The FTC has added more comments to the comments page on its March 25th Digital Rights Management town hall meeting since the original batch of 700. The total is now up to 840, including some that were submitted in the very last few days of the submission period. As Ars Technica observed, it is common practice for industry advocacy groups and other heavy-hitters to hold off on their comments until the very end of the submission process, so they can see what others have written and not give anyone time to respond to their own submissions. For the FTC meeting, a...

Thanks to Michael Pastore of EPublishers Weekly for letting me quote this. The original is here. I agree completely. The hyphen is just s-t-u-p-i-d: Email is now officially spelled with or without the hyphen: why not ebooks? The ebook world has plenty of technology; we can use a bit of humor and a dash of art. Here is a poetic parody that gripes about the ludricrous hyphen in the word "e-book". Written by a man who is unafraid to put his name at the bottom of a beautiful heap of nonsense. Why the Ex-Perts Call Them E-Books “You say e-books, and...

Newsarama has two recent articles on the interaction between e-readers and cartoons. The first, Could Kindle Kill Comics?, by Vaneta Rogers: "[Comic books are] a business that is very low margin and very low print run, so if 10 percent of the readers migrate to an e-device, that is going to throw off the economics for 60 percent of the books that are published in this country, and that's probably a low guess," said John Cunningham, DC Comics VP, Advertising. "So it doesn't have to become everybody in the room raising their hands having one to have that have a long-term...

Here is the text of a fascinating email that Paul Lyons sent us. I went over to the site and for any lover of diaries it is a marvelous resource. Paul hopes we find them well-written, original and interesting. Indeed I do. I find them all of that and more. Onto my RSS reader his site goes! Hi It's now nine months I've now been writing two or three articles a week on historical and literary diaries/diarists for the Diary Junction Blog. There's an archive of over 120 substantial stories, all of them full of useful...

If:book was right on the mark about the advantages of hyphenation in justified text---see Paul Biba's item. My own justification tastes very. But often I'll pick ragged right, partly because of the gaping holes in some justified texts without hyphenation. That can be a special problem when screens are small and the text isn't wide. Now here's another suggestion---one I've made before in an E Ink context. E-reading software should let you boldface all text if you want. The Cybook E Ink machine in the photo has a handy "embolden" command in Mobipocket-related software, and FBReader offers an...

This is a really interesting article by Dan Visel. However, for the article to really work you need to see his illustrations, so go on over and take a look: There have been a raft of reviews of the new Kindle and the various iPhone reading applications lately. In general, reviewers are more positive about the experience of reading from a screen than they have been in the past. However, I've noticed that one enormous factor in reading tends to get passed by; maybe it's not something that people notice if...

Here are some excerpts from Martin Taylor's review of the service: I checked Shortcovers out using its iPhone/iPod Touch reader app which works pretty well. Part of the Shortcovers proposition is its emphasis on lots of short content - under 5000 words - that you can easily read on your mobile phone. Most prominent among this is a great selection of first chapters that you can read for free so even if you don’t buy anything online it’s likely to be a worthwhile resource just for browsers. You’ll need to be online to access them. These chapters are not downloadable as far...

A former associate of mine from PalmAddict has been writing for Treo Central. Jennifer has just written an excellent article on her reading experiences with a Centro, iPhone and Kindle 2. The article is well worth reading as she has always had a good "touch" about gadget writing. From her article: When I got my first Palm PDA, I was really shocked to learn that I could put a whole book on the device. I remember thinking, "No Way!". And imagine my shock when I discovered that I could put an entire library of books on the thing!...

Strange, isn't it? Publishers don't want Amazon to boss 'em around on such issues as price---and yet they're letting Amazon use DRM to lock in customers. This is hardly news to TeleRead readers. But it's good to see Techdirt, itself no stranger to this issue, note the paradox. Related: Techmeme roundup here. Angry Slashdot post here. Thanks to Joseph Gray and Jon Noring....

No one believes Amazon's text-to-speech retreat has anything to do with Audible? So Amazon's people gear up to fight the legal battle that will let the company do T-T-S on the Kindle. And then they find that they've has cut out one of the key foundations for a business just bought for $300 million? Perhaps the Audible people were as surprised as all of the industry and have only just been able to navigate though the booming laughter to make their points. I’m very skeptical that Amazon is doing this in the interests of the publishing community....

According to Brad Stone in the New York Times “Bits” blog, Amazon has announced that it will leave up to the publisher the decision of whether a book can be read aloud by the Kindle’s speech synthesizer. In their statement, they continue to insist that the feature is completely legal—”Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rights-holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.” (This reminds me of the flap caused by Adobe back in 2000 when the company released a PDF of Alice in Wonderland through Glassbook whose description included the...

Japan has gained a reputation as the land of the cell phone. The adoption and use of cells in Japan seems to be several years ahead of phone use in the west, and it has become an integral part of their culture. For example, one season of the long-running Kamen (Masked) Rider series, Kamen Rider 555 (pictured at left) used special cell phones to transform ordinary teenagers into armored warriors—and the cell phone pen-pal relationship unknowingly carried on between two other characters was an important dramatic element of the series. In that light, it seems strange...