Moderator: Aaron Miller is CTO of BookGlutton.com, a Web-based community for e-book readers. He has 11 years of experience building Web sites for startups and established clients, including WellsFargo.com, Playstation.com, and Macys.com. Welcome to the ranks of TeleBlog contributors, Aaron, and keep the ePub criticism coming! Let's hope that the IDPF will listen to all sides. Also see Tamas Simon's essay. - D.R. Links, bookmarks and annotations all depend on one important thing: the ability to uniquely identify a specific passage or point in a book. And it's easy with paper. We put daggers and numbers where our notes belong....

John Updike was POed enough at the prospect of techies snippetizing his novels. Now imagine whole books written in snippets, with Digg-style ratings of newly added sentences, which can be voted up or down. Penguin Books UK and others have experimented with more primitive, wiki-style novels, but the LiveBook project takes such efforts to a new level, technically. Artistically? No threat to Updike, I'm sure. Marshall "The Mediu is the Message" McLuhan just might like this. LiveBook's app on FaceBook is called Helen and her Facebook, and it's about a social net newbie. On the Bebo service, meanwhlie, LiveBook...

"For about $150 anyone can access the United States' multi-billion dollar GPS program. GPS Outdoors: A Practical Guide for Outdoor Enthusiasts shows readers how to plug in and enhance most any outdoor experience." - Wowio, an ad-supported company that offer the Guide for free. More details: The Guide is for outdoor people ranging from hikers to "a climber pre-scouting the routes up Mount Shasta." GPS just might save your life. Amazon reviews of the book are here. Paul Biba, a TeleBlog regular, is a GPS expert, and I'd welcome his thought on the guide. Alas, people outside the States...

I've tried Sophie 1.0, and here's the news: It's more exciting to me than either E Ink machines or the IDPF's .epub standard. Ever since I heard about E Ink, I've been a big fan of it. But although I own a Sony Reader and read a lot, I don't use the Sony. Let me explain why. The main benefit of E Ink is readability. Unfortunately this resulted in slow page-refresh times. Negatives of today's E Ink Current E Ink devices: Are monochrome black and white. Offer slow page turns and screen refreshes---no video. Have slow...

How can Amazon bully publishers? In the wake of Jeff Bezos's POD power grab, here are four ways listed by Andrew Savikas of O'Reilly Media---a publishing tech expert and general manager of O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference. Would the International Digital Publishing Forum and the Association of American Publishers kindly take notice? All four ways would apply to one extent or another to e-book publishers---if not now, then in the future---and consumers, too, could suffer. Okay, here are the four: 1. "Data-driven lock-in"---for example, reader reviews. As Andrew notes, that can be good for end users. I'll not quarrel...

Jeff Bezos and friends have already bullied e-publishers into dumping non-Amazon formats for the books sold within its main store. Now we have this month's POD power grab, the talk of the blogosphere and beyond. "Amazon is a latter day mill owner," writes consultant Michael Cairnes, former president of R.R. Bowker, in his PersonaNonData blog. I agree. The new deal from Amazon is that you'd better use Jeff's BookSurge if you want his big store to carry your print-on-demand books. Is there any other nastiness that Amazon can pull off on the E front? Plenty, and ideally the...

Almazán is a Spanish municipality covering an area of 166 km². You would have known this if you had looked up the Dutch Wikipedia article on the place. The entry was started by one of the many "bots" that roam Wikipedia. Ah well, you'll say, there's still room for the human factor---look at the article's history, the entry has been edited 80 times. Yes, but---I'll reply---all those edits were performed by robots too. The article has never been touched by human hands. ...

"Authors and publishers who use Print-On-Demand printers in the U.S. have recently been hearing that Amazon will only continue to carry their works if they switch to Amazon's own POD property, BookSurge. WritersWeekly has the full story." - Booktwo.org. The TeleRead take: Amazon has its share of good traits, but as shown by its bullying of Toys R Us and the related legal findings, this is no charity---in many respects, not all, just the usual robber barons at work in the Seattle haze. TeleBloggers might want to revisit Matthew Josephson's writings or download a freebie from Manybooks.net, Burton Jesse Hendrick's...

Sophie 1.0, intended to make it easier for readers to become writers, is now downloadable in Mac, Windows and Linux flavors. Anyone care to give it a test drive and share impressions? The software developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book will let you create books, not just read e-texts---into which, by the way, you can insert audios and videos. Click on the left image for a better look at a screenshot of a Sophie book by Sol Gaitan, a Spanish teacher at New York's Dalton School. Audio and video embeds will help his students...

Good news for those looking for a Cybook Gen3. The storefront for the NAEB buying club is back up, following a hacker attack yesterday. Credit cards were not at risk. "We treat customer payment info the same way CD Baby does," Pam Gadsden, head of the club, reassures us, "so there is nothing there for anyone to steal."...

"One Turk Against the World" has just defaced the NAEB storefront---a bizarre action. NAEB isn't some evil, faceless corporations, but rather a grassroots effort, a buying club intended to bring down the price of the Cybook Gen3 e-reader with trimmings, and discourage use of DRM. To sabotage NAEB---short for Not Another eBook---is to aid those who want to keep e-books shackled. Best of luck to NAEB in recovering. Update, 6:20 p.m.: NAEB's Derek Benner has just e-mailed us: "We're getting the store fixed back to normal. We use the same system CD Baby does. All transaction information is secure. Oh,...

Moderator: Welcome to our latest contributor, Jeff Scott, library director in Casa Grande, Arizona! His bio is at the end. An aside: We're also eager to run balanced write-ups of library e-offerings from companies besides Overdrive. - D.R. Double-click for Jeff's audiobook video in greater detail. May other library systems create their own! - D.R. Find free audiobooks on the Web. Libraries can use hooks like this to help advertise their downloads of audiobooks, e-books, movies, and music. Some libraries team up in consortia to have better selection. The Greater Phoenix Digital Library in Phoenix, Arizona, is among the bigger...