Okay, so Jossip isn't the Columbia Journalism Review. And the headline is a tad overdone: New York Times rocked by Maureen Dowd's Harry Truman quote scandal---even if there's a qualifier in a smaller font, "According to a loose definition of the word 'rocked.'" Still, it's good to see more people wondering if Harry Truman actually said, "If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog," a quote that appeared first in Ms. Dowd's work for the Times. The TeleBlog is simply the most recent outfit to revive the issue, having been preceded over the years...

Women are probably the biggest book-buyers. But could e-books help the industry find new male readers? And might newspaper book review sections get closer to E? Remember, if you buy an e-book advertised online, you get immediate gratification. Besides, the same reader gizmos used for enjoyment of e-books can work for newspapers---with possible help from services such as Feedbooks, so that even e-machines without wireless and display the news. The wireless-equipped  iPhone and iPod Touch are naturals for certain e-book fans, news junkies and mixes of the two. Both AP and the New York Times...

The Telegraph in the U.K. has published an excerpt from The Last Theorem, written by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederick Pohl. Summary in Slashdot: "It's a reassuring chunk of old-fashioned sci-fi, describing an Olympics that's set on the moon. Typically for Clarkian sci-fi, is very much about the practicalities of mounting a Lunar Olympics, rather than any wild fantasy." So far, alas, I can't find TLT in E. Technorati Tags: Arthur C. Clarke,Frederick Pohl,SF,sci-fi,science fiction,Olympics...

"The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-inch screen and comes with the Linux OS. It has a 400MHz processor, 128M bytes of RAM, 1G byte of flash storage and an optional wireless networking dongle. It includes office productivity software, a Web browser and multimedia software. " - Network World. The catch: You can't buy the NPX-9000 except in batches of 100. Still, it just might be the world's cheapest laptop---beating the OLPC's XO-1 (shown) by $58. Just the ticket for e-books for schools in, say, Bangladesh? Related: AMD passes on low-cost notebooks, in eWEEK News. But,...

Yahoo angered Yahoo Music consumers by deciding to shut down a DRM server. This would have prevented them from moving the songs to other machines, in the wake of the closing of YM. Luckily Yahoo has wised up, and people will get refunds or DRMless music. Yes---the inevitable question. A lesson for publishers? Books are a medium of permanence. Don't muck up the works with DRM. Technorati Tags: Yahoo,Yahoo Music...

Q. In this era of $4-a-gallon gas here in the U.S., might LCD prices go the same way as oil? If so, just how? A. C-a-r-t-e-l? Or at least informal price adjustments? Prices of LCDs---and yes, they have their fans among e-bookers who dislike E Ink---may rise under a plan by some manufacturers to limit production to 90 cent of capacity. An OPEC act? Or just good planning? Supposedly the price increase will be minor. Will this save LCD operations that might otherwise vanish? If so, maybe this will be A Good Thing by preserving competition....

Brick-and-mortar stores can sell e-books under the Symtio system. Zondervan, the Christian publisher, a HarperCollins imprint, is blazing the way. Here's how Symtio works. A customers buys a plastic card in the store, goes online for a book or audio, keys in a number, then buys the ePub or MP3. The latter will work on Sony Readers but not Kindles. See video and news release. Who knows? Maybe this will hook a few p-book shoppers. Still, one wonders what happens when they go E in a bigger way and learn to browse and download their...

I've asked this before. Did Harry S. Truman really say, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog?" Or "buy a dog"---the words that Maureen Dowd of the New York Times first attributed to him on March 10, 1989? After a month, I have yet to receive a reply from Ms. Dowd, whom I tried to contact though a Times form on the Web. Does anyone have the Pulitzer Prize winner's e-mail address handy for my private use? Got access to a New York Times corporate directory? Even if she were...

Flexibility helps keep us healthy. We can better enjoy physical activity which, in turn, motivates us to exercise. Keep on stretchin’! Likewise, a flexible digital publication format is much better for the industry—and for readers—than a rigid, limited one. To be more precise, a flexible format is more likely to be embraced, due to business pressures. The IDPF’s new open standard e-book format, ePUB, is rapidly proving its flexibility. And ePUB’s flexibility is, of course, intentional by design. A little history of ePUB's predecessor as a consumer standard Five years, two months and eight days ago, I published the reviewed eBookWeb article: “OEBPS: The Universal...

I've got a warm spot in my heart for the Pragmatic Programmer site. It  sells e-books using social DRM---a concept that has intrigued both Adobe's Bill McCoy and me, as a compromise in the "protection" debate. So I'll pay special attention to a question that Dave Thomas over there is asking: Are eBooks ready for technical content? For easy layouts, such as those used in novels, of course E is ready. But how about program listings? Some houses like O'Reilly have been doing this for a long time. In the end I hope that the universal solution for...

The New York Times over the weekend ran a piece on a topic familiar to many TeleRead community members---piracy of oft-overpriced textbooks. "The students who create and give away digital copies are motivated not by financial self-interest," columnist Randall Stross writes perceptively, "but by something more powerful: the sweet satisfaction of revenge." Meanwhile, guess who was advertising phones on the Pirate Bay site when I dropped by a few minutes ago? The advertiser was Verizon or at least an affiliate or other company, maybe authorized, maybe not (updated at 5:30 a.m. on July 29). Fascinating---even...

James Fallows of The Atlantic is the latest Kindle convert and tells here and here about his new love. This is good news for e-books, given his stature within journalism and among Washington policy wonks. Besides commercial books like Netherland, he is already enjoying free public domain classics from Manybooks.net and Project Gutenberg. Perhaps he'll also check out Feedbooks.com, which, like Manybooks, has K-format books ready to go. I know Jim and will see if he might eventually write about e-book standards and related issues such as DRM. Just look what happened to cassette tapes....