Update 2007/04/28, 11:59 MDT: The OpenReader site is back online, and the "malware" has been removed. Somehow a bunch of links to bad sites and a bad-actor counter got added. They've been removed with the help of James "KodeKrash" Linden, who is also now tracking down how the bad stuff got there in the first place. He says avoid using canned CMS like Mambo if possible, a sentiment with which I agree. Now to get the Google bad flag removed for all search results which bring up OpenReader pages. - Jon Noring Badware has infested the OpenReader site, and it's down...

Citing an e-book horror story in the TeleBlog as one example, Rob Beschizza writes in the Gadget Blog at Wired News: "After years of hype, e-books may yet be the next big thing. Even with decent handsets (like the Sony's Reader...) and stabler standards, however, it's a technology tainted by a history of aggressive DRM. Of all the things you'd expect to have gone mobile by now, the humble book still lags behind news, magazines, music and video. If digital takeup is any guide to health, literature is the sick man of media. "The why of that has many faces, but DRM...

Pity the publisher trying to promote an e-book. How to alert prospective buyers? How many e-books have you seen piled up at Barnes & Noble? And has Oprah touted an e-book original lately? Oh, and forget about newspaper book supplements, which can't even do justice to p-books and are dying or being folded into other sections. What to do? Could a formula be found through which publishers could spread glad tidings about e-fiction and e-nonfiction alike? Search engines: Important---but just one kind of tool Publishers talk about the use of Amazon and search engines as ways for consumers to find books,...

What if the IDPF gave a standards party and no one came---or at least got awfully distracted by proprietary competition from Microsoft and Amazon? Suppose Amazon were selling a reader gizmo that used the proprietary Mobipocket format. What-if might soon be reality, in line with earlier hints about Amazon's Kindle prototype or similar machines (photo is just of a prototype---uglier than the real Amazon Reader, I'd hope). Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly reports from the London Book Fair: Amazon has been previewing its e-reader to publishers both in the U.S. and U.K.—HarperCollins UK CEO Victoria Barnsley mentioned the reader at yesterday's LBF...

Samsung's VLUU i70 digital camera---7.2 megapixel---can display e-books in the .txt format on its three-inch LCD. Besides shooting videos and photos, natch, it offers text-messaging and plenty else, including MP3s. See specs (thanks Dan). Who knows what this portends? Will the day come when you can shoot videos and instantly insert them into a Sophie-style book---right there in the field---with the same gizmo? Even with the present technology, the camera would be a natural home for such e-texts as tourist guides and maintenance manuals and some pleasure reading. Meanwhile the present item serves as a handy excuse for a mini sermon on...

MobileRead info here. Related: New FBReader released—with XP and OpenReader support: A pleasure to use....

The Sony PSP's price has been knocked down from $200 to $170 in the U.S. So how long until the PSP includes decent e-book capabilities? Eventually we're probably talking about prices under $100, a level already reached by other manufacturers of games hardware. Perhaps it's time for Sony, other games-hardware makers, publishers, librarians and educators to get serious about games machines as e-book platforms. Like vitamin-fortified cereal Think of this as the e-equivalent of fortifying cereal with vitamins. Many of today's young people love games, librarians and the others want to reach out to them, and the above idea would be one book-friendly...

FBReader 0.8.1b info here. New release includes Pepper Pad capability, in addition to rendering OpenReader, albeit without CSS and other trimmings. Meanwhile background on the newest OpenOffice is here. I understand kerning is now a default. Related: Anyone tried FBReader on the OLPC laptop?...

Reading about e-libraries, I feel as if I'm in Stalinist Russia and every Comrade wants to surpass the quota for pork or tractor production. So much talk of numbers! I understand. Just a fraction of the world's books are digitized at this point, and more e-books will mean a greater chance of discovering a quirky 19th century memoirist---or enjoying digital editions of Saul Bellow's novels, which, last time I checked, were still not available in electronic format at Fictionwise, Amazon/Mobipocket or eBooks.com, anyway. Still, I mostly agree with a blog post from Andrew Pace, an information technologist at the N.C. State...

Telecom Italia, Sony, Adobe and iRex Technologies will offer perspectives on "New Mobile Devices & eReading Software"---at the IDPF-organized Digital Book 2007: Digital Publishing in Consumer, Education & Library Markets to be held May 9 in New York City. I'll be especially interested to learn what Telecom Italia and Polymar Vision will be doing with devices similar to the one shown. Other panels will be on formats, digital warehouses, textbooks, digital libraries and e-periodicals. The format panel will feature eBook Technologies, OverDrive and OSoft. I think this would be a great chance for OSoft CEO Mark Carey---if he's inclined---to make the...

FBReader 0.8.0 is out with support for the XP operating system and OpenReader now included. "Integration with Linux desktop environments (KDE, Gnome) has been added," developer Nikolay Pultsin also says. Here's a link to his home page so you can try the software yourself. Download options for XP and various flavors of Linux are toward the bottom of the page. Beta worked great While this is just a beta version with a less fully polished interface, FBReader worked like a charm on my XP desktop when I was reading HTML and ASCII files. I'll be even happier if FBReader can use a...

The almost-released version of FBReader, e-reading freeware dear to savvy Nokia 770 users and other Linux users, will run on Windows XP even if it can't handle earlier versions of the Gates OS. That's the developer's word on the FBRreader list. Now, go to a larger version of the screenshot shown of the XP flavor. See the OpenReader reference? Is that reality or just filler for the screenshot or even confusion with the OEB specs from the IDPF? But wait. I also see an OEB reference. Old or new OEB? Other formats mentioned by name in the shot are FB2, HTML,...