Perhaps Paul should be the one covering this, since he’s the one who’s actually gone to e-book conferences over the last couple of years—but since I’m the one who’s awake right now, I’m calling dibs. Edward Nawotka has a pair of posts on Publishing Perspectives—a feature and a short editorial—relating to the subjects of e-book conferences. While Tools of Change was going on, Nawotka was serving jury duty. This gives him an opening to find some amusing similarities between the two events: they both involve taking time off from work and travelling to strange environs, listening to “experts”,...

Here's an interesting one. A new ereader, the KeyReader, was introduced into Singapore. It's got wireless connectivity and is locally made in Singapore. The reader will be able to access the over 900,000 books in the collection of Singapore's National Library board for free. The manufacturer, iCell, is also in contact with other Singaporean content producers. More info at The Straits Times. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the heads up....

Interview with Jack Matthews, Ohio author of philosophical short stories (Part 1)...

Here is WorldCat's list for January. You can find more details here. 1. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer 2. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold 3. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer 4. Dear John by Nicholas Sparks 5. Push by Sapphire 6. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer 7. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer 8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling 9. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 10. The Help by Kathryn Stockett 11. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling 12. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown 13. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson 14. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 15. The...

Introduction to the Literary Works of Jack Matthews, Ohio fiction writer, book collector and essayist. By Robert Nagle...

They have a long interview with the Edge people and you can find it here. Just a snippet: Q: The eDGe is the first e-reader with a dual display. Or maybe the first netbook with an e-reader display... How did you come up with this design? AM: We saw a gap in the e-reader market for a device that could combine reading with note taking, Web surfing, email, Word/PowerPoint/Excel and music and video playing and recording, which would ultimately enhance the learning process as well. My teenaged kids confirmed it as well, saying they couldn’t do much with just a dedicated...

Found via Slashdot: A patent filed by Google in 2008, made public last week, covers methods of separating printed magazine articles into individual digital articles that Google could deliver individually. This technique could make it easier for Google to add periodicals to its Google Books program. As Erik Sherman’s article on BNET notes, there are considerable technical hurdles to doing this (which is what the patent itself is trying to address), but perhaps more challenging are the legal hurdles. The Tasini case (which TeleRead mentioned here and here), in which freelance writers sued over their articles’...

E-Ink-Info has an short interview with Mary Lou Jepsen, Pixel-Qi's CEO. According to her: "We have been in early production since December and are now scaling it volume in the current 10" size and in process of designing new sizes that we will announce in the future. Our customers are pulling us int a variety of new product categories."...

Reading paper books is an emotional experience for which many of us have developed nostalgia. We remember our Dr. Seuss books, our early school readers, our library adventures, then the teen years and really ranging into our individual tastes. Right now, most of us did that with paper books. Ten years from now? I'm not so sure. I remember in the 1990s when a few Chicken Littlers were warning about the death of paper books. I laughed at them. I remember in the early 21st century when writers first started wondering about whether they should protect their electronic rights. The industry...

Yesterday contributor Tony Dandy did an introduction to WorldCat. After that article I downloaded the iPhone app and have been having a lot of fun with it. Now, WorldCat has an Strategies for WorldCat subject searching, 2010 style, by one of their research scientists. This little blog post and Tony's article go together nicely. (via ResourceShelf)...

A couple of days ago I looked at the implications Apple’s expulsion of explicit apps might have for e-books. But I missed the more immediate implication for e-newspapers and magazines, which are covered in this post on Wired’s “Gadget Lab” blog. Brian X. Chen, the writer of the piece, thinks that Apple’s decision should make newspapers and magazines think twice about their plans to develop for the iPad. Chen suggests that it is possible that, if a paper or magazine posts a particularly controversial article, Apple could be pressured into taking down the iPad version of the periodical...

An interesting Reuters article yesterday about an author, Yves Smith, who wrote a non-fiction book that was published by an imprint of Macmillan. Since his book price has been increased he has been getting more one star reviews on the basis of pricing alone. He says: You know my base skews heavily toward the type that buys on Amazon, and to top that off, as you would imagine, my book promotion is going to be more than usually web oriented, so that will maintain that skew. I don’t know about you, but the...