Here’s a start. Go for it---while keeping in mind some eBabel-related caveats and other warnings from Slate: old news to TeleRead community members. For now, I’m intrigued by New Egg’s $137 deal for an Aluratek Librie reader, a $63 discount (excludes a $10 AC charger). The Amazon price is $169.99. The screen uses LCD technology (no backlighting in this case, I suspect), and one review at New Egg gives it a four out of five stars. Any overlaps with the LCD-based JetBook? The Aluratek’s supported e-book formats are PDF, TXT, FB2, EPUB, MOBI, PRC and RTF. Not...

Since the early 1990s, I’ve been pushing for a well-stocked national digital library system. The Obama White House so far has ignored the TeleRead idea as recently presented in the Huffington Post (and forwarded to White House staffer Shin Inouye on Oct. 23). But could we be getting there anyway? Via the Reading 2.0 list, here’s an except from Harvard Professor Robert Darnton’s article in the New York Review of Books---about the Google Books controversy: The most ambitious solution would transform Google's digital database into a truly public library. That, of...

On October 6 I posted about a 10th grade teacher who needs a netbook for her Ethnic Lit class. She still needs $263 to get the computer. You can contribute to this cause here at DonorsChoose.org. Here is reprint of my original post. DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that connects potential donors to classrooms in need. Here is a proposal from a 10th grade teacher that should mesh will with the proclivities of the TeleRead audience. You can donate here. Thanks to Erin Biba for the heads up. I’ll start the ball rolling by donating $25. Now the...

I recently wrote a 2 part series about green hosting companies and the environmental impact of data centers. Part 1  examines the challenges of trying to estimate the carbon footprint of a webhosting service or a data center. (In addition to discussing some known green hosting companies, I also talk about my unsuccessful attempts to figure out the carbon footprint of TeleRead).  Part 2 takes a look at how various data centers are attempting to improve their data efficiency and how the EPA plans to release a new Energy Star rating system for data centers in April 2010. Near the...

Over at Kindle Nation, Steve Windwalker wonders if the battery improvement in the Kindle upgrade is only for the global model. That’s my current interpretation, alas, although Steve isn’t so sure. I think the “Gobal Wireless” in the bulleted item is in fact there to exclude the domestic-only model. The hardware in the global Kindle 2 just may be slightly different from the original K2’s---the radio-related components at the very least. I’m going by an old Engadget item mentioning that the U.S.-only Kindle 2 has a CDMA radio, with an empty slot for...

Note: Chris Meadows also covered this story earlier this week. Adobe DRM will get some loving attention from me in a post later this week. Meanwhile guess which topics come up in a Slate piece on Black Friday deals as bait for suckers? Clashing e-book formats and DRM. I’m very, very pleased to see Slate’s Farhad Manjoo warning Black Friday fans about the hazards of the Tower of eBabel, as we at TeleRead say from time to time. I hope he’ll start using the same term. While deploring...

A list of Thanksgiving-related books appears from About.com---including An Old-fashioned Thanksgiving, by Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women. Also go here for other possibilities from such authors as Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis (and a Thanksgiving interview with Mark Twain). An Old-fashioned Thanksgiving may delight many parents and children, and what’s more, you can download the public domain version for free from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks.net and elsewhere. Also try the pub domain sites for other books on the About.com  list. Shown is a modern HarperCollins edition of An Old-fashioned Thanksgiving. Here is the plot as summed up...

D-Lib Magazine has published a study by the Online Computer Library Center on the Characteristics of Potentially In-copyright Print Books in Library Collections. The study was done by Vrian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey. Here is the conclusion of the study: This article characterizes the aggregate collection of US-published print books in WorldCat, with a special emphasis on materials published during or after 1923, and therefore either potentially or definitely in copyright. Findings from the analysis indicate that the collection of US-published print books in WorldCat is quite large, encompassing about 15.5 million print books. Nearly two-thirds of these –...

I’ve started out Thanksgiving Day with a little sacrilege---by Amazon standards, anyway. The left image shows a page from Google’s PDF of The Jungle,  the Upton Sinclair novel exposing the Chicago meatpackers. My little experiment was for more than the sake of curiosity. Google has digitized zillions of titles that you may not be able to find online elsewhere, even if the Jungle itself is hardly in that category. As so often happens in the Kindle world, there are catches: 1. The Kindle browser won’t download files with the .pdf extension, so I had to use my laptop and Firefox and tell FF to...

Ron Miller at Fierce Content Management has obtained a review unit of Astak’s EZReader Pocket Pro (the same one I’ve been reviewing in recent weeks) and used it to examine Google’s e-book offerings. It is not clear from the article whether he downloaded the PDF or EPUB versions of the books he chose to read. What he writes could be true for either one. (Certainly, from my own observations of the Astak’s performance, the PDF version would not look its best on that 5” screen.) I was immediately shocked by the quality. Those of...

Newspapers have been hit hard by the economy and by shifts in advertising and readership, and the venerable Washington Post is feeling the pinch. Fox News reports that the Post is closing its bureaus in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, and will be concentrating more on local news from now on. But this is not the Post’s only economizing measure. TechFlash reports that the Post is experimenting with the Amazon affiliate program: when books are mentioned in articles or reviews, the articles will include links to Amazon.com where the books can be bought with a percentage of...

A few days ago, dpierron on MobileRead posted a very interesting guide to combining the Dropbox on-line storage service with the e-book files generated by Calibre to create your own personal Stanza e-book server, accessible from wherever you can reach the Internet. I have tried this method out, and it works quite well. The method involves setting ePub as your export format and exporting any books not already in ePub into it, then changing your Calibre storage directory to a subdirectory of your Dropbox Public folder. After that, you make sure to exit from Calibre so it closes the database file,...