Yesterday ALA announced a new blog on E-content, to be administered by Christopher Harris.  Here is more information from the press release: Keeping up with the many varieties of digital content—and how libraries can offer them to their patrons—just got easier. American Libraries has launched an “E-Content” blog (http://americanlibraries.org/e-content) that provides information on e-books, e-readers, e-journals, databases, digital libraries, digital repositories, and other e-content issues. The blog complements the new section on e-content that appears in the weekly e-newsletter American Libraries Direct and focuses on similar issues. E-Content is administered by Christopher Harris, director of the School Library System for the Genesee Valley...

AMAZON KINDLE-EDITION BLOGS NOW ALLOW SUBSCRIBERS THE ABILITY TO FOLLOW LINKS THAT ARE CODED FOR "NEW WINDOWS" ("new tabs" on a computer web browser, but not recognized formerly in the Kindle Editions). This is a long-desired feature, and its absence in the new Kindle 3, despite its more capable web browser, was lamented. With this kind of link which is meant to bring you to another website via a new window while keeping the blog-website in place in the original window, we'd get a Kindle-edition blog error message instead, saying: "Web Browser could not open this link because opening multiple windows is not...

Nick Spalding, author of the experimental written-all-in-one-sitting novel Life…With No Breaks (readers on Amazon seem to either love it or hate it), announced yesterday that he’s launched a new indie author blog called Spalding’s Racket: I’ve created [it] to promote books written by independent authors. It’s a place for you to find out about new books you might like to read. I’m making sure that only professionally laid out books make it on the blog. It’s not a review site per se, but I won’t be posting just anything up and...

Stephen Page has an interesting editorial in the Guardian’s Books blog, looking at the possible effects of the iPad, now being launched in the UK, on the publishing industry. Page doubts that the iPad will cause “a revolution in ebook sales” but expects it to accelerate the change that has already been taking place. He feels it is incumbent on publishers to move faster to demonstrate why they are useful and necessary in a world where self-e-publication is becoming easier and faster. Publishers, Page says, need to seek direct relationships with readers, rather than being content to...

Blogger Ben Forta remarks on a strange conundrum. The 2010 US Census has a fancy website, a blog, and is using social networking to spread the word…but when it comes down to actually filling out and sending in the census form, they require you to mail it back. Using snailmail. The site says they are considering response via Internet “for the future”. Of course, the next “future” census is in 2020. It seems awfully strange in a world where we can download music, movies, and books, and so many government agencies (such as unemployment insurance) have...

Found via Slashdot: On the heels of Publishers Weekly’s report that e-book piracy could be costing the publishing industry as much as $3 billion (which we mentioned here) comes a tongue-in-cheek post by blogger Eric Hellman: Apparently, over 2 billion books were "loaned" last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to...

I conducted an interview with Pablo Defendini, Producer and blogger for Tor.com, via Google Wave. Our conversation ranged from the Tor.com blog itself, to the free e-book giveaway that kicked off the site, to the much-anticipated but still-absent Tor.com e-book store. Defendini noted that Tor.com was a separate subsidiary from Tor Books the publisher, and as an employee of Tor.com he was unable to answer questions pertaining to Tor Books’s stance on e-books or its e-book ventures prior to Tor.com (such as Tor Webscriptions). However, he did have a number of fascinating things to say about...