The site with the best logo in the world, The Register, has a must read article on copyfraud written by Charles Eicher, who is an artist and multimedia producer in the American Midwest. He has a special interest in intellectual property rights in the Arts and Humanities. The article is too long to summarize, but his basic thesis is: The public domain is the greatest resource in human history: eventually all knowledge will become part of it. Its riches serve all mankind, but it faces a new threat. Vast libraries of public domain works are being plundered by claims...

I find it fascinating to see how much different stuff is available on line. From the Resource Shelf: The Health Management Specialist Collection is a free, web-based library of high quality information resources. It is aimed at all healthcare professionals with a management role or interest. The site has a growing number of subject-based RSS feeds and regularly updated information on hot topics such as commissioning, patient safety and service provision. A free, twice-weekly alert service comprising of links and short summaries of the key documents published that week from national healthcare organisations is also produced....

Will this apply to classified ads in e-books someday? Simon Owens of the the Bloggasm blog writes in: “I remember reading your post the other day mentioning that Craigslist has closed down its adult services ad section. I wanted to test the effectiveness of its dating classifieds system, and so created a series of fake ads in multiple cities and tallied the amount and quality of the response.” Among Simon’s results? At finding mates for sex, romance, whatever, female advertisers have it much easier than males do. The straight women in Washington, D.C.---well, the ones he invented---averaged...

Here is their press release: Baltimore, Maryland (June 25, 2009): The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) filed suit today against Arizona State University (ASU) to prevent the university from deploying Amazon’s Kindle DX electronic reading device as a means of distributing electronic textbooks to its students because the device cannot be used by blind students. Darrell Shandrow, a blind ASU student, is also a named plaintiff in the action. The Kindle DX features text-to-speech technology that can read textbooks aloud to blind students. The menus of the device are not...

I guess Erik was reading the comments on the Arno Press post because I got this email from him today: Arno has added an ePub version of blur. Now you get both formats together for only $5. An update on the blog would be appreciated. Thanks to Teleread and your readers to helping improve our product! ________________________ And I got an email from Allen Lau of Wattpad: Not sure you know, OS 3 not only broke eReader, it also broke Wattpad! Fortunately, earlier today Apple has finally approved Wattpad v1.2, which is OS 3 compatible. We have posted the following to our...

“Following an interview with Philip Roth, the journalist and musician James Marcus created a dance remix sampling the great writer's ‘Jewish shouting’ and laughter--a song destined to be the ringtone of choice among hip literary types this summer.” -  Galley Cat. And speaking of the odd: The tiger-resistant laptop---aka the Panasonic CF-30---on the Forbes site. Technorati Tags: Philip Roth,Panasonic...

Congrats to TeleRead contributor Kat Meyer and other e-savvy founders of Quartet Press. A news release follows. Notice how Quartet is avoiding DRM? A lesson for big publishers? Expect more DRM-hating book people to start houses with a built-in advantage---no reader-hostile “protection.” – D.R. Quartet Press announces it is open for submissions. Quartet was founded on shared goal of the principles to create a high-quality, community-centric, and reader- and author-friendly digital publishing house. First titles will be available in Fall 2009. PASADENA, California. June 25, 2009 — Quartet Press–a fledgling digital publisher formed recently by Kassia Krozser...

A MobileRead member reports problems with the Sony PRS-700 storing annotations and book collection info? Anyone else have the same problem---or a solution? And is anyone suffering a similar problems on other e-readers? And speaking of annotations: When is the IPPF going to provide a standard for shared annotations or work with those who want one? This inaction is unfortunate, given their importance in the K-12 market. Technorati Tags: PRS-700...

Are you considering a netbook or bigger laptop for e-book reading? Check out some tips from David Pogue on decoding the ballyhoo about battery life, especially the old “up to” hype. Excerpt: “A.M.D. thinks that the industry should adopt a much more realistic benchmark for laptops---and then represent the results in a style that matches cellphones, iPods and cars. It’s proposing a new logo that clearly shows the best-case/worst-case numbers. Your laptop’s box might say, ‘2:30 Active Time/4:00 Resting Time.’” Disagree with any of Pogue’s advice or observations? Or got any thoughts of your own...

It's nice to be able to use two words like that in a row, but that is just what Apple's policies are. I was put on to this by reader Dave Law who emailed me. Here are two postings from Travelling Classics about their audio book application. By way of introduction their application had 224,381 total downloads, from 73 different countries, with 1,044,354 books downloaded from within the app. Their blog speaks for itself. On June 20 they wrote: We regret to inform you that our Audiobooks app will be temporarily unavailable for download. Late this...

James Kendrick at jkOnTheRun earlier told of an update he received of eReader so it again worked with OS 3.0 for his iPhone. I checked with eReader/Fictionwise. Both FW’s Steve Pendergrast and I wished that were true. But I didn’t see an update at the App Store. And Fictionwise hadn’t received the customary notification. Understandably we wondered if James had simply reloaded an earlier version and lucked out when he saw his eReader bookshelf again. New version for real: Keep checking the App Store Well, it turns out that James loaded up the real McCoy,...

Received the following email: Hi Paul, I write for a site called ChamberFour.com, and I recently did an interview with a librarian at the Seattle Public Library about ebooks, libraries and the OverDrive catalog. I thought it might be interesting to you and your readers. The post is up here: http://chamberfour.com/2009/06/25/interview-with-a-librarian/ I think it provides an interesting glimpse of how libraries handle their catalog and e-catalog, and it shows how libraries and librarians think of both p-books and ebooks as different sides of the same coin. Feel free to post a link or excerpt on TeleRead Thanks Nico Vreeland It is always interesting to hear something...