The latest issue of ACCESS, a newspaper for librarians in Asia, looks at Singapore-based iG Publishing, which now offers "some 50,000 titles from more than 100 reputable North American, European and Asian academic publishers." The article doesn't go into much detail on the underlying technology, but it looks like iG relies on PDF and the Adobe Acrobat Reader DRM plugin called FileOpen. Read the full article at www.aardvarknet.info....

Marie Lebert's review of the past forty years of ebooks continues over at Project Gutenberg News with eBooks: 1993 – PDF, from past to present. Lebert's post focuses mainly on the timeline of the format's evolution, so I heartily recommend you supplement it with Nate Hoffelder's OMG PDF WTF at The Digital Reader, which highlights some of the format's huge security issues....

If you'd like to spend this weekend reading a whodunit set in 7th century China, try "The Chinese Maze Murders" by Robert van Gulik, this month's free ebook from the University of Chicago Press. It was first published in the 1950s and is the first in a series of novels featuring Judge Dee, who must both solve the crimes and sentence the guilty. It sells for about $10 elsewhere. From the description: "Poisoned plums, a cryptic scroll picture, passionate love letters, and a hidden murderer with a penchant for torturing and killing women lead Judge Dee to the heart of the...

Remember that Mark Twain autobiography, allowed to be published in full only a century after Samuel Clemens’s death? The New York Times reports that it’s turning into a surprise runaway bestseller—the publisher can’t print the books fast enough to keep up with the demand. It originally thought a run of 7,500 copies would be sufficient—after all, who besides scholars would want “a $35, four-pound, 500,000-word doorstopper of a memoir”?—but has printed 275,000 so far and is still not meeting holiday season demand. “It’s frustrating,” said Rona Brinlee, the owner of the BookMark in Neptune Beach, Fla....

Mike Masnick at Techdirt has a post considering the possible copyright status of the new three-volume Mark Twain autobiography that is being published in its entirety and as Twain originally intended for the first time, a century after his death. Masnick finds the overall copyright claim that the Mark Twain foundation puts on it to be misleading, because the portions of it that have never before been published, as well as the portions that were published before 1923 and any portions published between 1923 and 1963 on which copyright was not renewed, ought to be in the public...

Adobe has released the newest version of its Acrobat system, Acrobat X. The release comes just a few weeks after Acrobat released version 9.4 to patch critical security flaws. The press release is full of claims that it provides better security and efficiency and enables better collaboration. I have little doubt that most ordinary users will probably never touch even a tenth of these new features, and probably won’t notice the difference in general. Christopher Dawson at ZDNet reports on one feature he finds particularly interesting, however—it simplifies the process by which students can build digital portfolios...

For the aviation enthusiast and avid eBook reader, the fusion of these two resources together can be found at the Flightglobal Archives.  Located at http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/index.html, this online PDF archive of the many years of back issues and additional resources is easy to search, easy to use and in many cases, downloadable to your reading device of choice. With large page sizes and graphical images, aviation history, at least from my past usage, is not commonly associated with easy reading on any electronic device.  However, Flightglobal has a done an excellent job with the archives in bringing these back issues and other resources...

The Adobe Reader PDF viewer is now available for Android (requires version 2.1 or higher). I don’t use Android so I don’t know how well this reader works versus whatever PDF viewing capabilities already existed for the platform, but if any reader wants to send in a review we would be happy to run it! Speaking of Android, apparently a Verizon employee left a next-generation Motorola Droid Shadow in a corporate gym. Gizmodo has the details and some tech specs (though they didn’t get to buy and disassemble this one). With a 4.3” screen and 16GB...

Who doesn't love a good comic book?  Granted, comics these days are a far-cry from the cheap, pulpy titles such as G.I. Combat, Sgt. Rock and Richie Rich that I used to read, but in the end all comics do is entertain, no matter what style or story you like! But flashing forward to the present day, has the thought of reading or re-reading your favorites on on your e-reader ever crossed your mind?  Whether you have a smart phone, Kindle, Sony or some other reading device, the chances are good that you can once again enjoy Superman, Batman or your...

Terry White has an article in Adobe how-to magazine Layers looking at how to export documents from InDesign into EPUB format for use with Adobe Reader or other e-book devices. I don’t have nor have I used InDesign so I can’t really say how good the instructions are. However, the first half of the article talks about the rise of e-books and e-magazines, discussing the Kindle, the Kindle app for iPhone, and the Zinio e-magazine reader. White doesn’t really mention many of the other e-book options apart from these, but at least he does agree that the PDF...

You can read Adobe-DRMed ePub on your iPhone or iPod Touch via an app from Txtr, the e-reader hardware company. Download it via the App Store or iTunes and share your impressions with fellow TeleRead community members. My impression is that the app lets you access material from your private bookself on the Txtr server. I wanted test the app, but need to move on. Here’s the word to TeleRead from Txtr’s Josch Bach: “We are very busy with our eReading platform, and of course, there is an App for it. We might do not feel much love for...

The Chinese snooped on Google and certain Gmail users, along with a number of other U.S. companies, including Adobe. Now the “Do no evil” boys will no longer censor search engine results---something that, as a very small Google shareholder, I think they should have stopped doing long before this. Google may even end up leaving China. So what does it all mean from an e-book angle? A bunch of questions arise, and I’d welcome some perspective from TeleRead community members. --Will this affect Google digitization of Chinese books, and how? Google currently seems on the verge...