From the Research Information Network's monthly newsletter. If any of our British readers attend these I would be happy to publish a precis. Crystal ball gazing: services and skills for tomorrow's libraries 21 September 2009, Open University, Milton Keynes This annual Open University library seminar includes Liz Chapman, Deputy Director University College Libraries, Lorraine Estelle, CEO of JISC Collections and Sue Hill of Sue Hill Recruitment Services as its key speakers. Themes explored will be the challenges of the digital environment, the impact of technological developments and changing user behaviour and expectations, the skills and ranges of expertise and knowledge essential for...

Received an email from Clement Monjou: I've got some interesting news about the upcoming Sony Reader product line and when they are going to be available on the french market. Sony announced today that the Sony Reader Touch Edition will be available in France in November 09 for 299€, only in black and red. The Sony Reader Pocket Edition will not be released in France but the PRS-505 will stay available. So French consumers will be able to buy the following products : - Sony PRS-505 Silver 230€ - Sony PRS-600 Black 300€ - Sony PRS-600 Red 300€ I wrote two articles about this...

How can Sony and others beat the Kindle? Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo doesn’t just urge greater ease of use and other improvements? He also writes: I'd counsel Amazon's competitors to embrace openness even more. In particular, they'd be wise to let people trade eBooks. They could do this even while maintaining copy protection—you could authorize your friend to read your copy of The Da Vinci Code for three weeks, and while he's got it, your copy would be rendered unusable. (I'd prefer if eBooks came with no copy protection—as is the case with...

E-book prices need to come down, warns Sony content exec Richard Palk---and with good reason, given the lower production expenses of e-books. Granted, both E and P come with editing costs and all that. But really, should e-book prices be as high as they are now? (Bookseller.com via Don Linn.) Related: 6,000 outlets reportedly to sell Sony Readers this holiday season---2X last year’s number (via Mike Cane). And actually that’s tied to the first item. The more e-book gizmos out there, the more e-book gouges will harm the growth of the book biz as a whole....

The EU’s possible new rules would deal with such matters as out-of-print and orphan works, says the New York Times. Meanwhile a hearing will be held on something in similar territory, the proposed Google settlement....

Anybody try Auto Kindle eBook Converter? “It takes PDF, Lit, and HTML files and converts them to .mobi.” How’s it compare to Calibre?  (Via MobileRead.)...

Ugly underlining and a yellow background show up in ePub books that you download from Google Books and convert and read with Mobipocket Desktop. Annoys the devil out of me. But Spider Mattheson has a workaround: just use Calibre to convert the ePub to Mobi. Eureka! No more yellow submarines!...

io9 has interviewed Tor editor Patrick “pnh” Nielsen Hayden, co-blogger of Making Light, about the future of science fiction. Nielsen Hayden (it’s a compound surname) has some interesting things to say, much of it about e-books. pnh “believes print books will continue on into [the] future,” but has himself been reading e-books since the era of the Palm Pilot. (In the comments, he outs himself as the nameless “editor of science-fiction books” cited as an enthusiastic Palm Pilot convert in a 1998 Salon Magazine article.) The small visual inconvenience of e-books is made up for...

Nokia officially announced its fifth Internet Tablet today, the N900. The color, 267ppi screen and 3G wireless capabilities make this device an even better fit as a companion Kindle e-reader than the iPhone....

Northwest Missouri State U has been evaluating e-texts, and has come up with some interesting results. As many others in academia are discovering, students are showing a lot of interest in any way to bring school costs down, especially when it comes to textbooks. Combined with a forward-thinking school (they give laptops to full-time undergrads), you have the makings of some serious efforts to use e-texts. From an article to be released in the September 2009 CURRENTS: One Show Me State institution may soon be showing the way to e-textbook innovation. Northwest Missouri State University spent the 2008–2009 academic ...

That's what The Daily Utah Chronicle is reporting. Publishers are having a hard enough time right now, but textbooks publishers must be shaking in their shoes. The article, however, points out that one of the downsides to this is that the top professors might be reluctant to write for open source textbooks and give up their publishing income. Could open source mean a lower standard for the future? The Utah Student Association is proposing to make textbooks free by offering them online. USA, composed of all student body officers from every Utah college, has tentatively proposed to have Utah colleges...

From the Bookeen blog here is a listing of the new feature in the upcoming 2.0 firmware release. They don't give a date, but say it will be coming soon. Firmware 2.0: Adobe Digital Edition - Support of Adobe Digital Edition epub and pdf files. - Support of non DRMed epub and pdf files. - Support of html, txt, jpeg, png, gif. - 12 font sizes on all epub, txt, html files. - Rotation of the page and Zoom from 50 to 100%. - For pdf files: hyperlinks are now activated and the covers are displayed on the library page. - Browsing mode: new interface presentation. - Possibility to...