Happy Thanksgiving, everyone (in the US, anyway—those impatient Canadians celebrated it weeks ago)! Hopefully you are replete with turkey (or ham, whichever you prefer) and spending the day with your families…in which case you probably won’t see this until at least Black Friday. But hey, we can be thankful any time of year. I have a lot to be thankful for this year. I have my family, who are just close enough to spend time with when I want to but far enough away I don’t have to when I don’t. In particular, I’m thankful my Mom survived losing...

Everybody’s coming out with tablet gift buyers’ guides this time of year (including us in not too long). I thought it might be a good idea to come out with more of a thinking guide, something to suggest ideas for you to consider while you read those guides—a “buyers’ guide guide” if you will. These are the primary considerations I think a tablet buyer should be keeping in mind. 1) Walled garden or the open road? Many of the most popular tablets this year are locked up in someone’s walled garden. The iPad and iPad Mini are no-brainers...

Given the state of Republican rhetoric in recent years, I was very surprised to find them endorsing a cause I can actually wholeheartedly support—but they did so this past weekend, for less than 24 hours before they hastily retracted it. I refer to a paper issued by the Republican Study Committee, the caucus for House Republicans, stating that current US copyright law is stifling creativity instead of encouraging it, and is in dire need of drastic reforms. (The paper is embedded below this article.) The paper pointed out that copyright is all about encouraging the progress of the useful...

Just in time for the holiday season, the Pottermore e-book shop has added gifting options for Harry Potter e-books and audiobooks. The gift e-books or audiobooks can be bought any time from up to six months in advance through the day on which they should be delivered. The books may be downloaded up to eight times each. All Pottermore e-books are multiformat and DRM-free. Pottermore has also just made the tie-in story collection The Tales of Beedle the Bard available as an e-book for the first time, for £3.99 in the U.K. and $5.99 in the U.S., with a...

When I was visiting relatives over the weekend, I had a fairly potent reminder of the enduring power of the public domain—and I finally succumbed to the inevitable realization, that in some cases, piracy is just too much work. On Saturday night of our stay, it turned out we didn’t have time to watch Marvel’s The Avengers as I’d hoped we could. So my sister-in-law instead introduced me to the first episode of an engrossing ABC television series called Once Upon a Time. The premise is that Snow White’s Wicked Queen worked a curse that trapped well-known fairy tale...

It’s not clear whether Apple is doing this or it’s just someone who’s cut a deal with them (both 9to5Mac and CNet asked Apple for clarification, but the company apparently hasn’t responded yet), but an eBay store entitled “refurbished outlet” has opened up, selling factory-refurbished Apple products at the same prices (including some 4th-gen iPod Touches at the bargain prices I noted a couple of weeks ago) and with the same one-year warranty as on the Apple Store. (It’s a buy-it-now only operation, so there’s no bidding.) As a side benefit, only a few states’ residents—California, Indiana, Nevada, New Jersey,...

CNet has a report on a new book scanner (Japanese) from Dai Nippon Printing that takes and corrects three-dimensional images of book pages, allowing for them to be scanned at the amazing rate of 250 pages a minute, meaning that the average book could be captured in little more than two to three minutes tops. This is the result of the scanning development technology we covered in March of last year, created by University of Tokyo professors in the hope that it could be used for easy scanning and sharing of manga titles. (The manga studios were not amused.)...

I’ve been mostly away from my computer for the last few days, due to an early Thanksgiving visit with family. But I’ve been following the news while I’ve been gone, and there have been a few interesting items concerning Amazon. One is that, in the UK, Philip Jones reports that Amazon had to answer to Parliament last week concerning its habit of basing its UK business in Luxembourg where it can fulfill orders without having to charge the sizable UK value-added tax (or what we in the US call sales tax) on it orders. Jones notes that there seemed to be...

Here I go, turn the page. On the NY Times Bits blog, Nick Bilton gleefully reports that the patent office has seen fit to award Apple a design patent on, of all things, the digital page turn used in iBooks. Bilton uses this as proof of the ridiculousness of the current patent system, as well as a reminder of the obnoxiousness of Apple’s recent patent litigation practices. But is this patent really as silly as it looks? As some people point out in the comments under Bilton’s article, the patent is narrower than Bilton makes it seem—it doesn’t cover any page turns,...

Found via an email from Ed Howdershelt to the Ebook Community Mailing List: the swan song for e-book stores Fictionwise, eReader, and eBookwise. Barnes & Noble has emailed Fictionwise publishers and authors that it is shuttering the long-running e-book stores and will be offering US and UK customers the opportunity to migrate their e-book purchases from said sites to a Barnes & Noble Nook library. (Complete letter pasted below the jump.) It’s really kind of sad: eReader (nee Palm Digital Media, nee Peanut Press) and Fictionwise were two of the first really big e-book stores, feeding the e-book habits...

One of the most common complaints about e-books is that you can’t do as much with them when the power goes out. Well, our former editor Paul Biba has been caught without power in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and has found that, within limits, e-reading can work just fine without a steady source of electricity.  (Hat tip to Nate Hoffelder for pointing this post out to me in e-mail.) While he limited himself to paper book reading during the day, Paul found he could read from his Kindle PaperWhite after dark with the light on very easily. He reported reading...

In his Copyright and Technology Blog, Bill Rosenblatt has an interesting column looking at the Owners’ Rights Initiative, a lobbying coalition of interested parties who have united under the slogan “you bought it, you own it,” seeking to promote the right to resell digital property. The group includes used book vendors such as Powell’s, movie rental firm Redbook, and used merchandise outlets like eBay, Overstock, and others. But it also includes a number of public library advocacy organizations, because if you “own” something like an e-book, you also have the right to lend it. The group seems particularly interested...