If you're one of the many e-book customers who's expecting a payment or credit as a result of the 49 states' recent $69 million settlement with HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, you should be aware that "the states have slightly modified the way those payments will work," according to Paid Content reporter Laura Hazard Owen. In a post filed this morning, Owen detailed two of the latest modifications to the payments that were filed by the states' attorneys. (Click here to view the six-page document on Scribd.) As for the changes to the way credits will be disbursed, those modifications are fairly minimal; they probably...

California Governor Jerry Brown gave his pen a workout this past Thursday,  September 27. In addition to signing legislation prohibiting social network snooping by employers and colleges, he also signed off on a proposal for the state to fund 50 open source digital textbooks. He signed two bills, one to create the textbooks and the other to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host them, at a meeting with students in Sacramento. (See video below.) Source: Ars Technica     * * * Update: Thanks to commenter Frank Lowney for bringing our attention to the following infographic from Twenty Million Minds; it illustrates the implications...

By Andy Richardson, CEO of Influential Software Last week the UK Culture minister, Ed Vaizey, bowed to sustained pressure from publishers and The Society of Authors and announced a government review of e-book lending that will have important implications for the British book trade. The review’s stated objective is to look into the “possible consequences of e-lending, including the long term impact on library premises, the effect on publishers and the impact on those who cannot keep up with changes in technology,” and will be chaired by William Sieghart, the founder of Forward Publishing. Looking at the official announcement that the Department of Culture,...

Back in early September, we published a post mentioning that the F.A.A. had announced plans for an “industry working group to study [the effects of] portable electronics usage” on aircraft. At the time, it wasn't entirely clear how long the process was expected to take, and it still isn't: The F.A.A. originally indicated that the process would take "at least a year." (Remember: This study is specifically looking at whether or not passengers will be allowed to use electronic devices during a flight's taxi, takeoff and landing periods.) And yet as New York Times reporter Nick Bilton astutely pointed out in a recent online column, because...

Michael W. Perry's political rant about the cause and ramifications of the DoJ price-fixing case definitely touched a nerve this week with a good number of readers. Some of you found Perry's thought-process and logic to be a bit twisted, while others didn't think the essay had any place being published on TeleRead at all, given its rather over-the-top political overtone. Perry has since responded with a 2,200-word comment, and it's nothing if not a doozy. Click here to give it a read....

The increasingly heated national debate surrounding the use of personal electronic devices on airplanes has been chugging along steadily for years now. And yet thanks to the laudable efforts of the New York Times' Nick Bilton, the conversation has once again become news. As many of you are undoubtedly aware, a now-legendary Bilton piece appearing in the Times in late March—in which he criticized the F.A.A.'s  rules against using e-readers and tablets during taxi, takeoff or landing—actually resulted in a somewhat positive governmental response: The F.A.A. promised to take "a fresh look" at the issue. Frequent fliers everywhere, of course, have long been equally befuddled and frustrated by the...

There was an interesting overview of reader privacy issues in this week's Guardian. I wonder if most e-book readers have given any thought to the issue. I bet it hasn't even crossed their minds that the customer profile Amazon or Kobo or Sony might have on them—detailing what they've purchased, and when—would be valuable to someone. And if they did see the value (I myself find Amazon's recommendations engine both useful and surprisingly accurate), I wonder if it's crossed their minds that this information could potentially be shared once Amazon has it. As the article points out: "Retailers and search engines, most notably Amazon...

by Gary Price Editor's note: The following post was originally published on the Library Journal's infoDOCKET blog, in a slightly different format. Back on August 16, the Library Journal's infoDOCKET blog reported that the State Dept. had formally withdrawn/cancelled its plan to sole source a contract to Amazon.com for Kindle devices and management. The planned deal raised a bunch of eyebrows since it was first announced in June and an event to announce the State Dept. Learning Initiative was announced an cancelled within a few days. Just two days later, infoDOCKET learned that the State Department had released an RFI (Request for Information) to learn...

According to a story in yesterday's Navy Times, the Navy Library Service (who even knew there was such a thing?) is currently in the process of  "working to put e-library systems on ships, allowing sailors to choose from thousands of digital books to read while at sea." "This is a challenge," the story continues, "because limited bandwidth on surface ships and the complete lack of it on submarines prevents seamless e-book downloads while at sea." Bids will soon be solicited from companies that provide e-library services to large-scale organizations. Once a service provider is chosen, a test run "tentatively scheduled for next spring"...

Today the Department of Justice finally got around to posting over 850 comments it received on its proposed anti-trust settlement with three agency pricing publishers—along with its own response (PDF) to the concerns and issues raised by the comments it received. In summary, the Department of Justice considered all the relevant issues raised by the comments, pro and con, and found nothing sufficient to convince it to budge one iota from the settlement plans it had drawn up. Of those comments, fewer than 70 were in support of the settlement, and the rest were opposed. (However, hundreds of those...

Senator Charles Schumer (D, New York) has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal calling upon the Department of Justice to drop its lawsuit against the agency price publishers and Apple. Schumer seems to have bought into the Author’s Guild’s rationale, which he quotes and references, painting Amazon as the evil monopolist and publishers as beleaguered innovators who came up with a way to nobble Amazon’s unfair advantage and are now being punished for it. The suit, Schumer writes, “could wipe out the publishing industry as we know it, making it much harder for young authors to get...

We’ve probably all seen that famous photo of the victorious President Harry S Truman triumphantly holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune that called the election results for the other side. For decades it has been the exemplar of the hazards of jumping to conclusions, as well as the problems of gathering facts quickly when the speed of communication is limited, But could such a thing happen in the high-speed Internet age? It seems the answer is yes. The Dewey vs. Truman incident happened because at the time the Tribune had to go to press several hours earlier...