CNet reports that Apple and Microsoft are assembling a patent portfolio to challenge the legality of open-source video codec Ogg Theora. Theora competes against the h.264 video codec that Microsoft and Apple are supporting as part of their HTML5 strategy. "A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now," Jobs wrote in the e-mail, which Apple did not immediately confirm as authentic. "Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others' patents." This may not immediately seem...

David Morgenstern has an editorial on ZDNet in which he predicts a grim future for e-book device manufacturers that aren’t Apple. He notes that over the last few days, not one but two high-profile tablets have been cancelled—Microsoft’s two-screened Courier and HP’s Windows 7 slate—and he lays their cancellation squarely at the feet of the iPad. He also suggests that the three million unit guesstimate being tossed around for the Kindle device’s sales may be grossly overinflated, and it might well have sold below one million. (Though, given Amazon’s reticence to release numbers, either guess is probably equally valid.) Meanwhile,...

The iPad 3G comes out this afternoon, and CNet reports that Apple Stores are actually closing for an hour from 4 to 5 p.m. to prepare for the launch. If anyone picks one up, we’d like to hear from you! PC World has a 6-page article comparing the iPad to “everything else”. E-book and magazine reading makes up a considerable part of that comparison. The article says that the iPad definitely has the advantage as an e-reader, but that magazine publishers have yet to “create products that take full advantage of the iPad's display and interface.” Remember...

Amazon still has not reached an e-book price agreement with Penguin, whose contract with Amazon expired (like so many others) on April 1 when agency pricing took effect. Penguin is the only one of the “agency pricing five” not to have come to an agreement yet, and so after thirty days, Penguin’s e-books still are not available via Amazon. Of course, the whole reason for the kerfuffle over e-book pricing to begin with was Amazon’s $9.99 price point for e-books, in which it was buying the books for standard half-hardcover price and then marking them down to increase...

A couple of months ago, Victoria Espinel—the White House’s new Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator—called for public comments on the state of intellectual property law. Then in March we covered Ars’s summary of some of those filings. Now Mike Masnick at Techdirt reports that the White House has now made all the public comments available on the web. While I haven’t looked at them myself, Mike has examined a few and summarizes their arguments, good and bad. As expected, a number of groups from both sides of the copyright wars have weighed in. On a related note, Tom’s...

How do we find the next literary masterpiece among the 1 million+ books published each year (and I believe that number will rise rapidly as increasing numbers of writers publish direct from their computer to Internet). Don’t we need to find the next literary masterpiece? Don’t we need to separate the Shakespeares from the Joe Schmoes? Or does it not matter if we never find another Shakespeare? Or find another literary masterpiece? Does it not matter what our literary state says about our culture, our state of intellectual advancement? For me, this is the dilemma. What role does literature play in...

If the well-read, book-loving and e-loving crowd at Mobile Read is any indication, the Agency Five may have misfired more than they realize with the new pricing model and ensuing chaos. My three standout experiences this week involved a library book, a paperback book, and a poll at Mobile Read to see if I was the only one wondering when on earth the madness would end... 1) The Library Book This is a simple enough tale. A book came out three weeks ago. It's part of a series and I have read every single other book in this series. In the old...

According to Threepress Consulting's blog, Liza Daly's tutorial, Build a digital book with EPUB, is now available at DeveloperWorks without registration and has been updated with some minor corrections. According to the blog: This tutorial explains the EPUB format in detail, demonstrates EPUB validation using Java technology, and moves step-by-step through automating EPUB creation using DocBook and Python....

That's what TorrentFreak says about some research they did after the iPad launch. Here are some snippets: To determine if Apple’s iPad has had en affect on eBook piracy we looked at the number of downloaded titles before and after its introduction. We decided to focus our research on the 10 best selling eBooks on Amazon which seemed to be a good starting point. The problem, however, is that none of these books are available on public BitTorrent, nor could we find them on file-hosting services or Usenet. This is interesting information just by itself. Maybe ebook piracy isn't as...

Nick Harkaway has an article on the site about DRM. Our audience knows most of what he says, but I found this section of interest. He wonders why people are still using DRM since it can be bypassed so easily: If we were talking about the movie industry, though, where I used to work, I might suggest a bit cynically that DRM was still used because: a) the people the industry has hired as consultants also sell DRM for a living b) the players have spent too much on DRM to admit that DRM isn't buying them anything except grief, and...

Every Friday morning I post a list of my favorite posts for the past week. Purely a subjective judgement on my part. Google Book Settlement market analysis on how it would work with academic libraries Original Alice manuscript digitized by British Library iPhone/iPad e-book app review: iBooks by Chris Meadows iPhone/iPad e-book app review: BookShelf by Chris Meadows Digital Writing and Pedagogy: How Do We Teach, What Do We Teach by Matt Hayler Whitcoulls of New Zealand to launch ebooks – Kobo is branching out High Quality free audiobooks can be read on app for iPhone/iPad Summing Up the Last Week for Amazon: Phases I, II, and...

Back in January we did an article: “Listening to Braille” : Braille advocates at odds with new audio technologies. Now an article in CTV News, of Canada, discusses the same issue. Less than 10 percent of Canada's 830,000 vision impaired people can read braille. New technology, such as JAWS (Job Access With Speech) is gaining popularity and obviating the need for braille in many cases. Nevertheless, the braille advocates are still there: "What braille allows is for someone to gain literacy, to gain an understanding of sentence structure and grammar. Computer technology doesn't replace how to learn to write, to spell, what...