In a new column he has penned for the Guardian, Cory Doctorow suggests that the Authors Guild has “lost the plot” in their fight against the Kindle’s text-to-speech function. After laying out why that function is not an infringement, or even if it is Amazon is the wrong one to complain about, Doctorow explains that the legality of read-aloud is irrelevant and what authors should be worrying about is Amazon’s ability to turn off features in the Kindle (that is, changing their mind and allowing publishers to choose to disable read-aloud for their books) after it has been...

Picked this up from Bookfutures. Maybe one of our British readers can fill us in after the event. Date/Time: 19 Apr 2009 13:00-18:00 Location: Earls Court One, Level 1, Cromwell Room To book a place CLICK HERE For American book publishers these are challenging times. The economic downturn is hitting hard an industry once thought by many to be recession-proof. Bookstores are reporting sharp declines in sales and traditional channels for books are shrinking and consolidating. Consumer confidence is low, reading skills and literacy levels are falling, and readers have more competing distractions than ever before. * While they confront today some of the toughest trading...

Wired’s Epicenter blog seems to think they are. Steven Levy writes about how one of the law firms interested in filing an amicus curae (“friend of the court”) brief in the Authors Guild vs. Google case has received funding from Microsoft, and that its chief investigator is a former Microsoft employee. Levy points out that Microsoft has nudged the government toward taking anti-trust action against Google before, and could well be doing so again. It is puzzling what to make of this article. Beyond rumor and innuendo, there is not a great deal there. As one commenter points...

I don’t bring any special credibility to the table here at TeleRead. I’m a working author, a believer in the potential of and vision behind the Kindle both for readers and authors, and I have acquired a bit of expertise about Amazon’s underlying business strategies over a decade of writing about the company’s innovations and practices. I care about Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues, but I am not doctrinaire about them. My inclination is to believe that these issues will be sorted out at certain critical times in the future development of the book business, and that it may be counterproductive...

David Nygren has just published a short story, Under the Table, in Excel spreadsheet format. You can find it here. I don't know what to say - what can come after this? So I’ve done it. Here is the first draft of my short storyspreadsheet “Under the Table” (I hope I don’t need to point out the double entendre). Other formats are available at the end of the post. Read it. I swear it’s not horrible (how’s that for a blurb?). ... The first worksheet of the Excel file has the “raw data,” the story...

The idea of print-on-demand has long been associated with books. But now it is beginning to rub off on other media. From the Warner Archive Last week, Warner announced its new “Warner Archive” program, in which classic Warner movies that were not yet getting a full commercial DVD release could be ordered for $14.95 as a DRM-encumbered digital download, or $19.95 as a DVD. Upon order, a disc would be created featuring the movie in its original aspect ratio and its trailer if available, then shipped out to the consumer, The disc would be fairly...

Kindle owners and others can now download books in the nonDRMed Mobipocket format from Project Gutenberg. I checked out several PG books, and they all had Mobi editions. This apparently is for all titles, just like Gutenberg's ePub. The conversions are not perfect, but, still, it's definite progress. Now---how long until the Kindle can read ePub, the industry standard? (Via MobileRead.) Related: 500,000 public domain titles in ePub, from Google-Sony partnership. Readable on a PC—no Sony Reader needed. You can read the Google books on a Kindle, even, with the right arrangements....

Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II was a dream patient for his American dentist, during World War I, in at least one way. He showed a extremely high tolerance of pain, at least if you go by the start of The Kaiser as I Know Him, which I read on my Sony Reader this morning on a walk down Howard St. and Jordan in Alexandria, VA. "'The ladies like an anesthetic, no doubt, Davis,'" the Kaiser would tell tell the Dr. Arthur Davis, "but I can stand it without. Go ahead!" "And I may say at...

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” —John Gilmore This saying has long been true in the Internet world, but it was a shock to many when it first came true in the real world. Banned in France I was recently reading through my copy of Dear Valued Customer, You Are a Loser by Rick Broadhead, a collection of anecdotes about great technological blunders, and one that caught my eye was this story from 1996. There had been a great deal of controversy surrounding the late French President François Mitterrand’s health...

"In a poll hosted on the flight search engine’s site, 'a good book' received 24% of the vote, followed by an MP3 player with 22%, perfume or deodorant with 14% and a laptop or PDA with 10%." - TravelDailyNews.com. The TeleRead take: Just wait until the prices of readers come down, and ideally the costs of e-books from big publishers, too. Since many travelers must deal with less-than-ideal lighting conditions, this could be good news for makers of book lights, the side-lit Sony PRS-700, and LCD-based gizmos such as iPhones and Touches. Speaking of prices and bargains: My $170 used Sony PRS-505...

"Through a series of studies, we have discovered that fiction at its best isn't just enjoyable. It measurably enhances our abilities to empathize with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves." - Keith Oatley, novelist and psychologist---writing in Greater Good Magazine (via Readerville). The TeleRead take: So what about distinctions within fiction? Will a Tom Clancy novel improve you as much as, say, one by Philip Roth? Of course, I'd hope that people wouldn't read fiction just for improvement, but also for sheer enjoyment. Meanwhile here's one issue I'd hope wouldn't come up---e-book vs. p-books, in...

A book is forever. A screen of text is not. So says Stephen Carter (photo) in a Daily Beast post titled Where's the Bailout for Publishing? I would say he has it backwards: online is forever. Books are made of glue and paper, mostly of the high-acid type that quickly turns into so much dust and pulp. I have whole shelves doing so before my eyes, particularly the ones I owned in Thailand, where the climate is particularly merciless to cheaply-made books. They’re churned out by a publishing industry mostly concerned with this quarter’s bottom line, not eternity....