I’ve been using my Kobo reader for a while now, and will get into my own experiences with it soon. But for this review I’m going to concentrate on the experience of getting my Dad set up with his Kobo today. I went down to visit over the weekend, and took the opportunity to get it all set up for him.(He had already ordered a smart tough zipper case for it.) Dad found the set-up instructions rather confusing—he said after reading them he didn’t know anything more than when he’d begun. But since he had me...

Usually these posts are for questions by readers, but I had a burning e-book-related question that I need answered, and I can’t figure out a better place to do it than here. I’m just about to start preparing the Kobo Reader my Dad asked me to buy for him, and as I mentioned before he’s a huge fan of Anthony Trollope. I’d like to load the Kobo up with every Trollope work I can, and there are 76 of them on Project Gutenberg—but downloading them one at a time could be rather time-consuming. And Project Gutenberg does not keep...

The UK’s Prospect Magazine has a piece by Leo Benedictus looking at the besieged state of libraries in the UK (with over 450 library closures planned), and wondering whether this is as terrible a thing as library supporters contend given how well e-book readers work. Benedictus suggests that some defenders of libraries might be doing so less out of a belief in libraries’ intrinsic beneficence than a moral obligation to defend endangered species, and many of the benefits of libraries can be found in e-book readers. The talk of a future in which children...

This weekend I went down to my parents’ house, spending half of Saturday and most of Sunday visiting with my parents, brother and sister-in-law, and two-month-old niece, and blogging from home. (That’s me at left, blogging from my parents’ kitchen table with my Kobo and iPad visible in the background.) When I went, I took my new Kobo Wireless reader and the Literati I was reviewing with me. While the Literati didn’t last long, the Kobo made a lasting impression on my father. (I wish I’d remembered to photograph him reading it.) A longtime fan of Anthony Trollope,...

Smartphones are penetrating more and more widely these days, but there are still plenty of people out there with feature phones or other small-screened devices. And while there are cloud readers (such as Ibis Reader) and free e-book sites that work on smartphones and tablets, they tend to be media-intensive applications, requiring a decent amount of screen real-estate and memory. Enter ebook.Taggedzi.com, a cloud e-book site designed to work with small-screen devices that don’t have those sorts of specs—for example, basic feature phones. (Why do they call those “feature phones” when they really don’t have any?) The site acts...

Here is the full text of Project Gutenberg's response to the Bear's letter letter we mentioned below. Thanks to reader Greg Weeks for posting the link in a comment to the article. Blockquotes omitted: ** This message is granted to the public domain ** From: Greg Newby [mailto:gbnewby@pglaf.org] Sent: Monday, October 25, 2010 1:52 AM To: Greg Bear and others Subject: Re: Takedown Request -- The Escape by Poul Anderson On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 05:53:54PM -0700, someone wrote: > Dear Dr. Newby: > ... [ delete by gbn ] Dear Greg, Astrid, and others: My apologies for my long delay in...

From e-reads.com: By misreading copyright law Project Gutenberg may have infringed the rights of some authors and improperly put their books into the public domain, say science fiction author Greg Bear and Astrid Anderson Bear, his wife and daughter of another SF author, Poul Anderson. Here is the statement in full: The online site Project Gutenberg (PG) is systematically declaring copyrights void in many literary works published in the 1940s, 1950s, and later, with a special focus on stories published in science fiction pulp magazines. Project Gutenberg then makes these works freely available on the internet though their website,...

Project Gutenberg has been a visionary project launched by Michael Hart in July 1971 to create free electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. The project got its first boost with the invention of the web in 1990, and its second boost with the creation of Distributed Proofreaders in 2000, to help digitizing books from public domain. In 2010, there are Project Gutenberg websites in the U.S., in Australia, in Europe, and in Canada, with more websites to come in other countries. 1990-94 Initially, the ebooks were mostly in English. As Project Gutenberg was launched from the University of Illinois,...

From the press release: The new Gutenberg eReader Android app, which delivers free ebooks on demand, is now shipping through the Google Android Market. The Gutenberg eReader provides an intuitive interface to browse through the Project Gutenberg catalog and lets users read any ebook on the device. Reading enthusiasts can catch up on the latest Project Gutenberg releases with the stylish and sleek new user interface. The beautiful icons and large titles allow customers to easily navigate through hundreds of categories, such as Science Fiction, Children's Literature, Poetry, and Fantasy, etc. The attractive user interface works on any Android phone or...

From the Project Gutenberg News comes this article by Michael Hart: The latest Project Gutenberg Grand Total figures have just passed 37,500 titles this past month and will have 40,000 eBooks during our 40th year celebration, 1,000 a month over 40 years doesn’t sound like much, but we are on track right now to do 5,000 this year. We are currently giving away about 100,000 books a day, just through the one single site: http://gutenberg.org. About 3 million eBooks per month or 36 million per year. In 2000 USB flash drives were just getting started with 8M “IBM Memory Sticks” available for...

From Project Gutenberg News: One of our newest projects is to solicit suggestions as to where Project Gutenberg should be in it’s 50th year. The current suggestions are: 1. Make it more obvious that PG wants error messages–how to write them, where to send them, etc. 2. Make it more obvious that PG will send DVD’s so the people who have to pay by the megabyte can use PG. 3. An extensive library of human read audiobooks. 4. Please make it more obvious how to do PG eBooks for Kindle, Sony, nook,...

OverDrive has announced integration with Project Gutenberg. Boston Public Library is the first to add this featured collection of more than 15,000 EPUB eBook titles to its website. There’s no authentication needed to access these eBooks, and the eBook titles don’t expire or count against a user’s checkout limit when they download. OverDrive plans to expand this service to additional libraries in the US and UK and is looking towards further international expansion in the future. On the technical end, OverDrive's Digital Library Blog says: ... every EPUB eBook downloaded from the Project Gutenberg collection will count as a circulation even...