George Santayana said “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Certainly e-book history has been repeating—the iPhone/iPod Touch and the Kindle are standing in for the Palm PDA and the RocketBook as a new generation discovers e-books just as the early adopters did ten years ago (only a bit more successfully this time). But the history that people have been forgetting (or perhaps not knowing to begin with) is that there was a thriving electronic fiction community years before even the earliest commercial e-books were around to be adopted. Over the last four columns, I have...

Here’s Robert Lanham’s Internet-Age Writing Syllabus: Students will analyze the publishing industry and learn how to be more innovative than the bards of yesteryear. They'll be asked to consider, for instance, Thomas Pynchon. How much more successful would Gravity's Rainbow have been if it were two paragraphs long and posted on a blog beneath a picture of scantily clad coeds? And why not add a Google search box? Or what if Susan Sontag had friended 10 million people on Facebook and then published a shorter version of The Volcano Lover as a status update: "Susan thinks...

Found via TechMeme, the PreThinking blog reports that Palm is looking for “Real Reviewers”—everyday people like you and me (who are US residents and at least 18 years old)—to hype the Palm Pre on their blogs and social networks. According to Palm’s official blog, they will provide selected reviewers with a “current-model phone” (confirmed by PreThinking to include the Palm Pre) and six months of a pre-paid data plan. Applying (via the link to Palm’s blog, above) involves filling out a survey about what you do all day, what you are passionate about, what you use your current...

Is a spiffy new icon for an e-book program---from Apple itself---about to join the ones you see here? "A book reader application could allow the user to purchase and download new books," the iPhone 3.0 OS documentation reportedly says. So, within the app, could you buy e-books via micropayments billed to your iTunes account? A member of the Reading 2.0 list is sensibly speculating that. Needless to say, what applies to the iPhone could apply to the Touch as well. And maybe even the rumored Apple tablet, the “Mediapad” or whatever. Now for some other...

“Built on the Intel® Atom™ processor, the PeeWee Pivot PC is an Intel-powered Classmate PC which features durable, drop and spill resistant construction with a sturdy plastic case and removable carrying handle to withstand demanding everyday use at school, in the house, on the job or when traveling.” – PeeWee PC site (via jkOnTheRun). The TeleRead take: Priced at $599---no, this isn’t an econo machine---the “tablet laptop”  uses the Windows XP operating system. So it presumably can run Adobe, eReader and Mobipocket software, as well as other common e-reading apps. Before you go with Adobe Reader, however,...

I want one of these!! From the BeBook blog: Introducing the 'mini' BeBook (5") The BeBook mini, all the features of the large version and more, but a slightly smaller screen (1" / 2,5cm smaller). Perfect for travelling, this reader fits in any pocket. Full specs and a very competitave price level will follow shortly....

I was in New York today for a press event that had nothing to do with TeleRead. While there I passed by the booth from the OLED Association. Since OLED displays are absolutely gorgeous, I asked the representative about using them for ebook readers. He said that given the current way ebooks are presented OLED would not be an optimal technology. While OLED is extremely battery efficient compared to LED screens, it wouldn't work well for ebooks. This is because OLED's battery efficiency comes from the fact that only the driven leds require power. Black pixels, for example,...

This series, “Paleo E-books,” looks at groups who were writing Internet literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s—well before most people had any idea what an “e-book” was. Prior “Paleo E-books” columns cover: The Superguy Mailing List The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest In this entry I will be looking at fan-written fiction, or “fanfic”—and in particular one of the more famous early Internet fanfic series: Undocumented Features. Today, there is nothing unusual about Internet fanfic; it’s just one of those things that people do on the Internet. It’s gotten so you can barely research Harry Potter without coming across a...

A milestone of sorts was reached on my idiotprogrammer  blog recently. I noticed that wordpress has caught over 1,300,000 spam comments on my blog so far!  This merits an appreciatory post at least. I've been blogging since 2001, and I think I switched over to wordpress in 2003 (or was it 2004?). I think I started using akismet spam fighter in late 2005 or early 2006. Until  until then I was completely unprotected--and in a state of constant panic--always dreading the need to weed through the barrage of comments.  Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! (next page)....

Here we go again. Adobe, according to the Washington Post, has confirmed that there is a security flaw in Reader for Windows, Linux and the Mac platforms. There have been a lot of security problems with Reader and perhaps we should be switching over to a more secure platform According to the Post's Brian Krebs in his Security Fix column: As an alternative, I generally recommend the free and lightweight Foxit Reader (like Adobe's Reader it now comes bundled with a toolbar that you may want to opt out of installing). But there are other free PDF readers,...

“EPUBGen is a project that Peter Sorotokin has started---it's a conversion utility for rtf files, word files, and FictionBook files. The output in each case is, of course, epub. The project is open source, and available for download.” – Adobe Digital Editions blog post. Key detail: “Note that there is also a .jar file for rtf2epub and it should work, but the main intent of this project is to provide source code and examples of the way things could be done. In other words, there's plenty of room for developers to improve and enhance the conversion.” The TeleRead...

Stop the presses, as it were. The Espresso Book Machine “can print and bind books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait,” according to the Guardian. Currently it has access to 500,000 books, but the British bookseller Blackwell’s hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer---the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response...