A couple of days ago we reported on the iPhone SMS bug that would allow your iPhone to be taken over by a hacker. Today Apple has released a patch for the bug. Update your phone as soon as you can. It never hurts to be safe....

The Millions' has a collaborative atlas of book stores and literary places. This Atlas is open to anyone and everyone to edit. Aside from the atlas the mashup also includes book blogger locations. The creator says: add the general location ... of where you live. In the next year, I will be notifying you about authors who are coming to your area! It's fun to poke around the map and see what bookstores are where. The most unusual one is in the Antartic: CSEC Library, Antarctic Last Updated by Max on May 15 The Crary Science &...

This is not a good time to raise capital. That's why that fact that LibreDigital was able to secure $15M in a second round financing is impressive. LibreDigital is an ebook distributor, and the venture sharks wouldn't give them money if they didn't smell more money in the water. And that money is coming from ebooks. VentureBeat quotes on of the partners who financed LibreDigital as saying: "Demand for books & newspapers in digital formats is out-pacing supply." ...

Google Books engineering director Dan Clancy was interviewed recently and he talked about Google's vision of the future. He said that that the settlement was looking at the past, but in the future Google had other ideas. Here's an excerpt from the interview as published by the BayNewser: ... But right now the physical bookstores are a critical part of our book ecosystem. And in fact a huge amount of books are bought because people go into a physical bookstore and say, hey I want this, I want that. And I think it's a mistake...

Maria Bonn is the Director of the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office. She is responsible for the production of electronic books and journals and for broadly developing the role of the Library in scholarly communication. In an interview by Mary Minnow of the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use website she discussed how the University determines whether a book is under copyright: On determining copyright status: right now we are being fairly conservative in our copyright judgments. Keep in mind that these volumes are only for sale in the United States, so we are guided by U.S. copyright...

I hate the fonts on most E Ink readers. They don’t stand apart sufficiently from the background. But the Sony PRS-600---discussed earlier---just might offer bolder fonts than typical models. Let hope that the impressions from this screen shot, picked up from the Kindle 2 Review, will hold up in real life. Improved screen contrast would also help.  PRS-600 specs: Touch screen of six inches,  maybe flexible, SD and Memory Stick support, size of just 4.87 by 4.87 inches, weight of ten ounces, ePub capability, and possibly MP3 audio recording rather than just a...

“The Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has won its court case against The Pirate Bay. The Amsterdam court today ruled that the site must cease all operations in The Netherlands within 10 days, or else pay penalties of 30,000 euros ($42,300) a person, per day.” – TorrentFreak. The TeleRead take: See Techmeme roundup for further details. The defendants will face a 30,000-Euro-a-day fine if they don’t shut down. A few issues have popped up. Were the defendants AWOL because they failed to receive a summons? Also, can Dutch authorities really block the site?...

Details in Engadget---source of the dog-ate-my-homework  image. Meanwhile a news release from a law firm involved with the homework case says: The suit is being brought by Justin D. Gawronski, a 17-year-old high school student who had purchased Orwell’s 1984 to complete a summer homework assignment. When Amazon deleted the book from his Kindle, it rendered the electronic notes he had taken worthless. The law firm hopes to turn this into a class action suit. Related: PDF of complaint. Technorati Tags: Justin D. Gawronski,Justin Gawronski...

That is from a market research report by Simba Information. Unfortunately the full report is fee based, but the Simba press release does contain some hard information: In July 2008, the top 25 titles on Amazon’s bestseller list for the four weeks averaged $9.25 and the top 25 in June 2009 averaged $8.04 after decreasing fairly steadily during the interim. For Sony, after starting at $10.13 in July 2008 then increasing to $11.68 in November thanks to a few well selling bundles, the average price of the top 25 fell to $9.97 in June. ... ...

“The New New York Times, or NNYT, would have a writing staff of say 50 people. These are among the best journalists in the world, and lets say they wanted to pay themselves $200,000/year, a top salary for a reporter of that stature. That’s just $10 million a year in payroll expenses. Call it $12 million with benefits. Plus, they all have stock options in the new comapny.” So writes TechCrunch founder J. Michael Arrington---complete with the “lets say” and the “new comapny.” A publication of any size can use copy editors (a job description I dearly...

That's the title of my daughter's feature article in Wired Magazine this month. Erin Biba is a Wired Correspondent and you can find her article on line here. The picture is from the article. Isn't it great to be able to crow about your daughter to a semi-captive audience. Now to hit all those suckers who follow me on Twitter....

For e-reading, I’ve had good luck with my Acer Aspire One with a 120G hard disk, 1G of memory, WiFi, an 8.9-inch WSVGA display and Win XP. But some e-bookers might prefer a more rugged XP model with a 16G solid-state drives. $199 for the reconditioned solid-state model at uBid isn’t an incredible price, but it certainly isn’t a gouge. You’ll be able to download books directly and read them with a variety of programs ranging from FBReader to Adobe Reader. Of course, I’d rather go with a linux netbook, but thanks to the Tower of eBabel,...