All those people who cite the fact that it doesn’t weigh anything as a reason they prefer e-books have just been proven wrong. The Telegraph reports that a computer scientist has explained that the more e-books you download, the heavier your e-reader is. Adding 4GB of e-books to a Kindle will increase its weight by a millionth of a millionth of a gram—the approximate weight of a DNA molecule or a small virus. He also notes that e-readers could become slightly heavier in the summer, because they take on more energy from their exposure to sunlight. So there...

PBS’s MediaShift is running a series on e-books this week, and not all the articles are as lame as the one I talked about earlier asking whether Amazon was short-changing authors. MediaShift’s business columnist Dorian Benkoil wrote a lengthy column complaining about the annoying maze of incompatibility and missing features that purchasers of DRM-locked mass-market e-books have to face. When given a book he wanted to read, Benkoil went looking for an e-book version that he could both read and have read to him, and thought that Google, which is pretty open, would have the best version—but was...

Still without power and may be in this condition for the rest of the week. It's interesting how WiFi is of little help in this situation. The local Starbucks, and other WiFi hotspots, are jammed and one simply can't get in. The local library is also packed and the WiFi is completely overloaded. No help there.Aside from the lack of power, I'm on a well so I have no water, as well as no heat. Of course, recharging my laptops, or this 3g iPad and my phone, is problematical. I just was able to find a small...

All right, so it doesn’t really involve e-books, but it is a particularly clever Halloween use of two devices that are very popularly used for reading them: a NASA engineer has come up with a costume that involves securing an iPad 2 on the front of your body, another iPad 2 on the back, and starting a FaceTime chat between them to make it look like someone’s blown a gaping hole through your body. My anal-retentive side quibbles with his presentation in the video—the ipad on his back is clearly higher than the one on his front, so you...

Happy Halloween! Raising money for UNICEF has been a traditional part of trick-or-treating over the last few decades, and Diane Duane is marking its 60th anniversary by offering e-reading access to “Not On My Patch,” a new novelette in the Young Wizards universe, as a reward to anyone who contributes more than $5 through UNICEF’s website before the end of Halloween in the USA (at 12:01 a.m. Hawaiian time November 1st). Donors forward a copy of their donation confirmation e-mail to youngwizards4unicef@gmail.com and will get a link to where they can read the work. Through the month of November,...

Today’s xkcd makes a point that may relate to the constant griping about e-books from some old-time bibliophiles. It involves a stick-figure with a shelf full of completely blank books, who insists that the words don’t matter because the sheer act of holding a book “prompts [his] mind to enrich itself.” The last panel of the strip is brilliant, but I refuse to spoil it. Go read it for yourself. Though e-books are never mentioned, it’s easy to see this as the logical extension of the arguments paper book lovers advance as to why paper books are...

I'm caught in the major New Jersey power outage which resulted from Saturday's snowstorm.  Power has been out since Saturday afternoon and no projections as to when it will be restored. Postings will probably be limited until the problem is cured....

PBS’s MediaShift blog looks at whether Amazon’s self-publishing operations might be short-changing authors, but doesn’t really seem to do a whole lot by way of saying yes or no apart from simply posing the question. The article discusses Amazon’s direct publishing pricing practices, and takes a look at a couple of authors who publish through Amazon, but doesn’t really seem to draw any conclusions. Though it doesn’t really come right out and say it explicitly, the article seems to be taking the tone that Amazon is bigger than everyone else, therefore it must be evil. Some of its examples...

Yesterday, the Guardian carried a rumor that HP is going to kill off its webOS operating system. WebOS is the operating system that powered the TouchPad tablet that sold unspectacularly until HP slashed the prices to sell out of excess inventory. However, HP’s Executive Vice President Todd Bradley has said in a TV interview that this is an “unfounded rumor” and that, even though HP was no longer making webOS tablets, they were “continuing to invest in webOS software” due to its “very unique capabilities.” This includes software updates for the million TouchPads currently out there. While...

At The Digital Reader blog, Nate Hoffelder has heard from three different sources, at least a couple of whom are Barnes & Noble employees, that Barnes & Noble will be launching its next generation of Nook Color on November 7th. One source remarked on the huge “NOOK boutique” that his store built, complete with LED TVs, touchscreen point-of-sale systems, and so on, which his manager said “was not designed to house just 2 nooks.” It will be interesting to see whether this pans out. As Hoffelder points out, given that the Kindle Fire will be shipping soon, this is...

Ars Technica has an article about the overall failure of Citizendium, the attempted fork of Wikipedia by co-founder Larry Sanger that launched five years ago this month. (David Rothman covered Citizendium for TeleRead in September and October of 2006 when it launched.) Sanger was concerned that the freewheeling anyone-can-participate editorial style of Wikipedia could turn off actual experts in the fields they were editing about. He feared they would get fed up with having to defend their edits and stop contributing. So Sanger created Citizendium, which would be like Wikipedia (in fact, it forked its article database from Wikipedia...

I found a pair of unrelated stories concerning Russia and piracy today in my Google Reader trawl that make for an interesting juxtaposition. On Publishing Perspectives, Daniel Kalder interviews Sergey Anuriev, the CEO of Russian e-publisher Litres.ru. At the time the company was founded in 2007, there was no legitimate e-book business in Russia—it was “a 100% pirate market.” But at the time it launched, new legislation had founded new civil courts in Russia, which made it easier to fight piracy. At the moment, the Russian e-book market is still very small, and Anuriev estimates that still 90%...