Well this is a real blow for Teleread. I have been reading this site for a few years and have always been amazed out how much output could be done by one person. Chris Meadows has been the backbone of this site. We are definitely going to miss his constant input. I have already bookmarked your new residence on the web, and look forward to reading your posts there.

I hope that there hasn’t been any nefarious reasons for the two main contributors of this site leaving in consecutive days. It does looks suspicious.

I hope that Dan Eldridge and whoever he acquires can keep the standards high and the posts interesting (and often). Good strength in this endeavor. You definitely have BIG SHOES to fill.

The best also to Paul Bilba. We are going to miss both of you, greatly.

I have really enjoyed this website because of the updates that were always arriving, mostly by Chris Meadows. I sure hope that this site is able to keep up the volume and the quality that we have experienced in the past.

My best to Paul and Chris. Good strength in your future endeavors. Wish you didn’t have to leave, but it has been great while it lasted.

Good strength to Dan Eldridge and whoever he brings on to fill the shoes that have been left vacant.

Like Dan, I love your mini-history. Nate’s blog is first-rate, and with your prose and insights, it’ll be even better. Meanwhile those several thousand TeleRead posts of yours will remain online for e-book fans and technical historians to discover, admire, and enjoy.

Yes, how far we’ve come since the days of e-books on blurry PDA screens, and worse! The glory of technology is that, however problematic are the doings of humans, it keeps getting better; and I hope that Dan himself will be at TeleRead for a long time to chronicle the wonders ahead. As people can see from the comments section, he and I
and others like Joanna C. are mulling over ways to reinvent the site rather than simply let it serve as a digital museum. The more suggestions we get from savvy TeleRead community members like Joanna, the better!

Any site covering technology needs to be forward-looking rather than dwell excessively on the past. But I can’t resist a few brags about yore. TeleRead was pushing in the 1990s for a massive national digital library system at a time when some experts wondered if search technology would allow this. This was years before Google’s proposed private version and the Digital Public Library of America project at Harvard. We were hardly the first to advocate a national digital library system. But our twist was the idea of combining the virtual library with the systematic popularization of color tablets with detachable keyboards, and we were also advocating other wrinkles such as tight integration of the technology with local schools and libraries.

For those who don’t know, TeleRead likewise was the leading champion of OpenReader, which in turn jogged the International Digital Publishing Forum into creating the ePub standard now used by giants like Apple, Sony, and B&N. Thank you, Jon Noring, for founding the OpenReader Consortium and writing about it in TeleRead when many prominent people in e-bookdom ridiculed the idea of nonproprietary standards. In an e-book context, I invented the phrase “Tower of eBabel,” and Jon and I tried our hardest to raze the Tower (like Chris, I continue to root for the death of DRM—a related evil—in e-bookstores).

As far as I know, TeleRead is the Internet’s oldest site devoted to general news and views on e-books. It isn’t as ancient as my car, a white 1988 Honda Civic with a sometimes-moody air-conditioning system. But who cares? I’d rather be sentimental about the gifted and hardworking people behind the site, over all these years, than about inevitably obsolete machines. You’d fit the former category, Chris. Good luck!

Cheers,
David

And of course, I wish you the very best of luck, and much happiness, at TDR. It’s a fantastic site, and now I’ve got one more excuse to follow it daily!

Very kind regards,

Dan Eldridge
TeleRead.com