Publishing Perspectives has an interesting article on the fragmented e-book situation in France. To English-speaking e-book fans, of course, fragmentation is nothing new; there has not been a single cohesive format for e-books since they first gained popularity back in the 1990s. In France, a similar situation has arisen: each publisher is releasing books on its own distribution platform. A report commissioned by France’s Culture Minister proposes that a single platform be created for the distribution of e-books. However, French publishers reacted to this about as well as you might expect Apple, Amazon, and Google would...

Read an E-Book Week 2010 may be over but the amount of downloaded reading material should last readers for quite a while. Several participants of the event commented that traffic on their websites was up dramatically from last year. The Read an E-Book website had well over 60,000 page hits just prior to, and during the week. Mobile phone traffic - both Android and iPhone - was also up from last year. Libraries from around the world were visitors this year. Wright State University Libraries did an article on Read an E-Book Week and produced lapel button templates. Several libraries in...

Gizmodo has a great article by Matt Buchanan laying out the “Tower of E-Babel” problem: different readers have their own different, restricted file format ecosystems. There is not a lot new to long-time TeleRead readers, but it would be great to show anyone just getting into e-books, or thinking about it. The article starts with a Steve Jobs quote about Apple using the EPUB format because of its “openness,” and proceeds to fill in what he is not saying: “open” or not, DRM-locked iBooks books will not be readable on other DRM’d EPUB capable readers, nor vice versa....

Today Valve Software officially announced that its Steam digital game distribution platform will be coming to the Macintosh in April. But they are not stopping there. Macintosh owners who have already purchased the PC version of compatible Valve games (those built on the Source engine, such as Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead) will get the Macintosh version free. (And this will continue into the future, too: buying a new game will get you both versions from now on.) Imagine if buying the Kindle version of an e-book bought you the eReader version, too for one price—and...

Here's a video of Gigabytes new Android 6" ereader (they say it is the world's first Android e-ink reader). According to the article they want to allow readers to install any software on the machine. (via E-Reader-Info)...

TechDirt and BoingBoing link to public interest group Public Knowledge’s proposed copyright reform legislation. The proposal has five key goals: strengthen fair use, including reforming outrageously high statutory damages, which deter innovation and creativity; reform the DMCA to permit circumvention of digital locks for lawful purposes; update the limitations and exceptions to copyright protection to better conform with how digital technologies work; provide recourse for people and companies who are recklessly accused of copyright infringement and who are recklessly sent improper DMCA take-down notices; and ...

Troy Wolverton of the Silicon Valley Mercury News has a great column looking at the “Tower of e-Babel” problem of myriad incompatible e-book formats, and how Apple’s iBooks may be set to make it worse. Until recently, Wolverton notes, everyone except Amazon was standardizing on EPUB, putting pressure on Amazon to come into line with them. However, since iBooks uses an entirely different form of DRM than the standard EPUB version, this means it will not be cross-compatible with the DRM everybody else uses. Apple has already shown great ability to sell digital content...

I've been keeping my eyes open to see if I could find out anything about the DRM that Apple will be using on their ebooks. It's nice to see them using Epub, but if that Epub file has proprietary DRM it doesn't really matter that it's Epub. You won't be able read it on another reader anyway. Well, the always excellent jkOnTheRun has this statement by Adobe, but they don't give a link to the source. If anyone has any more info please let us know: Adobe is quick to point out that iPad content will not work on...

I conducted an interview with Pablo Defendini, Producer and blogger for Tor.com, via Google Wave. Our conversation ranged from the Tor.com blog itself, to the free e-book giveaway that kicked off the site, to the much-anticipated but still-absent Tor.com e-book store. Defendini noted that Tor.com was a separate subsidiary from Tor Books the publisher, and as an employee of Tor.com he was unable to answer questions pertaining to Tor Books’s stance on e-books or its e-book ventures prior to Tor.com (such as Tor Webscriptions). However, he did have a number of fascinating things to say about...

When we talk about manufacturer competition among e-books, we are usually talking about the “Tower of e-Babel” problem: Kindle vs. Nook vs. Sony, MobiPocket vs. ePub vs. LRF, and so on. But Ars Technica sees another area where manufacturer competition is heating up in the e-book arena: chipset manufacturers. Several semiconductor companies have announced plans to make dedicated e-reader system-on-a-chip devices, each of which could replace several sets of chips being used in current e-readers. Ars notes that, because e-readers’ functions and chipsets are in general so similar to smartphones’ already, this could lead to e-readers expanding into...

Earlier item here. Thanks to Phil Bosua at LOL Software!. Technorati Tags: RSS,RSS readers...

PC World has an article looking at the problem of e-book piracy. And while this article does get a few things wrong (such as believing e-book piracy started relatively recently), it does echo a few of the things that have been noted here on TeleRead. It begins by discussing the “growth” of e-book piracy coming along with the growth in popularity of e-book readers. (I would be inclined to say it hasn’t actually grown all that much; it’s just that more people are thinking about e-readers so they’re more likely to notice it now.) Then it covers...