As many of you have seen we have been undergoing some site problems in the last week or so. This has probably been caused by a combination of our redesign and the fact that our traffic is growing. NAPCO, our owners, have had their IT people working hard on this. Needless to say we thank you for bearing with us and appreciate your continued support....

Here's an update on what we've changed in response to your comments and what's still in the works. Keep your comments coming, we look forward to them. What we've done so far: • Added more text to post teasers on the home page (we're still testing some things here). • Comments will only appear in comment section when they are approved and appear as part of the post. • Moved the Comment block higher-up on the page. • Removed the green font style that made "block quote" text very hard to read. • Add "Next" and "Previous" links below each post page. • See all the...

On Friday, September 10, 2010 around 5pm EDT, TeleRead's new site design should go live. Hopefully, it will point you to articles that interest you in a way we can’t do now. I’ve asked that we incorporate a “real” search function and to cater to our international readers. The new look will also allow us to be more advertiser-friendly, which is important if the site is to remain viable and grow even more than it has to date. Some of you will love the site, and I’m sure some of you won't – that’s just the way people are. But when...

Along with the site redesign, I've asked our owners, NAPCO, to implement reCAPTCHA. You have undoubtedly seen this on other sites you've visited. Since May we have received over 172,000 spam comments. Why is this important? It's important because all those spam comments are held by our filter for review before being deleted. That means that Chris and I have reviewed over 172,000 spam comments to be sure that they do not contain false positives. We regularly find false positives and have to approve them. This isn't the end, though, because an "approved" spam then becomes,...

We will have at least one maintenance outage in the next couple of days preparatory to the site redesign. Work will have to be done on the WordPress database and the site has to be off line for this....

I reported earlier that TeleRead will be undergoing a redesign. Well, we're proceeding according to schedule and don't be surprised if in a day or so you are treated to a whole new experience. Keep your eyes peeled....

Just a reminder that we’ve got a spamtrap in effect because we receive literally hundreds of spam comments per day. They range from the generic (umpteen zillion ways to say, “Your blog is awesome! I totally agree with everything you have to say. You are such a good writer to know how to make your points so clearly!”) to the strange (the person who claimed to be held prisoner by the Irish mafia who were making him post spam for a Christmas website) to just plain garbage. Sometimes our spamtrap has been known to get a little overzealous...

Just got off an hour-long phone conversation with our owners about the redesign of TeleRead. Yes, it will happen and it will be soon. The target date is September 1, but to be honest with you I think it will be a couple of weeks after that. Even though we will still be using WordPress, it is amazing how many small details need to be attended to and how much time they take. I hope you like the new design - it will be modern and streamlined. Hopefully it will point you to articles that interest you...

Since last night, we have been deluged by around a thousand spam comments from a particularly persistent free-iPhone-site spammer. At 20 comments per page, that’s a lot of spam to go through for false positives! In that light, it is entirely possible that some comments, including lengthier ones, may accidentally be passed over and lost during our trawl to clear the spam out of our trap. If you post a comment that does not show up on the site for several hours—especially if it was a longer one, mentioned sales or had several URLs in it, or comes from the...

I have two Speck Kindle 2 cases to give away. The first winner can receive their choice of a Fitted or DustJacket Kindle case, and the second winner will get the one remaining. The Fitted case retails for $39.95 and the DustJacket for $34.95. Both are provided by the good offices of Speck's PR people. You can find my review of both cases here. The rules are simple: the third person to email me with the word "case" in the subject line gets their choice and the sixth person gets the remaining case. You can find...

Every Friday I'll post a listing of my favorite articles for the preceding week. Purely a subjective judgement. My iPad hands-on: Stellar for nonDRMed indie and public domain e-books, not just locked bestsellers by David Rothman iPad: The First Six Hours by Joe Wikert Will Apple’s iBookstore be Publishing’s Waterloo? by Rich Adin BookofJoe reviews the iPad 746 free science fiction books for the iPhone P-books to e-books: The ethics of downloading and the legality of scanning New digital library about the 1918 influenza pandemic funded Your Kobo questions answered by Joanna Joanna interviews Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis Parent vs Reader, Round 2: Dad vs Kobo by Joanna Amazon...

Christopher Kenneally, Copyright Clearance Center, moderator; John Silbersack, Trident Media Group; Sara Pearl, Trident Media Group John Silbersack: literary agent. even for major authors electronic book sales only account for a few percentage points. Meeting with ebook companies who want to explain their ebook models almost every week, but still very little money being generated on these deals. Most companies don't offer an advance but higher royalties. These companies are also selling a marketing platform. Probably not the time to fight the battle about who owns backlist ebook rights because of low monetary value. But it is...