A number of websites are going dark tomorrow to protest the SOPA legislation that could impose harsh restrictions upon the Internet. These sites include Mozilla, reddit for 12 hours, and Wikipedia for a full 24 hours. Google will also place a SOPA-related link on its homepage. Wales explained that the Wikipedia blackout comes as a result of feedback from the Wikipedia community, Not everybody is sanguine about the blackout. On just-launched Silicon Valley news site Pando Daily, Paul Carr writes in agreement with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s tweet calling the decision “foolish”. Carr blasts Wales for “[making] a...

The Library of Congress is where not just books but other documents deemed to have great historical significance are stored. And soon those documents will include an archive of every single public Twitter posting ever sent. Twitter and the Library of Congress have reached an agreement whereby an archive of those postings will be transferred to the library for inclusion in its electronic archives. "We were excited to be involved with acquiring the Twitter archives because it's a unique record of our time," [LoC digital initiatives program manager Bill] Lefurgy said. "It's also a unique way...

On PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports on some interesting findings from a Twitter discussion about e-book buyer behavior based on comments from book industry research organization representatives. The research reps suggest that limits on e-book sharing are limiting e-book adoption. The reps point out that consumers really like reading free e-books (about half of e-book buyers read free e-books) and expect e-book prices to stay low or drop lower. Half of all e-readers are given as gifts, but less than 1% of e-books are. Barriers to widespread e-book adoption are limits on sharing,...

Authors have experimented with Twitter fiction before, and even fictional characters from a musical have taken to Twitter to do a little world building (and marketing). But Reif Larsen's enigmatic matryoshka doll piece is the first I've seen in a while to make such effective use of the format. Here are some examples from the blog A New Kind of Book: here’s what Reif wrote on July 19th: Package from Serbia just arrived. I did not request such a package. I wonder the % of unrequested packages that end up being life-changing. That’s odd, I thought. A little quirky, a...

Scribd is launching an iPhone app called the Float Reader, through which it hopes to become “the Netflix of reading.” Unfortunately, I can’t try this app out on my first-gen iPod Touch—it requires iOS 4.0—but from the news coverage it looks like an interesting attempt to bring some of the benefits of iPad-only reader apps like Flipboard to the smaller smartphone interface. The Float Reader provides access to a user’s Scribd documents, as well as to articles from 150 partners including The Atlantic, Time, Salon, and TechCrunch, and to excerpts of articles friends have shared on Facebook, Twitter, or...

Although this doesn’t have anything directly to do with e-books, it points out a way that authors can use digital media to help raise money for worthy causes. Yesterday, tornadoes ripped through Joplin, Missouri, a city about 90 miles west of my home in Springfield, killing at least 89 people and leaving many more homeless. Galleycat reports that to help raise money for a relief effort through Shelterbox, authors Maureen Johnson and Robin Wasserman are auctioning full book critiques on Twitter. Johnson led a similar fundraiser for earthquake victims in New Zealand...

One of the great things about the current state of electronic text is how much information and advice is available free on-line for the asking—concentrations of expertise in answer sites like Quora, as well as pre-published content available through search engines. But when it comes to important matters such as medical advice, there’s an amazing amount of misinformation out there. It seems a lot more people enjoy giving medical advice than are really qualified to give it. One problem is, when it comes to giving out advice, doctors are sadly underrepresented in social media. A CNet...

Flipboard has scored another magazine coup, ReadWriteWeb reports, adding a feed for Rolling Stone Magazine and demonstrating once again why they’re still the best way to read magazine and magazine-style content on-line. The new section is essentially a tweaked presentation of the @RollingStone twitter feed, adding a bent-back-magazine-style frame for the smaller version of the article rather than a scroll-up half-screen version. (This frame seems to be used for all their content partners’ publications, since they know the source will never be bigger than a tweet.) As a result, sometimes short-form tweets share the overview page with framed...

One of the best surprises I got this Christmas was the gift of a used iPod Touch by my sister-in-law. She belongs to an iPhone family, and they’ve gotten so many iPhones over the course of the last few years that the Touch, originally bought for the kids to play with, was relegated to sitting around unused for months since the kids get to play with the older-generation iPhones now. And as a result, I have an iPod Touch again for the first time since losing my original one in June. It’s just a 1st-generation model, and only 8...

Shortly after Apple called it the “best iPad app of the year,” awesome social reading app Flipboard has a major new update out that adds a couple of much-requested capabilities to the social network reader for the iPad: it now supports Flickr and Google Reader feeds. As Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb reports, it actually incorporates most of the functions possible in Google Reader, including starring items, sharing items, marking as read, and so on. That’s certainly a lot more than the Pulse RSS reader has yet managed to do. I tried the new feature out, and it...

Apple has lately named social-network reading app Flipboard (iTunes page) its “iPad App of the Year” for 2010. Big news for the company, whose app proved so popular on launch that its servers melted down in a matter of minutes, but not a big surprise. As I said of it in my review, the app is one of the prettiest things I’ve seen for the iPad, and I always recommend it to iPad owners I help over the phone in my tech-support day job. As Jay Yarow said on Business Insider: From a higher level,...

Even if no e-books are involved, there is a particular kind of “tele-reading” we all do all the time, and have ever since the Internet became something you could put in a pocket: Internet research. Many of us consider the Internet to be our own personal ready reference guide, and consult it as naturally as we might glance at the watch on our wrist to check the time. I’m sure nobody who has ever worn a watch is a stranger to the aggravating sensation of repeatedly glancing at our wrist to check the time only to realize anew that we’ve...