The International SSBN Agency is trying to establish requirements, if any, for separate identification of different ebook versions. There is quite some controversy going on now as to whether an ebook should have the and ISBN at all, and if so whether it should be the same as the print ISBN or different, and if the ebook has its own ISBN should it have a separate number for each of the formats it is published in (epub, mobi, txt, etc.). The Agency has started a survey, which you can find here, and all interested parties should respond and help...

So predicts Sarah Epps at Forrester Research. I have mixed feelings about this. Given a choice of only one portable device for students, I’d rather they get netbooks (or larger laptops) that could double as tablets. Hey, we want students to write, too, and beyond that, the current E Ink readers can be disasters for people with disabilities, as Robert Kingett (photo) will tell you. Let’s hope that changes. In the same Bloomberg piece quoting Epps, Corning says textbooks will be eighty percent...

Jonney Shih, the billionaire chairman of Asus, gets a write-up in Fortune for pioneering the netbook, which, of course, springs from the One Laptop Per Child project. OLPC receives nary a syllable of mention. But certainly Fortune seems on the money in giving Shih credit for major commercialization of the idea---a somewhat shrunken laptop with a low price. Next on tap for Asus: e-books. Fortune missed that angle, alas. Given Shih’s competitive nature, it would appear that Amazon and the rest are in for a good fight. Already, according to Fortune, Asus in...

Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute has shown off some new flexible display screen technologies. One is a 4.1-inch color OLED screen pictured here. OLED does away with the need for a polarizer or stacks of optical film. For an e-reader, however, OLED is still a bit of a problem because all the light parts of the screen have to be powered. ITRI also showed a color e-reader touch screen with software that would allow drawing and note-taking. The screen uses a cholesteric liquid display that supposedly uses less power and is highly reduced in cost. In conjunction with Corning,...

Don’t give away your whole book for free. That’s what Ficbot warned new authors yesterday, and I agree. Generous samples are cool. Same for onscreen viewing of the complete book, as opposed to actual freebies of the full files. But should a writer offer a free download of the whole bleepin’ book if it isn’t the first in a series or whatever? No, in most cases. I’d respectfully disagree with Cory Doctorow on that issue. Meanwhile there’s the related matter of freebies in e-stores. Shortcovers President Michael Serbinis notes, in an upbeat interview with...

The basic Story e-reader from iRiver is on sale in the United Kingdom for £229. Specs: ---Optional touchscreen, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity. --Six-inch E Ink screen with 600-by-800 resolution and grayscale. --ePub, PDF, TXT, Office .doc, PPT, XLS. Plays MP3, WMA and OGG audio and shows JPEG, BMP and GIF. --2GB of RAM and SD card slot allowing up to 32GB. --USB 2.0 slot. --Battery life of 7000 page turns. So, gang, is there anything to get excited about, especially at the price, equivalent to about $400? Look at the photo...

An e-book shop will open on Dec. 1 for Australia ---Read without Paper---and will sell both international and local authors. Supposedly prices will be comparable to those of U.S.-based stores: let’s see. The publicity says that “Over 110,000 Fiction & Non-Fiction Titles” will be be available, including books from “Stephanie Meyer, Dan Brown, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, Nora Roberts and many more.” It will also feature top Australian and New Zealand writers such as Colleen McCullough, Kerry Greenwood, Michael Faber, Nick Cave, Tom Collins, James Clavell, Thomas Keneally and Kathy Lette.  Formats will be Adobe-DRMed ePub, Adobe...

Found via Slashdot: Wiseandroid.com has an article provocatively entitled “The Googlephone: Google gears up for attack on mobile phone market” in which it claims Google is preparing to release its own self-branded Android-powered iPhone-equivalent phone. Of course, there is nothing particularly earthshaking about yet another Android phone hitting the market—last month, Wiseandroid noted that over 50 Android-powered phones will be released in the near future. But this one will be the first to harness the power of Google’s Google Voice + Gizmo5 VOIP platform to let customers make calls for free. The article is not entirely clear how...

Googled: The end of the World As We Know It---that’s a new, not-so-flattering book about the search giant, complete with anti-Google comments by some media barons. Check out Nicholson Baker’s NYT review. I haven’t read Googled yet, but get the sense that Baker is much fairer than Googled’s author, Ken Auletta, the New Yorker’s media critic (photo). “So why are the prominent media executives unhappy?” Baker asks. “Because Google is making lots of ad money, and there’s only so much ad money to go around.” I’m highly anti-Google on some issues such as the proposed Google...

A novice self-publisher posted a question on MobileRead: Are readers more likely to check out a new author if the book is available for free? He got some great replies to his question. I read them with interest, and my own immediate reaction was, ‘Oh of course, free is great, free is wonderful, who doesn't like a free book?’ But then I thought about what he was really asking. Sure, I download any interesting-looking free book that comes my way, but do I really read them? ...

Links via Gary Price at ResourceShelf---along with some comments from me: --Cheaper Books Come at a High Cost to Worthy Literature, in the New York Times. Not only does the Times article discuss pricing issues, but also Wal-Mart’s favoritism toward politically conservative writers such as Glenn Beck. E-books, of course, as I see it, could be one way to bypass the Wal-Marts. In a related vein, see my post headlined Arguing with Idiots: If book chains want to save paper books from the Kindle, why are they so stupid about local needs?  --Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Denies Site...

Historian Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library and author of The Case for Books, a valuable work in many ways, is right to worry about Google wreaking havoc on libraries. But here’s one mystery about The Case. While delving into the evolution of books, Prof. Darnton devotes not one word to Project Gutenberg despite the project’s importance in the world of digitized books. Of less concern, since the TeleRead idea is just that, an idea for a well-integrated national digital library system, not an actual system, Darnton does not mention my own proposal despite its...