(This article announces the launch of the Digital Text Community, a new mailing list for serious discussion on the digitization of "ink-on-paper" texts, such as books, periodicals, documents, etc. Please join our community!) Like many of you, I daily follow and contribute to dozens of blogs, mailing lists and forums to keep abreast of digital publication related news, opinions, and developments. David Rothman should be happy to know that the TeleRead blog is the first place I go to every day to stay up-to-the-minute on digital publishing news and views. Considering the vast number of blogs, mailing lists, and forums...

Millions of elderly people suffer from fading vision. And large-print books are not always nirvana---not when many retirees also have arthritis, which makes it hard for them to hold the books and flip pages. With the above in mind, the TeleBlog will soon publish an important essay from Isabelle Fetherston, the reference librarian behind Senior Friendly Libraries, who shares my enthusiasm for e-books as potential life-enrichers for the elderly. May library-related sites and senior citizens' groups spread Isabelle's message! Read on, and you'll see that my own interest in these issues is personal, not just professional. [Update, Dec. 12,...

Good-bye hard disks? Hello, your own Library of Congress? Well, we're not there yet. But in the next few years, a new technology could lead to thumb-sized solid state drives storing a terabyte each. Power consumption might be one-thousandth of flash memory and costs perhaps one-tenth. Just the ticket for multimedia e-books, eh? Or even high-res movies inside them? In between his CSSing for the TeleBlog, Jon Noring took time out for some calculations. He figured that 20 million books exist in the world and that 18,000 of these drives would do the trick for high-res images of them....

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...

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...

E-bookers should watch the IDPF carefully to make certain that neither Adobe nor any other company turns .epub into a proprietary standard through extensions or otherwise. But guess what one of the best countermeasures is? Use of .epub! And noticing suspicious situations and pointing out omissions, which ideally the IDPF can address in time---for example, lack of reliable interbook linking! Readers and publishers of all kinds, then, not just public domain people but also Random House and little publishers, should thank the open-source-based Feedbooks site where co-founders Hadrien Gardeur and Loïc Roussel are fighting the good fight for genuine compatibility...

No one's a bigger defender of the idea of e-book standards than the TeleBlog is. I'm not entirely happy with the IDPF's present .epub standards, which don't assure reliable interbook linking, for example. Even so, at least they're a start and enjoy the endorsement of some major companies in technology and publishing. But just because .epub's enemies can be wrong---it's just a plain lie to say the specs support PDF simply because Adobe Digital Editions does---should we automatically accept what the format's defenders say? Going beyond the anti-.epub lies What if the current .epub isn't sufficiently useful without proprietary extensions from Adobe?...

The Internet Archive has made available to all its automated function for deriving multiple formats from a single source. If you post a movie to archive.org in, say, MPEG2 format, a whole slew of copies in different formats will be created for you, such as MPEG4 videos, a Flash video, and an animated GIF. Perhaps this function has been available for movie and music fans all along, but it is relatively new for e-book producers. Until recently, if I posted a set of scans for a public domain book at the site, the best I could do was to...

If any e-book Web site could benefit from the new .epub standard for digital publications, it's Munseys---the mostly public domain site where David Moynihan strives to offer "Over 20,000 rare and hard to find titles in 10 formats." The big word here is "strives." David M is still wrestling with Mobipocket hassles, for example, despite the months of work he has already put into the site. Alas, David appears to be burning in a Dantesque Format Hell, beyond his other woes (I still can't find Babbitt---database problems?). Here's a screenshot from a typical Mobipocket book as now offered by David. In most...

Over four years ago I published an eBookWeb article entitled “OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?” Unfortunately, due to eBookWeb going defunct (a casualty of the “E-book Dark Ages” that resulted after the dotcom collapse), that article has essentially disappeared from the Internet. So I am reposting the eBookWeb article here, not only for preservation purposes, but because its themes are stil very relevant today as will be briefly explained in this foreword. DeLorean jokes When I wrote that article, e-books were considered a lot like the DeLorean automobile — weird and impractical — the butt of many jokes. The DeLorean even played a...

So do magazine excerpts sell books? And how about free excerpts on Amazon.com? Such issues come up in a New York Times piece just published in the IHT. "Although excerpts from high-profile books still routinely appear in magazines, some publishers have been having second thoughts about the strategy. Frequently, an excerpt can offer a nice lift to a book's sales, but there is always the risk that it may offer too much, thus stealing thunder — and revenue — from the book." There! I trust I haven't stolen too much thunder from the Times. A prime example given is Vanity Fair's...

Can't find the best-seller you want in E? Then, beyond the obvious trip to the public library or the use of a swap service, you may want to consider BookSwim---a NetFlix for p-books, discussed in a Minneapolis Star-Tribune article. "For $15 to $20 per month," says the Strib, "the company will send your top five book choices. Return three books in a prepaid envelope, and your next three choices will be mailed to you." You can sign up now for the beta. Also see previous TeleBlog coverage, including my thoughts on the public library angle, plus BookSwim's response. Far from telling...