Yakov Shafranovich runs the interesting site publicdomainreprints.org. The aim of the site is: "This is an experimental project, which is focused on archiving and republishing public domain works. At this time, this service can take a book from any of the supported sites such as the the Internet Archive (books in public domain ONLY) and reprint it via print on demand techology." One of the sites he supports is Google Books, with about 3 million books available. However, according to his blog Google has changed its terms of service and he may no longer be able to offer these...

Editor's Note: I received the following email from reader Cliff Burns and found it so interesting I asked him if I could publish it as a Reader contribution. Paul: Read your comments in the Christian Science Monitor article with much interest. The e-book format and digitization of publishing had accorded people like me, an indie writer with a strong distaste for the writing "biz", a newly created and much cherished sense of freedom. I've been a professional writer for 25 years and in that time--thanks, mainly, to the rise of corporate publishing--I've seen literary-quality fiction marginalized in favor of commercial, derivative crap. I no...

This morning I noticed a comment on my comment about the publisher Everyman's, posted in Recession and the Penguin way. The comment mentioned Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. That reminded me that I had always wanted to read some of his stuff. So I immediately went to Fictionwise, always my first choice, and, unfortunately, it was only available in secure Mobipocket format. After what Overdrive did to all those Mobipocket customers I am very confused about buying in secure Mobipocket. I would have thought Fictionwise would have removed all of these books. Well, they haven't, but I'm...

Just now, Google scared us and a good part of the rest of the virtual world---with a kind of Halloween II, or maybe April Fool's Day. When I looked up something on TeleRead, I got a malware alert. For a time the Google-supplied link wouldn't even let people into the site. BUT guess what. A similar message appeared when I Googled up the New York Times, the Washington Post and a minor site in North Carolina. I doubt that an evil hacker would have infected all those places simultaneously. For now, the message is gone....

Liza Daly is a software engineer and president of Threepress Consulting Inc., developing applications for publishing and education. Recent work includes online products for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Oxford University Press, and O'Reilly Media.  She is a frequent writer and speaker on publishing technology issues and will be appearing on two panels at the O'Reilly Tools of Change 2009 conference. - K.M. KM: You are the developer of Bookworm. Can you easily sum up exactly what Bookworm is and what it does for us? (No pressure!) LD: As a project, Bookworm has two goals: ...

Earlier I summed up my 2009 e-book predictions for Publishing Trends. Now you can read them in full. One modification: The Plastic Logic E Ink machine, one of the biggest threats to the Kindle, won't be on sale in '09---but almost. It's now supposed to slip out in early 2010. Subscription info for Publishing Trends: Here....

Refurbished Dell Mini 9 netbooks have dipped as low as $178---alas, they're not that cheap right now---but Android netbooks are on the way. Could we see the $99 netbook in time without any need for a wireless contract? Let's hope that Stanza or another slick e-book app can come on the netbooks or at least be available. And if Android tablets or tablet-convertible netbooks can appear, then so much the better. Technorati Tags: Dell,netbooks...

First-hand I've witnessed the pain that eBabel and other complexities can inflict on small publishers like Lida Quillen who are trying to do both E and P. Many can't afford to farm out conversion and other duties to specialists. But in some ways the little guys actually enjoy an edge. They lack the big corpocracies where people so often feud over when and how to take e-books seriously. Luddites still shape policy at some large houses. In a related vein, the Christian Science Monitor notes progress that some respected small presses are making with e-books: ...

Is this some backpeddling or a failure to be clear in the first place---or maybe a reflection of a battle between factions within Amazon? One way or another, the latest from Amazon is that it isn't banishing all nonKindle and nonMobi publications from its store, contrary to the impression left in its original comments as reported in Publishers Weekly. "This does not apply to eDocs because they are not DRM-protected," Amazon is quoted in O'Reilly's Tools of Change blog. "This only applies to DRM-protected eBooks." TOC blogger Andrew Savikas adds: A...

From BookGlutton's Travis Alber. I can't say it any better than the email she sent me: BookGlutton has just pushed some major updates, some of which I think you might be interested in. BookGlutton now supports non-DRMed ePub uploads. We've released a suite of new upload features, including direct URL imports for HTML and ePub files, as well as the ability to upload ePubs from your desktop. We've also released private sharing - something we've been working on for quite some time. Now users can upload their private work and invite others to share it, without having it appear in the catalog. Features like this are great for...

"if Penguin was successful making good books available cheaply and everywhere in the 1930s, now is the time to think about doing the same thing with e-books." - Hugh McGuire in the Book Oven blog. Technorati Tags: Penguin...

We received the following from the firm charged with making notice of the Google Book Settlement and post it here as a convenience to any of our readers who might have an interest. The notice, itself, is too long for us to publish. The process of notifying authors and publishers about the settlement has begun. If you would like to update your readers with the court-approved Notice, which summarizes the settlement, important terms, claims process, and key dates, it is available at http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/notice.html. Rightsholders may now claim their works at http://www.googlebooksettlement.com....