A short personal announcement: I have decided to participate in this year's National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO) competition. I'll be a writing a novel called Fascinating Screwdrivers (the life story of a man who collects crazy things). I'll also be keeping a weblog diary of my writing progress throughout the month. I'll be writing it under a pseudonym, Thurston Borgraves. Nanowrimo, if you recall,  is a "fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing." You have 30 days to write a 50,000 page in the month of November. (Here's a podcast interview on the Writing Show with Nanowrimo founder...

Tim Bajarin, a well-known industry analyst, tested the new Sony on a European trip and liked the results even though he cautions that e-book tech is still at the early-adopter stage. Here's his PC Mag writeup. In a nutshell, he sees four obstacles for the Sony. First, reluctance to shift from paper, at least among aging baby boomers, the very people who could benefit from the large-font option. Second, the cost of $299. Third, lack of color, which could hurt the Reader in the education market. Fourth, not enough digitized. That said, Bajarin believes that e-books are here to stay. Meanwhile...

Moderator's note: We welcome Joseph Gray, a super-helpful TeleBlog commenter and a standards-loving IT guy, as our latest contributor. This is Part I of a two-part series. - DR With the recent finalization by the IDPF of the three specifications that comprise an epub, I thought I would see exactly what this new ebook format was capable of. For testing purposes, I created an epub using the information in the IDPF specifications. To the best of my knowledge, the only commercial software currently available for creating an epub is Adobe InDesign. I took the low tech approach and used a...

During the past year my Ball State University students have been researching the literature (that's academic talk for "trying to find out") on e-book devices. They have tried to see if there is evidence that the use of the devices is of value to grade school students. They have not found a great deal of evidence, but what they have found is discouraging to us who think that e-book devices can be useful. Most of the studies have been short term with few students participating. There are also many caveats that imply that if we knew more about usability of the devices we might...

"A group that was set up to promote the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) is abandoning its support of that file format in favor of a set of specifications developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)." - Computerworld. More info: The OpenDocument Foundation is said to believes that W3C's Compound Document Formats would be a better, more open choice,  due to Sun Microsoft's growing ties with Microsoft and the resultant effect on ODF development. Update: Not everyone likes the foundation's new direction. Cerebus and some participants in a Slashdot discussion are suspicious about the foundation. So what might...

So how's the Eee laptop as a Web browswer and e-book reader? 1. "Webpages look great," comes the word from a poster at eeeuser.com. No problems. PDF's look great, I would say no problems at all if you have 1 page across. If you open a book style 2 page across PDF it gets a little crowded and you may have to zoom in and look at one page at a time. Might be a nice ebook reader for those interested. I'll get back to you on the eyestrain about 12 hours from now- i don't think it will be...

Joseph Gray spotted this just now on the Bookeen site: "Due to overwhelming demand, all orders from now on will ship between December 5 and December 13, 2007." Technorati Tags: Cybook Gen3 ...

Here's a challenge for The New Yorker. Can its contributors write up e-libraries without droning on about how we'll always need paper books? Is every e-book lover an arson-minded Visigoth eager to burn down the great paper collections or rob them of funding? And do we all hate the idea of paper backups---or, for that matter, Main Street bookstores? In Future Reading: Digitization and its Discontents, the latest e-skepticism from the magazine, the famed scholar Anthony Grafton wisely points out the shortcoming of existing digitization projects, such as the gaps even in the planned collections. But he barely mentions the...

Why does the Cybook Gen3 cost more in Europe than in the States? Will this new E Ink machine (price $US350) work with Macs? What can the HTML viewer do? Below are answers that Michael Dehan of Bookeen kindly supplied to those and other questions. Thanks, Michael! Subheads are mine. The NAEB machine Concerning NAEB, we haven't set all the details with them right now (due mainly to us). More to come very soon. Currency issues Concerning Euro-Dollar, don't forget VAT, taxes and shipment price. If we compare with standard practices in the Consumer Electronics industry, Apple proposes higher model prices...

NaNoWriMo, aka national National Writing Month, is almost here, and Robert Nagle will be along with the details. The idea is to get something on paper even if you rush the job. Meanwhile I've been reading, on my Sony PRS-505, one of the fiction's most famous procrastinators. Yes, that's Franz Kafka to the left. Kakfa wrote his share of finished short stories. But novels? Even The Trial was incomplete, missing certain chapter numbers and parts of some chapters. What he did write might come out in paragraphs of Faulknerian length, and Sony-style machines are better than...

Good-bye hard disks? Hello, your own Library of Congress? Well, we're not there yet. But in the next few years, a new technology could lead to thumb-sized solid state drives storing a terabyte each. Power consumption might be one-thousandth of flash memory and costs perhaps one-tenth. Just the ticket for multimedia e-books, eh? Or even high-res movies inside them? In between his CSSing for the TeleBlog, Jon Noring took time out for some calculations. He figured that 20 million books exist in the world and that 18,000 of these drives would do the trick for high-res images of them....

Yes, we're experimenting with a new WordPress theme. Bear with us. We know the type is too small, and we may also adjust colors. Keep the feedback coming. Meanwhile thanks to Jon Noring for his ongoing CSS work and for serving as a second part of eyes! - DR Technorati Tags: TeleRead...