Responses to a Wall Street Journal article are now appearing from Google and Larry Lessig---both have substantial criticisms of the article. An earlier TeleBlog item discussed the WSJ piece in terms of the possible e-book ramifications if the article were right. It isn't, according to Richard Whitt, the Washington Telecom and Media Counsel for Google (photo). "Net neutrality and the benefits of caching," reads his post in the Google Public Policy Blog, which offers  "Google's Views on government, policy and politics." And the GigaOm blog is running a story headlined "Google NOT Turning Its Back on Network...

TorrentFreak reports: The Pirate Bay has reached yet another milestone. Today, they track more than 20 million unique peers for the first time since the site was launched. It is estimated that the Pirate Bay tracks more than half of all BitTorrent users at any given point in time. By November 2007, The Pirate Bay was tracking around 6 million peers, up from ‘just' 3 million the year before. The growth has been amazing, and it doesn't seem that it is going to slow down anytime soon. One of the reasons it was possible for the site to handle...

According to the Harvard Crimson, Harvard University does not want to participate in the copyright settlement agreed to by Google and publishers. The Crimson reports that in a letter released to library staff, University Library Director Robert C. Darnton '60 said that uncertainties in the settlement made it impossible for HUL to participate. "As we understand it, the settlement contains too many potential limitations on access to and use of the books by members of the higher education community and by patrons of public libraries," Darnton wrote. "The settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable," Darnton...

The official Google blog contains an announcement of a new strategy for building a more comprehensive index of the text on the web. A substantive fraction of Web documents are embodied in PDF (Portable Document Format) files that consist of images in series. These files do not contain text directly. Instead, they contain pictures of text, and any search engine that wants to include these documents in its search results must first perform additional processing to extract the text. Many of the PDF files that use images for each page were not "born digital." Often a paper book,...

Color e-paper will debut in a display from Qualcomm reports Technology Review in their November issue. The publication uses a curious definition for "e-paper". They say it means the display "has no backlighting and thus can be read in direct sunlight." The display consists of "two layers of a reflective material". "Some wavelengths of light bounce off the first layer; some pass through and bounce off the second. Interference between the two beams creates the color, and electrostatic forces control the distance between the layers." So this technology appears to differ from the methods pioneered by E Ink based on...

Bill McCoy, the General Manager of ePublishing at Adobe, wrote an influential blog posting that catapulted the term "social DRM" into wide use. He said "For eBooks, I really like the 'social DRM' approach of The Pragmatic Programmers, who 'stamp' PDF eBooks with a 'For the Exclusive Use of ...' and the name of the purchaser." Traditional Digital Rights Management (DRM) requires implementing technological obstacles that prevent the purchaser of a digital object from copying, displaying, and accessing the object except in limited ways. These obstacles can cause endless aggravation to the consumer. For example a Kindle format e-book cannot...

A Financial Times (FT) journalist believes that Oprah is likely to endorse the Kindle on her show on Friday. The front page of the Amazon store displays a teaser video featuring the talk show star; however, it is modified so that the gadget Oprah holds in her hand is hidden behind a superimposed light burst. The video ends with the injunction, "Watch the Oprah show, then order yours at Amazon.com." FT says: Kindle sales appear likely to get a significant boost on Friday, with talk-show megastar Oprah Winfrey apparently about to endorse Amazon's digital book reader. Amazon is featuring a trailer of...

[Editors note:  any mistakes in this post are the editor's, not the contributor's.  PB] Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), originally wished to provide inexpensive laptops to poor children in developing countries. That seminal vision is now being realized in places like the rural community of Gaire in Papua New Guinea where the deployment of laptops is attested to by the canonical images of eager children gazing upon their new devices. Yet from the beginning some observers wanted low-priced individually-allocated laptops distributed in developed countries too. One commentator said "To have the United States be the only country...

Mary Lou Jepsen is the designer of the remarkable display screen of the OLPC (One laptop per child). I have walked with an OLPC from the interior of a house into a sunny yard, and the experience is remarkable. The LCD (liquid-crystal display) image of the laptop is transformed from a full-color transmissive display while indoors into a black-and-white reflective display while outdoors in sunlight. In a new short interview appearing in Technology Review the innovator Jepsen is asked about the San Francisco startup company she co-founded earlier this year called Pixel Qi (pronounced "Pixel Chee"). Jepsen says that displays...

Moderator's note: Garson's essay is timely, given that Publishers Weekly is zapping online archives of E-Book Report and two other blogs. E-text is like Silly Putty---endlessly malleable. You can even go beyond that and delete it.  - D.R. While listening to an audiobook of a well-known multi-award winning novel I was surprised to find that the story seemed different from the story that I read many years ago. Major events in the book that critically defined the mental state of the main character had somehow been significantly altered. I wondered how my memory of the plot and settings could be...

"When will publishers and consumers accept e-books on a wide scale?" is a question that many readers of this blog have probably entertained. Some powerful companies have already unabashedly embraced e-books. Perhaps you think I am referring to Amazon or Sony? But the relationships Jeff Bezos and Howard Stringer have with e-books are mere dalliances compared to the liaisons of some other e-book swains. I am referring to companies that love e-books so passionately that they have made them mandatory. If you have purchased a gadget in recent years such as an automobile navigator, or a cell phone then...

"Meanwhile, tweaks to the particles, solution, and electronics have boosted the refresh rate from one frame per second in current displays to 30 frames per second in a 'video ink' prototype. E Ink is working with partners to develop flexible transistors for use in color displays; eventually, such displays could even roll up. Commercialization is still a few years off, but 'you can imagine a USA Today weather chart where clouds are actually moving,' says Russ Wilcox, CEO of E Ink." - MIT Technology Review (thanks Garson)/ The TeleRead take: This is in line with previous predictions, but...