People in Bexar County, Texas, should be excited about the 10,000-e-book “BiblioTech” library system that the country is starting from scratch—without paper books. This is reportedly the first U.S. public library system to shun paper, cardboard and ink, except for computer printouts. Any books are better than none, and besides, the 10K figure encompasses only copyrighted books, not the tens of thousands of free classics that library patrons will be able to read electronically. What’s more, Bexar will add to the 10,000. County Judge Nelson W. Wolff, the main brain behind the plan, deserves praise for his open-mindedness about e-books, their cost-saving potential and other advantages. Many people, especially dyslectic Americans and...

After Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an African-American Harvard professor, was erroneously arrested for breaking and entering, Barack Obama spoke up. The President at first overdid his criticism of the police, but in the end played the meritable role of peacemaker, inviting both Prof. Gates and the arresting policeman to the White House for a “Beer Summit.” In time, Sgt. James Crowley even gave Prof. Gates a pair of the handcuffs used on the professor. Now President Obama should help make peace in a separate Cambridge case and consider another “Beer Summit”—in fact a whole series—between copyright lobbyists and America’s librarians, educators and consumer activists. Dead in the copyright...

I live in the Washington suburbs, where “Military-Industrial Complex” is more than just rhetoric in an Eisenhower speech from 1961. Just across 1-395 from me, here in Alexandria, Virginia, arise the twin towers of the $1+ billion Quarter Pentagon, featured in this Army Corps of Engineers video bragging of its size. Perhaps a lesson for publishers and librarians? As I see it, a Library-Publisher Complex could boost the number of library e-books and other items—along with American education. Even the military could ultimately come out ahead, given the eventual national security benefits of improved K-12 performance in an era of more sophisticated warfare,...

If you can’t find the right library e-books for your new Kindle, Nook, iPad or other gizmo, you’re not alone. More than 100 patrons of the District of Columbia Public Library were lined up electronically today for 10 e-book copies of The Racketeer, John Grisham’s new novel about the murder of a federal judge. Some 400+ D.C. library users awaited 60 electronic copies of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the best-selling fiction title on the New York Times list. And a digital version of The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling, was not even in the catalog of the D.C. public library system. Could a well-stocked national digital library system—in...

I drive a 1988 Honda and on the whole lead a frugal life. But I have a weakness for e-books and gizmos for reading them. You can’t fathom technology, at the practical level for library patrons and other book-lovers, without using it. Curious where the tech is headed? Well, what costs too much now may someday be in Asian villages and on the racks at Kmart or in the hands of every high school student in Watts or Harlem. I no longer ask for loaners of review units, though. Why worry about offending vendors? Most of my purchases end up on Craigslist or eBay in a...

If only WordPress, Drupal and the like were as easy to use as Windows Live Writer (screenshot) or at least the less cluttered versions of Microsoft Word! Inserting images and sizing and positioning them just right, for example, can be so much simpler with LW and Word. That’s why, here and here, I urged theDigital Public Library of America to come up with a good free blog editor, which in fact could be much more—a Swiss Army knife for all kinds of creation. Everything from high school term papers to heavily footnoted academic documents. You could still use WordPress, Drupal and other content management systems. But you’d do your actual writing with a Live Writer-simple...

Mindful of the record number of poor Americans, a thoughtful “Front Line Librarian” in a Southern state is asking an essential question in effect: Why care so much about library e-books and the rest when millions of low-income people lack computers or at least the skills to use them? Front Line says more reliance on the Net will make their lives harder, not easier. “The digital divide has not gone away,” he writes in response to my suggestion that library-lovers fill out a Gates Foundation survey on the needs of future, more digitally oriented libraries. “If anything, it is worse now than it ever has been… “On a daily basis I...

In an even more wired future, what will be the needs of public libraries in the U.S. and elsewhere? Just what is the role of libraries if “a person can access much of the information in the world from a device”? How to bring about the right kind of “lasting changes”? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Global Libraries Initiative is asking some well-crafted questions of this kind in a survey I’d urge you to fill out. No small conundrum for present and future libraries is, how to pay for content? The Internet teems with free facts, raw information, as well as public domain and Creative...

Canned and dried foods, flashlights, radios, cellphones and good UPSes aren’t the only essentials that the wired might buy in an anticipation of the growing number of weather-related exigencies like Hurricane Sandy. I’ve also purchased a $99 battery-powered portable hotspot through which my iPad and other Wi-Fi-equipped devices  can stay in touch with the rest of the world when the power goes off. In the best-served locations, optimal speeds supposedly should reach 1.4 Mbps with the company’s current technology, perhaps even making Skype possible. No need for a cellphone with tethering capabilities, and my wife and I will be able to recharge the device with...

What if Amazon wiped out all your Kindle books and refused to let you open another account? I don’t know what if any sins a customer committed, but such an Orwellian scenario is said to have actually happened. No, I’m not just talking about the remote deletion of 1984, but rather the mysterious zapping of the customer’s entire Kindle library. The most likely scenario here, as guessed at by BoingBoing, is that the Norwegian customer simply lived outside of the territories for authorized purchases. While I love content providers—I’m one myself—Amazon’s latest action shows why the Digital Public Library of America or another nonprofit needs to get into...

John S. Knight Jr. and his brother supplied the first name in Knight Ridder, one of America’s best newspaper chains. Pre- and post-merger, the company’s papers won a total of at least 84 Pulitzer prizes. Years before most competitors, Knight Ridder’s people were envisioning digital newspapers displayed on iPad-style tablets. Knight himself, in character for the chain at its greatest, was fact- and conscience-driven. He was a conservative Republican, but his columns against the Vietnam war helped win one of the Pulitzers. The chain is gone now. But the brothers’ legacy lives on through the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with something like $2 billion in assets. Last week,...

A Kindle Fire-usable version of the OverDrive e-library app has now reached the Amazon app store. That could give the app’s Android version a nice boost—the Fire is essentially an Android machine turned into an Amazon cash register. Fire owners earlier had to go to the OverDrive site to download the app unofficially. But for me personally, the big news is optional all-text bolding in the OverDrive app for iPads, iPhones and Touches. So many library fans have their own wish lists of accessibility features, and full bolding led mine, since I cherish an extra-high-contrast view for reading e-books, even on LCD displays. Earlier in 2012 OverDrive obliged with optional...