Waving Goodbye to Hegemony is a must-read article in the New York Times Magazine by Parag Khanna, a think-tanker as well as author of the forthcoming book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. So here's the question of the day. Does a major premise of the book, that American influence is waning, apply to e-books? The technology, the content or both? In the tech area, consider: No popular e-paper machines, as far as I can recall, are produced en masse in the United States---the Amazon Kindle is Chinese-made. I'm eagerly awaiting whatever comes out...

"NAEB is accepting the bailout offers," reports Pam Gadsden, CEO of the buyer's club selling the Cybook Gen3 E Ink machine with a 1G memory card and other extras for $375 and shipping. "We are back on track and soon to order our first shipment from Bookeen." Slightly edited, here's the lowdown from her: "We order the readers by end of this week, the beginning of next with 1/2 paid. When Bookeen tells us they're ready to ship we pay the other 1/2.  We get them and send them on to the buyers. The funds freed will be used...

"If Negroponte wants to convert kids to the global information economy, he might consider the chief virtue of the XO laptop: its lights and sounds. Even Western kids, whose toys flash and squeal, are drawn with primitive wonderment to the peculiar phenomena of this computer---the distinctive hums and blinks that seem like evidence of its soul."- Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times Magazine, complete with an appropriate allusion to The Gods Must Be Crazy. The TeleRead take: I'm all for the razzle-dazzle if the schools can also direct the kids to the XO's awesome e-book capabilities, which, as I...

PDAs could be just the ticket for safely reading naughty books during lunch hour----with or without goggles. Jokes aside, however, might some e-book publishers rely too heavily on erotica? Jane over at DearAuthor asks the inevitable question. With mainstream houses breathing heavily down the necks of the small-fry---panting?--- maybe it's time for certain small e-publishers to work harder on developing new markets to augment existing ones. No moralizing here. Just some business questions. "Of the books listed as bestsellers at Samhain," Jayne says, "two of the top three feature threesomes or more. At All Romance eBooks, seven of the...

"I used to get library e-books but since my computer crashed and was repaired I can no longer get the PDF library e-books. Something to do with Adobe Digital Editions---they say version 1.5 should be coming out soon, which will fix the problem." - Linda Pettit, in West Virginia---writing in PalmAddicts. The TeleRead take: But how long until something else will introduce an incompatibility---such as Linda Pettit's moving on to a new system. Not to mention all the unknowns of DRM. Will IDPF members be able to agree on an "open" DRM system? Related: Ficbot's Public library eBabel...

The legally oriented LLRX site ran a mostly positive review of the OLPC XO---with mention of the International Children's Digital Library and the XO's promise as an e-book machine. Conrad Jacoby also has a few thoughts on such topic as the XO's use of open source software, and he discusses the incredible display, too: "The screen...is backlit with LEDs, not the fluorescent tubes used in most laptops. The resulting screen is both more environmentally friendly and more durable, as LEDs have an average life cycle in excess of 10,000 hours, and multiple LEDs must fail before the screen...

In The Machine Stops, written in 1909, E.M. Forster told of a world dependent on a vast communications network, which fails. What if the Net went away? Hey, if nothing else, that would lessen the eBabel problem. More reflectively, Lynn Greiner of CIO.com asks the big what-if in Network World and tells what we'd most miss, such as online shopping. A break for local independent, brick-and-mortar bookstores? Or would they be caught up in the general chaos? (Spotted via LLRX.)...

Oh, how innocent this man looks---Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Given the powers of time travel, why might a book-lover go back to snuff Sir Tim out before he invented the Web? Could it be because the Web often can be toxic for immersive reading, the old-fashioned kind where you don't just flit around but really lose yourself in an author's thoughts and your own? Yes, the Web is a wonderful research tool. But in some ways, along with television, it just might be more of a threat to sustained thought than, say, video games---a medium I had in mind when...

It was a bit of work finding the original post so I thought I'd do a reminder here of the interview with the creators of Girl Genius. I am a real comics fan but I'd never heard of Girl Genius before. Well, one of the benefits of being unemployed is that I have some free time, so I checked it out. I was so taken with it that I wound up spending an entire day reading all 6 volumes of the work on line - a rather unpleasant experience by the way. This is one area where paper...

The Kindle E-Book and Amazon blog has charted estimates of the average Kindle arrival times associated with order dates. The numbers come from this thread within the Amazon Kindle forum pages: Where do you live, when did you order, and when did it arrive? "One takeaway," the blog says, "is that if you're buying a Kindle you might as well order an Amazon Kindle now since it takes approximately six weeks to arrive. The other big takeaways are: 1. It'll take approximately between 35 and 50 days to get your Kindle. 2. The median is around 40-44 days so...

"The book world has always had an invisible asset that makes up for what it lacks in outsize revenue and profits: the passionate attachment that its authors, editors and most frequent customers have to books themselves. Indeed, in this respect, avid book readers resemble avid Mac users." - From New York Times columnist Randy Stross's Kindle review, which, by the way, is positive and covers familiar territory. Also see PW blogger Bethanne Patrick's upbeat Kindle posts, here and here. Details: Stross addresses Steve Jobs' observation that people don't read books---check out the numbers in the column. Books, it seems, are...

Dov's eager for the world to try out his FBR line-spacing fix. I have, now, and can say the tweaked 0.8.12 works just great. I had to remap the paging keys and others when I installed the new FBReader; also, my keyboard arrow for scrolling works different. Hey, no big deal. Thanks again for your work on this, Dov! Related: The OLPC laptop as a promising school and library machine---with quick Opera and FBReader installation instructions---as well as updated info on obtaining FBReader for installation by the easier RPM method. Housekeeping: The post with a few more XO e-reading...