"The Novelists Guild of America strike, now entering its fourth month, has had no impact on the nation at all," the Onion reported last week. Excerpt: "The publishing industry itself, which many believed to be most vulnerable, has nonetheless managed to weather the crisis. Publishers have reissued new editions of early, pre-union novelists---such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen, both of whom have previously established successful track records---and have seen no no change in monthly sales." (Via Scalzi's Whateverettes.) Moderator's note: A real hoot. Highly recommended. - D.R. Technorati Tags: The Onion,Robert Louis Stevenson,Jane Austen...

Today marks the start of the Boekenweek, the Dutch week to promote books. This year's motto is "Of old people...," named after Louis Couperus' classic 1906 psychological novel Of Old People and the Things That Pass... The theme focuses on old age, both in people and books, and has already been criticised by those who feel that youngsters should be encouraged to read books, not discouraged. More interesting for the TeleReaders may be that Alexander Teixeira de Mattos' classic translation of Couperus' masterpiece has recently become available in many formats at the Internet Archive. If anyone would like a version that...

Oh how I'd hate it if TeleRead weren't a global e-book blog. Where would we be without posts from Branko Collin in Amsterdam or others such as Carol Jurd in Adelaide or Ficbot in Toronto---or, now, Richard Herley, the prize-winning novelist whose essays reach us from a village in the Hampshire Downs in the U.K., an area shown in the photo? But no course requirements, no academic details, bedevil us. What about institutions? How can degrees be more similar in a number of places---not just Europe or the United States but also cash-strapped developing countries? And can open source...

Author and e-book expert Cory Doctorow published an article in Locus Magazine today in which he explores the economic realities of producing dedicated e-book readers. If Nintendo, he muses, cannot even cajole Chinese manufacturers into ramping up production for their incredibly popular Wii game computer, what chance does Amazon have of getting enough Kindles out the door? Frankly, book reading just isn't important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one's making dedicated e-book readers in...

Last Saturday Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech was read by her UK publisher Nicholas Pearson at the award ceremony in Stockholm. Lessing, 88, could not attend the ceremony because of a bad back, according to the BBC. Her acceptance speech wanders from issue to issue without ever really taking a position, which has not hindered some of the main stream media in interpreting her words as "Internet makes people stoopid," which is a lovely self-referential twist. You have to admire an author who can cause such an effect with a mere speech. In the speech, Lessing looks for a...

Along with Boing Boing, Wonkette and other well-known blogs, we've made Blogging Heroes---Michael Banks' book, which Wiley will publish later this year. Mike likes our fight for e-book standards and against Draconian DRM, in addition to our library-related efforts. You can read Mike's TeleBlog chapter---which Wiley sent with permission to reproduce it---in either HTML or PDF. Order the book here. Because of the nature of Blogging Heroes, Mike focused on me. So once again, I'll remind you of the contributions of others, especially Robert Nagle, Branko Collins, Jon Noring and Garson O'Toole, not to mention Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti and newcomers such as Paul...

The Web site of Publishers Weekly, the powerful 135-year-old bible of book publishing, has started running news and views I adapt from the TeleBlog. I'll also write some PW-first items, online and offline, and will welcome suggestions from the e-book community. PW's home page will spotlight my E-Book Report blog at least 2-3 times a week, and I hope that TeleBlog regulars will drop by to enrich my posts with their own insights. Commenters don't have to work in publishing or agree with me. The only musts are civility and fairness. P-E bridges Also known as the TeleRead Web Log, we draw tens of...

Note that we have created a Submission Guideline for TeleRead. For future use, the link is in the upper right of the blog's home page....

Eee User: Asus Eee PC 701 and 1001 will track news about the $200 Asus Eee PC 701 and the more expensive PC 1001. Domain reg info is concealed. Hey, I love the idea of the blog, but just who's behind it? Come out, come out, whoever you are. Any Asus or Intel ties? Useful info if true: "The Eee PC 701 (7″ screen) will be on sale this Fall, the Eee PC 1001 (10″ screen) next year." Hmm. Wasn't August the originally announced month for the 701? Regardless, one month is no big deal. Reminder: For e-book-reading, I really prefer the...

Software and content prez Walter Bender, chief tech officer and display maven Mary Lou Jepsen and others on the OLPC team talk about the (eventual) $100 laptop and their roles in its development. Length of this YiouTube video is around six minutes. Don't forget to watch the second part. Also see the latest OLPC newsletter, discussing, among other things, the new B3 machines, which "are close to final, feature the Geode LX processor, improved keyboard and touch pad, many electrical and mechanical enhancements, and a brightly colored XO logo on the back." Speaking of interesting hardware for reading e-books, check...

You know how people love the smell of paper books, or the feel of them, or the way they rusttle in the fire? These things cannot be digitized. Worse yet, evil digitization projects such as the one I am part of (Project Gutenberg) sometimes do not even digitize all that can be digitized. Inscriptions, for instance, are among the items that often fail to survive the cold and callous world of Plain Vanilla Text. No more! For now there is The Book Inscriptions Project. Found an inscription that must be shared with the world? Scan it, and send it accompanied...

The New York Times reports that elementary school librarians are planning to ban a prize-winning children's book for naming a genital on the first page. The Higher Power of Lucky, written by Susan Patron, describes how the "heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum." David Goldenberg has come up with a list (using Amazon's Search Inside feature?) to figure out which other books librarians must burn before they can claim to have cleansed their libraries. It...