That's 4 1/2 out of 5 in the review by Editor-in-Chief Lisa Gade. The Nook Color is a wonderful surprise. As a long time E-Ink bookworm, I didn't expect much from Barnes & Noble's LCD reader. But B&N has turned out one of the hottest consumer electronics items of 2010 and perhaps 2011. The Nook Color offers an excellent reading experience thanks to its retina-friendly IPS display with high pixel density and wide viewing angles. Reading on an LCD has never been this pleasant and my eyes are feeling good when reading in my usual 1 to 2 hour sessions. That...

It’s the time of year when people and publications start making lists of things that happened during the rest of it, and Publishing Perspectives is kicking off a series on “the most dramatic events in publishing in 2010.” The first piece in the series is also posted at the website of its writer, publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin of IdeaLog. Shatzkin’s pick for the most dramatic publishing event of 2010 is the confrontation between Amazon and five of the big six publishers early this year over bringing an end to Amazon’s $9.99 e-book pricing scheme. Even in theory, Shatzkin writes,...

Here is the full text of Project Gutenberg's response to the Bear's letter letter we mentioned below. Thanks to reader Greg Weeks for posting the link in a comment to the article. Blockquotes omitted: ** This message is granted to the public domain ** From: Greg Newby [mailto:gbnewby@pglaf.org] Sent: Monday, October 25, 2010 1:52 AM To: Greg Bear and others Subject: Re: Takedown Request -- The Escape by Poul Anderson On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 05:53:54PM -0700, someone wrote: > Dear Dr. Newby: > ... [ delete by gbn ] Dear Greg, Astrid, and others: My apologies for my long delay in...

The Washington Post has a story on this today. Gutenberg contributor Linda M. Everhart complained in an e-mail in late October that Amazon was selling a title she'd contributed to Gutenberg, Arthur Robert Harding's 1906 opus "Fox Trapping," for $4. "They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold," wrote Everhart, a Blairstown, Mo., trapper. She added that "their version had all my caption lines, in exactly the same place where I had put them." In follow-up messages, Everhart pointed to such other instances of Kindle cloning...

The 2010 survey was completed by 2,600 respondents and 47% of them had paid for an ebook - up from 18% last year. 80% of respondents said that they had read an ebook and this is up from about 40% last year. But Jones warned that booksellers were being left behind in the race for digital sales. In total 85% of publishers said that they sold books or journals in electronic format, but just 37% of booksellers said they sold content electronically. And while digital sales were below where most people had expected them to be, publishers' expectations of growth...

From the press release (blockquotes omitted): Approximately 5.9 million U.S. adults own an eReader according to the latest data from GfK MRI -- up from 2.1 million owners in the March-October period of 2009 when GfK MRI first began asking consumers about their usage of devices like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. During this time period, the skew between male and female eReader ownership has evened out. In the March-October 2009 survey period, 56% of eReader owners were male and 44% were women. The most recent data show that now 49% of eReader owners are male and 51% are women. To avoid...

From the Kobo blog. I just downloaded it to my new Samsung Captivate phone and will let you know how it works out. Further, we know that being able to read any eBook is important, and we’ve listened to your request. So what’s new? The ability to search, add and read Internet Archive ePubs – that’s over 1.9 million eBooks! You can now read ebooks in the ePub format, no matter where they are purchased from All of the great reading features available for books from our catalogue are available on books added to the library We’ve made sideloading books easier and more customer friendly In...

From the press release: O’Reilly Media and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair today announce the first Tools of Change for Publishing event at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. TOC Bologna will be a one day conference held on Sunday 27 March 2011 in Bologna, focussing on digital and mobile technology. This new collaboration between O’Reilly Tools of Change and the Bologna book fair unites two well-known and professional event organisers to produce an inspirational conference. TOC Bologna will be a landmark event for children’s publishers, agents, writers and international book people who are looking for the best speakers and insight...

The Wall Street Journal reports that Salon Magazine, one of the oldest and best-known Internet-only newsmagazines, is considering putting itself up for sale. Over its 15-year history, the magazine has tried just about every method possible of finding profitability—paywalls, advertising, subscription plans,, editorial decisions, and more. It has managed to survive this long, but apparently it is nearing the end of its rope. Like Newsweek, it is seeking a merger, new owner, or other means to survive. This revelation highlights some of the problems that newsmedia have making money on the Internet. The problem doesn’t just strike newspapers and...

Boingboing has a field day with the “hard” part, but reports that Playboy has released a portable 250GB USB hard drive (do I even need to warn you that link is probably not work-safe?) containing all 650+ issues of Playboy from December 1953 to December 2009 for $299.95. The page points to the benefits of being able to search through all 56 years of articles using e-magazine software from Bondi Digital Publishing, and the ability to use it at home or on the road without needing a power cord—the drive draws all its power from the USB bus....

Publishing Perspectives is running an article by Michael Bhaskar looking at Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear’s “collaborative transmedia” project, The Mongoliad (which we previously mentioned here). Like Elizabeth Bear (no relation to Greg)’s Shadow Unit, The Mongoliad is a website to which chapters are posted by the primary authors but in which readers can assay some participation and collaboration. The Mongoliad tells a 12th-century alternate history story involving a Mongolian invasion of Europe, with new chapters posted weekly. The chapters involve not just text, but pictures, videos, animations, and other supplemental material. It is supported by a $10 yearly...

According to Linux Devices the new reader will be offering a high definition 1024x768, 64 grey scale LCD touch screen with Wacom technology. It will be released in Taiwan at about $230 and may make it to the US in the first quarter of next year. It is called the Eee Note EA800. It will run the Linux operating system. The unit will ship with 42 templates for note-taking needs and will have a built-in camera and voice recorder. Battery life is expected to be about 13.5 hours. The Asus web page is here. ...