epub into a proprietary standard through extensions or otherwise. But guess what one of the best countermeasures is? Use of .epub! And noticing suspicious situations and pointing out omissions, which ideally the IDPF can address in time---for example, lack of reliable interbook linking! Readers and publishers of all kinds, then, not just public domain people but also Random House and little publishers, should thank the open-source-based Feedbooks site where co-founders Hadrien Gardeur and Loïc Roussel are fighting the good fight for genuine compatibility...

Is E or P more valuable for immersing yourself in a good novel or biography? And how about reference tools and scholarly collections where you may hop from item to item? Are the pricing issues different? Evan Schnittman, an Oxford University Press executive, who handles rights and bizdev issues, offers some thoughtful observations in the never-ending debate on pricing and related matters. In a nutshell, with my extrapolating and perhaps oversimplifying a bit, he says in a just-posted TeleBlog comment: --Yes, P is more valuable than E for immersive reading when, for example, you pig out on a good novel for hours at...

Just a reminder for newbies: Don't upgrade your iPhone firmware to 1.1.1 if you want to use the Books.App program to read e-books via your phone. Meanwhile here's the word directly from Zach Brewster-Geisz, to whom iPhoners should be grateful for his work on the program. "As the author of the main book-reading software for the iPhone," he tells us, "I'm more than a little teed off. But I'll say this: I'm not upgrading, and I'm still working on the software." "I'm sure the iPhone Dev Team is working on figuring out how to get into the 1.1.1 firmware--but for now,...

Google Book Search is looking more bookshelfish than ever---with displays of randomly selected covers. But I'm still waiting for user-optimized displays a la Amazon. Google is already reading my e-mail to choose which ads to display there. Can't the results show in GBS displays? More at Google Blogscoped and Publishers Weekly....

Um, as a writer, I've got an interest in this little matter. How much should publishers charge for e-books compared to the paper editions? I maintain that E is in many ways a whole new market, and publishers are stunting its development when they go the $25 route. An e-book sale doesn't necessarily mean the loss of a p-book one, especially when you consider the global nature of E and the scarcity of bookstores in many countries with growing numbers of Netfolks. Perhaps 40-50 percent of the readers of the TeleBlog live outside the States, and incomes are not always at...

Know of anyone locked out of an iPhone after tweaking it to run e-book-related software? Don't you love Apple---so responsive to user needs? People are balking. Such stunts are about as beloved as DRM. Apple should rely on style and features, not anti-consumer gimmicks, to keep up cashflow. I wonder if Apple might share marketing strategists with mobile.washingtonpost.com....

I hope the marketing brains at the Washington Post are happy. They're well on their way to getting me to stop reading a newspaper I've been following for decades. My favorite way to enjoy a newspaper these days is on a mobile computer, a nice break from my desktop. I'm tired of overgrown dead-tree editions invading our household. And my wife fears that she may be allergic, literally, to newspaper ink---just as Carly's mother already is. This morning I was 423 words into a book-related story, on Jenna Bush and her new book about a struggling HIV-positive Latin-American teenager, when the 2,050-word article...

The OLPC laptop isn't the only one with price creep. The Eee PC laptop, based on an Intel/AUSTek design, will reportedly go for $260, not $199, when it appears in mid-October here in the States. Even so, Phil Shapiro, a Washington, D.C., area activist with an interest in digital divide issues, says he's buying one. Ideally the price will fall if enough people follow in Phil's footsteps and if Intel really is serious about this project rather than simply trying to preempt OLPC. Keep in mind, however, that the screen probably isn't as good for e-books as the OLPC laptop, which offers E...

The screen's bigger on the new iPod Nanos, a huge two inches, with 320x240 resolution, and the old e-book related programs should work. Anyone using 'em for e-book reading when nothing else is around? I'm also curious how people feel about the new Nanos as audiobook players. Speaking of hardware: See Tuscon paper's overview of e-book devices, which it says are improving (LISNews)....

Yesterday I attended the Digital Life exhibition in New York for the Palm Addict blog site to cover Palm's press conference announcing the new Palm Centro smartphone. While there I happened to get a minute with Ed Colligan, Palm's CEO. Given Palm's emphasis on smartphones, I asked Ed if Palm had any plans to discontinue its PDA line, especially the e-book friendly TX. Ed said No! He said that they haven't paid too much attention to their PDAs recently because of the big opportunity in the phone area, but that Palm was number one in PDAs and he felt that...

Like Sophie and dotReader, VitalSource Bookshelf is one app we're watching because of a focus on shared annotations and other forms of interactivity within e-books. VitalSource already offers shared notes for real world use---by dental students at New York University. Multimedia capabilities, of special interest to the Sophie folks as well, are another draw. Over the summer VitalSource Technologies released Vital Bookshelf 4.6, which among other things will "support QuickTime audio and video inside textbooks for when our publishing partners roll out media-rich content." Letting professors and others blend their own resources with e-books But what about companion resources---an issue of interest in...