Stop the presses, as it were. The Espresso Book Machine “can print and bind books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait,” according to the Guardian. Currently it has access to 500,000 books, but the British bookseller Blackwell’s hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer---the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response...

There has been a decided uptick in interest in Mark Twain recently. All to the good: the great satirist deserves as large an audience as he get in this and any other time. Now HarperStudio is getting in the game with its release of Who is Mark Twain?, a collection of 24 previously unpublished essays by him. And if you buy the hardcover, you also receive the DRM-free e-book. While I can’t see why anyone would buy both a hardcover edition and an e-book, if HarperStudio is giving it away and it’s DRM-free in the bargain, I don’t see how...

Password Incorrect is a truly zany collection of “tech-absurd” short stories by Nick Name, pen name for Polish author Piotr Kowalczyk, which only a networked world could have unleashed. It’s available for free from Feedbooks. Start with the title story to see the absurd in action. My Kindle sat untouched for a couple weeks while I transitioned back to the U.S. from Thailand.  When I got back to my Kindle’s homepage again, I did a double take---Password Incorrect?  What password?  I never needed a damn password before!---until it all came back to me.  My reaction is strikingly similar...

The poet Norman Savage, whose autobiography Junk Sick I reviewed here, has begun posting poems on his blog. You don’t want to miss them. Some of these originally appeared in the countercultural magazine Changes, started by Susan Graham Mingus, wife of Charles Mingus. The poem “Sunday” came complete with pictures by Andy Warhol. (Unfortunately Savage is unable to upload them.) That’s all right. The poem speaks for itself. An excerpt: SUNDAY body repose, mind nomadic; constant flux even on the day of...

A book is forever. A screen of text is not. So says Stephen Carter (photo) in a Daily Beast post titled Where's the Bailout for Publishing? I would say he has it backwards: online is forever. Books are made of glue and paper, mostly of the high-acid type that quickly turns into so much dust and pulp. I have whole shelves doing so before my eyes, particularly the ones I owned in Thailand, where the climate is particularly merciless to cheaply-made books. They’re churned out by a publishing industry mostly concerned with this quarter’s bottom line, not eternity....

The literature copyfight has been going on a long time. My hero Charles Dickens was intimately involved, a point TeleRead has made in the past. Now here are some copyright-related highlights from Dickens vs. America, an essay by Matthew Pearl, author of the novel The Last Dickens. The essay appeared in More Intelligent Life: In the 19th century publishing battles raged between Britain and the United States. A loophole in American copyright law enabled publishers to reprint British books at will. Until 1891, the intellectual property of non-citizens was up for grabs. Charles Dickens, Alfred...

I've had a long continuous fist-fight with death. People were merely pre-lims. - Norman Savage Norman Savage’s life starts at 11 when he is diagnosed with diabetes. The whole anatomy of his life involves the disease. “Good diabetic control implies structure, work, planning, and deprivation, food deprivation. If you adhere to some rules and regulations, your odds are better of living a life relatively free of too many problems and complications. My gut instincts are to rebel against such a life.” And so he does, embarking on a 45-year odyssey of drugs, family,...

The latest twist in the locked-up Bible saga? Turns out you can download Crossway's version from the Mobipocket store, not just from the Kindle store. Meanwhile thanks, Crossway, for setting the record straight. But the DRM issue remains for Amazon, the owner of both the Kindle and Mobipocket formats. Is this Bible like typical books at the Mobi store and DRMed to the gills? Meanwhile I've checked out the Free Sample from the Mobipocket Store, and it works perfectly on my Kindle. Alas, the full Mobi version of the Bible costs $9.99 more than the Kindle version, which...

In locked-up Bible news, hemming and hawing is the order of the day. The marketing director at Crossway demurred when I asked if I could put our e-mail exchange up here. He's passing me along to those who oversee digital rights. Unlike the marketing director---who was very quick with the replies---the overseers haven't been so forthcoming. I was told that DRM-free and free-free versions of the Bible are available from Crossway; a request for links to those has gone unanswered. So I checked out the site myself. Amusingly, a link to "Online Bible" led to this: To...

In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov said, “If it were possible I would like to devote the fifty minutes of every class meeting to mute meditation, concentration, and admiration of Dickens.” Exactly. Go download some Dickens and bathe in the River Charles. Along the way you might even meet Bernard Madoff, the disgraced Wall Street swindler (left photo)---well, in the person of "Mr. Merdle," a character in Dickens' novel Little Dorrit. It's available for free in E from Feedbooks and Manybooks, and you can buy it on paper from Amazon and elsewhere. Possibly the kindest and most humane of all writers,...

Editor's Note: A TeleRead regular, Court Merrigan, has a very interesting post centering around the Copyscape application on his blog. I would suggest you go over there and read it. I certainly learned something when I did just that. Here's a little excerpt to get you started: A writer named David B. Dale (a pseudonym) has a site. On it he posts stories of 299 words. It boasted 197,577 visitors the last time I was there. I am not posting a link. Here's why: ... Not only has Mr. Dale copyrighted his work, but he...

Moderator's note: Court has had technical problems reaching TeleRead from his location in Thailand---the reason he hasn't replied in our comments area. - D.R. Thanks, everyone, for your comments. I am tempted to do as BBusyBookworm says, and strip the DRM after purchase, but I'll still have to pay $15 for the privilege. As for purchasing the hardback, there's never been a book I couldn't wait for until the paperback came out for, and this is no exception. I think as Clark said, I would soon be suffering buyer's remorse. Chris, I hear you about supporting authors, but I currently...