The nurses and the social worker agreed. "Hearing," they all more or less said, "is the last thing to go." At 5:30 p.m. today my mother, always a good listener when my sister and I needed her, died at 94 of congestive heart failure in a rest home in Springfield, Virginia. I don't know what the final words she heard were, just that we encouraged her to let go when there was no more fighting to do. Dorothy and I, in fact, tried not speaking to her, despite our wishes to the contrary, so she wouldn't linger on in pain---congestive...

Several hundred Sony Readers will soon reach Random House staffers, according to Publishers Weekly---this on top of other Reader-related adoptions at companies such as Hachette, S&S and St. Martin's. Manuscripts will get to Random's out-of-town sales reps faster and without any paper for them to lug around. And that's not all for publishers using the Reader. "We looked at how much we were spending on paper, postage, ink," Phil Madens at Hachette is quoted. "A 400-page manuscript would cost $7 to print. In the first couple of seasons, the Reader will pay for itself." Hachette is using readers...

Over the weekend we published some eye-opening numbers from the Publishing Trends newsletter---check 'em out if you haven't already. So how many e-books are major publishers in the U.S. really offering? Would you believe that at this point, even Random House has fewer than 7,000 e-titles available, a little short of Wiley's number. And HarperCollins and S&S? Just 4,000 each. Penguin, Harlequin and Hachette? Even fewer, individually. While Holtzbrinck subsidiaries aren't in the stats, I doubt their inclusion would change things that much. For perspective, remember that Amazon's Kindle store carries more than 110,000 books, newspapers and blogs, meaning that just...

The 4G Win XP version of the Asus Eee PC will apparently go on sale April 9 at Best Buy in the States for $399. At all BB stores? Not sure. Big pro from an e-book perspective: You can use the same gizmo to download and read your e-books and run Mobipocket and the others to read DRM-infested bestsellers---beyond which the Eee can do much more than the similarly priced Kindle. Con: The res of the 7-inch screen is 800 x 480. Some folks might want to wait until a pricier model comes out with a bigger, better...

Jeeze. When will e-textbook publishers stop hurting themselves and experiment more widely with no DRM, social DRM and other alternatives---including textbooks bundled with courses, thereby reducing the incentive for piracy? What is especially infuriating about DRM for textbooks is that students would prefer to be able to read the same book on cellphones as on laptops. DRM's inherent eBabel makes this harder. Yes, some publishers can put books online without DRM and use timed, browser-based viewing. But then the student can't keep the material for later reference. And even with precautions in place, nothing is copy-proof anyway. Not...

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti shared with us a moving remembrance of Steven T. Florio, ex-CEO of Condé Naste, who mentored her. Both were the first in their families to reach college, and among other things, Sadi benefited from his book recommendations. Here's an MP3 of Sadi's podcast of "Losing Steve"---well worth your time even if you earlier read the essay. If you haven't already, why not subscribe to our podcasts, mostly from Sadi? Technorati Tags: Steven T. Florio,Steven Florio...

"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits," Albert Einstein said in a quotation I picked up from by jan on freedom. "Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." Einstein lived in a different age from ours, that's for sure. I'm more worried that my students' lives are so frantic and busy---like mine---that they hardly have time to read and reflect. I have to schedule the time in my calendar. Reading as a...

As a publisher focusing on the professional IT sector, I ask myself this question a lot: What does the technology add?  Is this new tool or release measurably different from the others?  Will it enable users to create products faster, less expensively, with more useful features---or all of the above? I found myself asking the same question when I recently read about this project, The 21 Steps, by Charles Cumming, which is part of Penguin's We Tell Stories initiative.  In The 21 Steps, Cumming uses Google's satellite imagery to help tell the story.  Different?  Yes.  Functional use of the...

Should you date or marry someone whose reading list doesn't jibe closely with yours? What if your potential beloved hasn't even heard of this guy---Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin? Oh, the horrors related in a New York Times essay today, It's Not You, It's Your Books! I'll side with those who don't filter out possible mates by their reading tastes, however revealing they might be. "After all," Rachel Donadio points out, "a couple may love 'The Portrait of a Lady,' but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different...

Could your GPS gizmo not only display e-books on a nice LCD someday, but also let you shop for them, via a wireless connection? And how about geo-tied pointers that would automatically come up to show local books of interest or highlight literary landmarks? What's more, suppose you could even search for p-book stores in the area and, in some cases, even peruse their stocks from your car if the inventories were online? Check out TeleBlog regular Paul Biba's GPS Passion review of Dash Express (larger photo here), and tell us what you think. Hey, Paul, you gave...

In '06 major publishing houses individually offered 1,000-3,000 e-book titles and 250-3,000 e-audio ones, and the whole e-book market was $12-$15M, says Publishing Trends, a well - regarded newsletter for industry insiders. And now? "Many of these numbers have more than doubled," PT's April issue reports, "and publishers are increasingly providing digital content in a variety of forms." You already know the wholesale revenue stats for e-books of 12-15 trade publishers, provided directly from the International Digital Publishing Forum. Now---beyond the newsletter's chart reproduced here, showing percentages of March 28 New York Times bestsellers in different formats---here are some other gems...

"Here is my major problem with the situation---their insistence on dictating to us, and everyone else, these new terms over the phone in a high-pressure manner. The fact that they were unwilling to put anything in writing seem to me to suggest that, at a minimum, they knew what they were doing was questionable. Moreover, we are not Amazon's customers. Lightning Source is their customer. That is who they have the relationship with to distribute our books. They stepped over that business relationship to pit us against Lightning Source. I consider that unethical." - Post from Booklocker co-owner Richard...