I was able this past weekend to right a childhood wrong, and I owe it all to emerging e-technology. The background: years ago, we would summer at a cottage near one my uncle had. My cousin Andy had a large collection of MAD Magazines and Archie comics from the 60's and 70's that my sister and I used to look at whenever we were over there. Somehow, all or part of the collection somehow wound up in my hands one day, and got ruined---perhaps thrown out by a well-meaning mother on a cleaning streak, perhaps lost or damaged in a...

I have been a Kindle user for its last three incarnations: I bought a K2 to replace my Sony reader because I wanted to use the text to speech feature and I wanted support for multilingual dictionaries, then when my visiting aunt expressed interest, I sold it to her bought the K3. I was happy with it, and when the K4 came out, I was only mildly tempted---until this same dear aunt visited again and told the sordid tale of a husband who stole the K3 out from under her, registered it to his own account and left her reader-less...

So, until this weekend, my tally of relatives converted over to e-reading was as follows: Dad, gifted a Kobo and happily downloading his obscure boyhood favourites off Manybooks.net; Mom with a Kobo still registered to my account, and to which I do all the book loading; Stepmom, also with a gifted Kobo, happily downloading public library books; and an aunt who had bought my old Kindle off of me when I upgraded during one of her visits. So far, so good, right?Well, it turns out that last one hasn't quite gone as planned. The aunt was in town for a...

I'm sure you've read the same headlines I have: ebooks are cannibalizing print sales! They are driving people to pirate their media instead of purchase it! They are threatening local bookstores and small presses as Amazon/Apple/Google set out to rule us all! Or...are they? Might there be a simpler explanation for what's going on in the book marketplace today? Might it simply be that publisher indecision---on now to market, how to price and so on---is translating into customer indecision? Might a less confused customer be a better one?Consider the following case study. I...

I posted earlier about some problems I have been having recently with error-filled ebooks---I am not talking about major editing-process errors, rather, I am talking about typos and formatting glitches resulting from unproofed conversions. People used to complain about these at times before ebooks 'hit it big,' but now that we e-reading customers are a more mainstream group, the complaints are getting increasingly vociferous and this has been the first year where I have really noticed a widespread problem myself. But just how widespread is this problem? Is my feeling that these days, I am becoming more of a copy-editor...

I did an e-purge this weekend, deleting some 50-odd titles from my bloated Kindle, and what I have learned from the experience is this: on the blessing side, the e-universe makes getting your book into a reader's hand easier than ever. But the downside? The reader knows that there's always something else around the corner. If you don't win them over, and fast, they'll bail on you and your book forever, and in less time than you might think.When I started this little spring cleaning, I had 800 books to choose from, right on my Kindle, before I even went...

When David Rothman started Teleread, he had a dream of establishing a national digital library. Today, I wished that dream was a reality---I spent most of my morning in Librarian Hell, as part of the annual school clean-up now that classes are done for the year!Here was the problem: children had brought back library books they had signed out during the year, and teachers had also brought back all the books they had been hoarding in their classrooms. But since classes are done, we did not have any parent volunteers around on whom we could pawn off the shelving! We...

In my initial review of the very first Kobo, I concluded that it was a very nice little entry-level reader that, while it fell perhaps a little short for power users, was a great ebook experience for the newbie. Well, we're now two versions later---has Kobo learned their lessons and made enough changes to win over the power user? Yes, and no. The Kobo Touch is a slick little device, and a much improved experience for the average reader. It's slick and adorable. But for the power user, it continues to fall just a little short of must-buy status.SETTING UP...

There was a recent discussion at Mobile Read on the concept of 'eminent domain' as it may or may not apply to copyright. Eminent domain is a legal loophole whereby the government can appropriate something that belongs to you if their having it is somehow part of the greater good. For example, there was a recent case in my area where a subway station had to be upgraded with a wheelchair-accessible exit. There was only one area where the exit could safely be built, and unfortunately three homes were in the way. The government was allowed to appropriate these houses...

I've fielded some questions lately on the options people have for an ebook reader intended for children. Now that they have come down in price so much, many people seem to be contemplating rounding out the family library with an ebook reader or two for the kids. But nobody has made this easy for them! Why do none of the major ebook vendors have special kid accounts? I think they would be so useful because parents want their kids reading, and they want their kids reading independently, but they also want to control (to an extent) what they read and...

I wrote earlier this week about an ebook I purchased which was riddled with extremely obvious copy errors. The article sparked an interesting discussion about the true cost of editing, what steps are involved---and how much it would cost to make those steps happen. There is a piece of this whole puzzle that is still really puzzling to me, as you'll see below. But I wanted to clarify a few matters in hopes that we can arrive at a more productive dialogue here. First of all, when people say that ebooks should be cheaper, they don't mean so in an unfair...

Of all the many hundreds of benefits of this e-age, one of the most joyful and under-rated ones is that of influencing the younger generation. I teach a little grade 1 student who is book-crazy. Nine times out of ten, when I ask her about any book that comes to mind, her answer is 'oooh, I loved that one!' The other one time in ten, it will be 'can you write that one down on a piece of paper and give it to my mom?' Recently, they had to build a community building in a social studies project for their homeroom...