A couple of recent Apple stories of note. First, a Morgan Stanley analyst predicts Apple will introduce a new iPhone model with lower total cost of ownership (both hardware and service plan price) and new, possibly gesture-based functionality. There are no details or even guesses at what the new price points or functionality might be. Of course, the “new functionality” in general is a no-brainer; Apple always introduces new functionality on its products with each update. And the gesture-based stuff might be seen as a byproduct of whatever new gestures the iPad comes with, I suppose. Needless to say, a lower total...

Remember the Dear Author survey I suggested you take? Well the results are in, but are not very useful Dear Author will let you download the raw data or download a set of Powerpoint slides, but they are not giving us any hint of the results on their blog. Personally, I don't need to fool with data and I certainly don't want a bunch of Powerpoint slides on my Mac that I will have to download extra software to read. Pity - waste of time to have filled it out....

Defective by Design has presented a petition to Jeff Bezos and Amazon demanding the removal from all their products. We're submitting the petition to Amazon to remind them that the thousands of writers, readers, academics, librarians, and public intellectuals who signed our petition asked for much more: a full removal of any DRM from the ebooks Amazon sells and the "Swindle" device itself. Until Amazon removes all DRM, Amazon is putting our basic freedoms at risk in order to lock publishers and readers into their platform, bringing us closer to the dystopia envisioned in 1984 or The Right to Read. The problem with...

Short Story Writer Jack Matthews has traveled over a million miles in his car to collect books. Here he talks more about this crazy preoccupation....

Excerpt from Jack Matthews WORKER'S WRITEBOOK, a writing guide for his creative writing students...

Gizmodo reports on a temporary art installation in New York City that blocked off Water Street for a few hours with…a street-covering expanse of books with LED flashlights on top. Spanish art design team Luzinterruptus explained we want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word. So to promote reading and literacy, you…put books where...

In the wake of the Amazon/Macmillan e-book pricing affair and the reader comments it stirred up, Charlie Stross has decided to tackle some common misconceptions about the publishing industry on his blog. He has made two posts so far. The first misconception Stross covers is simply that “the publishing industry makes sense.” He notes that a lot of discussions about “the publishing industry” treat it as a more or less uniform entity where every part works about the same as every other part. He goes on to explain that this is not quite true. For the rest...

* Support for the Teclast K3 and Elonex e-book readers * Add 'Recently Read' category to catalog if Kindle is connected when catalog is generated * When adding PRC/MOBI files that are actually Topaz files, change detected file type to Topaz * MOBI Output: If the SVG rasterizer is not avaialbale continue anyway * News download: When using the debug pipeline options, create a zip file named periodical.downloaded_recipe in the debug directory. This can be passed to ebook-convert to directly convert a previous download into an e-book. * Add Apply button to catalog generation dialog...

Publishing and ebook bloggers and pundits are claiming that Apple has created an uneven playing field between the iBooks App it will soon roll out for its iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices and the Kindle Apps that are available alongside for buying and reading books from the Kindle Store on the same devices. According to Jay Yarow at the Silicon Valley Business Insider, customers using the Kindle for iPhone App "have to leave the app to buy e-books," whereas "the iBookstore will let you seamlessly buy books from within the iBooks reader app, with the iTunes account it's already...

Reader GBAV versluys sent me this link. It looks like a most interesting unit from this Korean manufacturer Tamtus. Unfortunately, there is no information about where it can be purchased. . Their site says: Real-time capture and automatic save on the computer for repeated use Impressively crisp image and detailed digital reproduction of the page ∧-shaped book cradle that produces flat page with no page curvature Complete and useful software package that is exclusively designed for digitizing paper documents Portable and easy to carry Complete the entire scanning at a touch of a button in just a few seconds Let the user annotate directly over the...

Here are a pair of governmental policy changes for the Internet that may have the potential to affect e-book-related matters. The bigger change is that the Obama administration has announced the government is revising its policy on the Internet. Whereas for the first few decades of its life, the government chose to take a strictly hands-off approach, now it will be holding discussions on key areas of Internet policy, such as cybersecurity, Internet governance, and copyright protection. The outcomes of such discussions will be “flexible” but may result in recommendations for legislation or regulation,...

This is off topic, but fun. Here is an interview with the guy who composed the Apple startup sound. Find out what The Beatles had to do with it. OMT in San Francisco #3: 'Let it beep' from One More Thing on Vimeo....