Moderator's note: How timely. Bryan Berry with the One Laptop Per Child K-12 project in Nepal, whom I met an an OLPC meeting last night, confirmed to me that shared annotations would be most welcome over there. Annotations are not just for high-level academia. - D.R. Lexicon Urthus by Michael Andre-Driussi is an out-of-print, expensive, and difficult to obtain book. Powell's Books, the famous book emporium, will sell it to you, but be prepared to pay $250. Amazon's prices range from $119 to $284 for a collectible editon. What does this book contain that would entice buyers to...

Google recently announced that Columbia University has become the 28th library to join with Google Book Search "to digitize works from its collections, and make them searchable and discoverable online." For many years TeleRead has been in the vanguard in advocating the creation of huge national digital libraries, ideally well-linked with each other and as comprehensive as possible. No, Google Book Search isn't TeleRead, but it does offer an enticing preview of the possibilities. Many months ago I used Google Book Search to investigate the origins of a supposed "ancient Chinese curse." I will update the results of this exploration...

A disturbing report in the Washington Post indicates that millions of items are missing or misplaced at the Library of Congress. Maybe it is time to digitize the collection and make multiple distributed copies. LOC has some digitization efforts going on, but obviously it could stand more. Moderator's note: I wonder if any libraries are threatened by the California fires. Katrina was hell on New Orleans' collections. - DR...

Along with Boing Boing, Wonkette and other well-known blogs, we've made Blogging Heroes---Michael Banks' book, which Wiley will publish later this year. Mike likes our fight for e-book standards and against Draconian DRM, in addition to our library-related efforts. You can read Mike's TeleBlog chapter---which Wiley sent with permission to reproduce it---in either HTML or PDF. Order the book here. Because of the nature of Blogging Heroes, Mike focused on me. So once again, I'll remind you of the contributions of others, especially Robert Nagle, Branko Collins, Jon Noring and Garson O'Toole, not to mention Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti and newcomers such as Paul...

My October issue of the magazine Business 2.0  was wrapped in a white cover emblazoned with black and red lettering that proclaimed: "This is your last issue of Business 2.0 magazine." No, this was not because my subscription was expiring. It was because the magazine was expiring. The protracted and difficult gestation of e-books may be distracting some from observing the successful birth and thriving of an older sibling---electronic text. Ominous blog post The death of Business 2.0 was foretold one year ago in a blog posting by a knowledgeable magazine worker with the job title "Creative Director." The blog entry compared the advantages...

The Web site of Publishers Weekly, the powerful 135-year-old bible of book publishing, has started running news and views I adapt from the TeleBlog. I'll also write some PW-first items, online and offline, and will welcome suggestions from the e-book community. PW's home page will spotlight my E-Book Report blog at least 2-3 times a week, and I hope that TeleBlog regulars will drop by to enrich my posts with their own insights. Commenters don't have to work in publishing or agree with me. The only musts are civility and fairness. P-E bridges Also known as the TeleRead Web Log, we draw tens of...

[poll=36]Do you hate captchas as much as I do? Perhaps as much as pop-up ads, even if both are small time compared to DRM? Yes, I understand the reasons. Project Gutenberg, for example, will use 'em to reduce the burden that nonhumans may place on its Plucker conversion routes---although luckily they'll kick in only on the less popular books (the ones not in a cache and in need of live, on-the-fly conversion). And of course captchas are common on WordPress blogs burdened by spam. I may yet have to resort to 'em. But I'd rather not. 150,000+ collectively "wasted hours" a day About the...

Nebula-related works are here. Other free texts are here. Reg may be required. Also check SFWA page without reg needed. Among the goodies available for free: Two Hearts, by Peter S. Beagle. (Thanks to Garson for the pointer.) Related: Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer for a post-apocalypse novel (BBC). You can actually buy an e-book edition of The Road Amusingly, Amazon readers give this one just a four and one-half-star rating on the average, not a five. Tough customers, eh?...

For many years TeleRead has been in the vanguard in advocating the creation of huge national digital libraries, ideally well-linked with each other and as comprehensive as possible. A natural and wonderful offshoot of large corpuses of digital texts would be search tools of unprecedented power. Massive digital libraries would enable stimulating new methodologies for observing the evolution of language. Google Book Search isn't TeleRead, but offers an enticing preview of the possibilities. Consider my recent search to examine the origin of one piquant and controversial expression---"May you live in interesting times"---described as an ancient Chinese curse. RFK and why...

Microsoft's new Deepfish browser is supposed to show Web sites well---or at least better than before---on little mobile phones even if the sites weren't designed for them. See link list from Microsoft, including a preview for prospective beta users. DOS fun on JVM-capable browsers In other software news, check out Garson O'Toole's interesting little comment on a way to run DOS on a browser using Java. "Classic DOS games such as Space Invaders, Lemmings. Commander Keen, and Prince of Persia can be played," Garson notes. "This means that DOS programs will be executable on even weakly-powered e-books in the future." Remember,...

Answers to yesterday's quiz: (1) What media titan in 1980 said, "Someday, Don, all news---and advertising---will be delivered digitally? There will really be no need for paper and ink." This quote is attributed to Rupert Murdoch, shown on the cover of Wired. See the article entitled Magazine publishers see future, but no profit, in shift to Internet that appeared March 18th in the International Herald Tribune. Regarding the hint, Murdoch's media corporation owns some important satellite systems that are used for media deliver. More recently his company acquired MySpace. (2) What author in 1969 predicted the Newspad? The science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke...

Can you identify the people who made the following stimulating comments about electronic text? (1) What media titan in 1980 said, "Someday, Don, all news---and advertising---will be delivered digitally? There will really be no need for paper and ink." (2) What author in 1969 predicted the "Newspad," a foolscap-sized device that in the future would display the world's major electronic papers? To use the gadget one would enter a code to select a newspaper. The front page would be displayed with tiny headlines for each story. Next one would enter another code so that the "postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly...