Today Wolfram launched CDF, a new document format that incorporates interactive charts, infographics, tables, and anything else that you can produce in the company's own Mathematica (or that you can import as MathML expressions from Excel and Word). Conrad Wolfram writes, "The idea is to provide a knowledge container that’s as easy to author as documents, but with the interactivity of apps—for CDFs to make live interactivity as everyday a way to communicate as spreadsheets made charts." Although Wolfram is positioning this as an open document format, the readers over at Slashdot are skeptical about the EULA and potential issues down...

One of my earliest blog posts about e-books, back in 2002 when I was writing for Jeff Kirvin’s “Writing on Your Palm,” was called “Whither the PDA D&D?”. I pointed out that, whereas fiction e-books had made the transition to portable e-format, role-playing games had yet to do so. Possibly one of the biggest obstacles was the way that so many of them depend on tables, which don’t tend to translate well to small screens. Given how big and thick role-playing game books tend to be, they would seem tailor-made for such a conversion—if someone could get around the...

Marie Lebert's review of the past forty years of ebooks continues over at Project Gutenberg News with eBooks: 1993 – PDF, from past to present. Lebert's post focuses mainly on the timeline of the format's evolution, so I heartily recommend you supplement it with Nate Hoffelder's OMG PDF WTF at The Digital Reader, which highlights some of the format's huge security issues....

The 2011 edition of this annual anthology of essays and reports on (U.S.) government libraries is now available from LexisNexis' Government Info Pro website. It's described on the site as "a collaborative document... put out annually on a specific topic of interest to government libraries." The second section may be of particular interest to the Teleread audience. Titled "Adapting to New and Evolving Technologies", it contains reports from librarians and consultants over topics like the Kindle Lending Program, e-accessibility issues, and SLA 2010. Via Resource Shelf...

The National Academies—consisting of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council—recently announced that all PDF versions of books published by its members will be available for free download, starting immediately. This includes more than 4000 existing books, plus any published in the future. These PDFs can be accessed from the National Academies Press web store, from which print versions can also be purchased. They can also be read online for free. Although the e-books will be available for free, they will still be copyrighted. The National Academies...

ReadWriteWeb reports that Hollywood trade magazine BoxOffice has digitized a large portion of its 91 year back issue archive, and is working on the rest. Now nearly 3000 issues of the publication are available online as free PDFs (or page images for more recent issues). Although they lack metadata or search capabilities, these digital back-issues will still be a valuable resource for scholars, historians, and others with an interest in movie history.    ...

On FutureBook, Andy McNab of European e-book distributor Mobcast has posted an editorial about “squeez[ing] the life out” of e-book pirates. He points out that book piracy is nothing new, and that a lot of pirated e-books are low-quality PDF-only versions, which limit their usefulness to readers. He points out that focusing on taking books down from file-sharing sites is only a short-term fix, and ultimately short-sighted, and suggests that publishers should start focusing on ounces of prevention rather than pounds of cure. He also notes that holding back on releasing e-books out of fears of piracy is...

Author Keir Thomas has posted an account of how he came to write and self-publish an Ubuntu Linux reference book, after being spurned by a number of other publishers including O’Reilly who felt the profit margin was too low on inexpensive books at the moment. So Thomas decided to write and publish the book himself through Amazon’s print-on-demand subsidiary CreateSpace. And to drum up interest in the printed book, which he priced at $12.99, he gave the e-book away as a free PDF. Thomas estimates that the book had to be downloaded about 446 times for every...

The National Archives has always been a great source of PDF and other non-fiction documents for my eBook reader.  Escape and Evasion reports, WPA guides, After-Action Reports, all of these have made for some interesting reading.  However, navigating the archives and the ARC (Archival Research Catalog) to find new items has always been somewhat challenging. No more!  Stopping by the site in the last few weeks, I’ve noticed big changes in how you can search for electronic items for download.  If you go to the Online Public Access Prototype, link at http://www.archives.gov/research/search/, a massively streamlined search portal is now available for...

There is an interesting thread going on at the RPG.net forum relating to PDF e-books of role-playing games. In particular, the third edition of the Nobilis RPG, which I have in 1st and 2nd editions in paper form (and reviewed for RPG.net). Jenna Moran (nee Rebecca Sean Borgstrom, Nobilis’s author) wrote, in response to someone inquiring about a PDF version: I'd be grateful if people who are interested in PDFs took some time to explain why, how important it is, and how it plays into their interest in retail purchases. (In general, I think electronic formats...

That's the title of an article in Intego's Mac Security Blog: In a recent presentation to the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, security researcher Julia Wolf highlighted a number of “features” of the PDF format that could lead to serious security issues. Wolf showed that a PDF could contain a database scanner that could “scan a network when the document is printed on a network printer,” and that PDFs could “blindly trigger the execution of arbitrary programs in Acrobat Reader.” PDFs also support “inherently insecure script languages such as JavaScript, formats such as XML, RFID tags and digital rights management (DRM)...

Here's the update description from their site: new PDF displaying engine - zooming/panning is a lot smoother now. However, if for some reason the new engine doesn't work for you, you can always switch back to the original engine with the switch in Settings. Higher quality images switch in Settings for PDF files. This switch produces higher quality scanned images, but impacts rendering performance noticeably. So try this switch to see which option suits your needs better. wireless printing: AirPrint support (iOS 4.2 or later) actions available without closing a file - "Open In...", E-Mail, Print Repair a PDF File feature. Some damaged files that...