Lately, Canadian Ric Day wanted to read an e-book of the new John LeCarré novel, Our Kind of Traitor. He searched for it in various bookstores and found it was available in the US and the UK…but not in Canada. Though his Google searching to find it turned up plenty of torrent links on the first Google results page. Does Penguin believe that only Americans and the British read English? Pay attention to Twitter? LibraryThing? GoodReads? No one else in the world reads English and notices new books are available from famous authors? No one...

Bruce Brandfon, Scientific American: always charged for content and a few years gave it away for free on the web. Couldn't monetize it by way of advertising. A year ago decided to publish tidbits and took the features stories off the web. Previously published features on the web for free before the magazine came out. As a result subscriptions increased. Lesson learned as publishers of content is that rates they were able to generate on the web were very small compared to the rates they could generate in print. Was able to replace direct mail by...

The $199 Sony Pocket Edition, aka the PRS-300 e-reader, gets a big knock from Mike Cane, who briefly tested one at a New York store. From the page-changing speed to the “nauseating, vulgar pink” of the unit he tried, Mike wasn’t happy, at least not for the most part. Sampled a PRS-300 yourself---whatever the color? Share your thoughts. No, the photo to the left isn’t of the reader that Mike tested and hated. Related: Mike’s observations on borrowing e-books from the New York Public Library, which, like many, uses the OverDrive service. Agree or...

New York is a pretty glum place these days, and I applaud Mike Cane's Chronicle's of Depression, straight from the Big Apple in his inimitable WTF tone. Mike's writings just might jibe with my own thinking. Humans have gotten worse, at least in recent, Gecko-ish decades, while the gadgets keep getting better and better. Cheerier than Planet E as a whole Despite all hassles of DRM and eBabel, however, the e-book world is a much cheerier place than Planet Earth as a whole. I rejoice in the rise of ePub, the growing resistance to DRM,...

Mike Cane is "trying to see if it's yet possible to replace a print library with an all-electronic one. This is my search for authors and ebooks and what prices are being charged. This will be a long process as I have well over one hundred searches to do across ten e-book sites." Best of luck. Mike, with The eBook Test blog and related research. It's a worthy experiment---maybe even in the class of Chris Steib's bathtub adventures with P and E versions of The Crying of Lot 49....

"In the age of the iPhone it is the paperback, not the hardback, that seems most under threat. Between my passion for" books from PS Publishing "and my lovely iPhone, I have barely touched a paperback in months. The part of me that loves books---that wants to own them, or lend them to friends, or give them as gifts---is far more satisfied by a quality hardback than a cheap paperback." - Don't abandon hardbacks, by Damien G. Walter, in the Guardian. The TeleRead take: Is there such a thing as a "hardback visage"? Walter, now working on a...

Here's the question of the day for Apple fans itching to see the company break into e-books. To what extent can the colorful iTunes Store help Apple catch up with Amazon, Sony, eReader and the rest? Steve Jobs is breaking into online movies; can books be far behind despite his statement that people don't read anymore? TeleBlog readers are well aware of Jobs' fondness for misleading rivals. Now let's hypothesize that e-books are on his mind and consider two of the plusses of the iTunes store: 1. The store and related software already dominate online music----people might simply think...

Check out the Techmeme roundup. Are any e-book software developers game to follow up on the latest jailbreak within the iPhone platform? Or is everyone just waiting for the official Software Developers Kit? Until then I'm not expecting that much action on the iPhone app front, but you never know. Related: iPhone/iPod Touch will have the greatest apps evah, from Mike Cane, who also ran a fascinating little tidbit called The Secret History of the PDA? "Well, it turns out this Klausner guy actually had something akin to an electronic organizer before anyone else!" And also of interest: Reports that...

Moderator's note: Mike Cane is a New York writer and fellow e-book nut from whom we hope to hear a lot more. Here's a just-received e-mail reproduced with his permission. Mike's not the traveler in the PR shot. But, yes, we'd welcome reports on how the Sony Reader works in Real Life in various lighting situations aboard jets, trains, etc.---both the new and old models of the Sony. Need to carry a book light? - DR I did a light fondle of the new model of the Sony Reader, the PRS-505, at Sony Style NYC. Luckily, they also had...