Can anyone please tell me why I need the endlessly hyped Second Life when I have Pat Conroy? This past afternoon I revisited the household of the Great Santini and peered through the windows at the sailboats bobbing in the river outside. I was there in a way that no VR simulation could take me, regardless of the enthusiasm of the SL cultists. I can see some wonderful uses for Second Life---I'll keep my mind open---but as a reader fond of traditional fiction, I find myself more and more appalled at SL as just another high-tech time sink. Tonight I had...

The TeleBlog's daily readership often surpasses that of LibraryJournal.com and normally exceeds the audience of The Book Industry Standard if you go by Alexa.com. Would you believe, the TeleBlog even beats Publishers Weekly on rare occasions. Check out the numbers yourself. We may well be the most popular Web blog dedicated to e-book industry news and views, as opposed to, say, mobile news in general. Whether the topic is DRM or Iraq, we'll generally cover it from an e-book angle, and this focus has helped put us on the map. At various times we've drawn links from major sites ranging from...

People care about the fate of a good community site. Do fully engaged users form site-related factions? Tribes, so to speak. In fact, that can be healthy. Even a less-than-huge site like the TeleBlog, without any pretense of formal governance---I consult as necessary with some regular contributors such as Branko, who may or may not agree with me---can have tribes. There's the Anything Goes Tribe vs. the Ban the Rude Commenters Tribe. I'm probably closer to the Anything Goes Tribe. Of more than 600 or 700 nonspamming commenters, I have yet to ban anyone, although, in the case of one determined...

Some of the wisest TeleBlog comments are coming from people who've never posted before---yet are fiendishly smart on arcane topics. While spammers are a hassle, openness can be a godsend. It takes time to master, say, the intricacies of e-paper technology. And so the out-of-nowhere folks can more clueful on certain e-book issues than the regulars, including, yes, me. Out of the cybermist Branko Collin (photo), author of more than his share of iLiad scoops and insights here, appeared out of the cybermist---or, to be exact, out of the Netherlands, not that far from iRex Technologies, where he could meet with the...

Branko and I don't always see eye to eye on DRM---I'm more flexible---but his post below is most timely. You see, my Palm TX can no longer use the Documents to Go program to display new e-book files loaded on it from Wowio's ad-supported e-book service. DRM just might be the culprit. I get a message asking for a nonexistent password; and Wowio says the most likely suspect is a library-related DRM system, which may have left its droppings on my computer. Wowio and I are both investigating this before reaching a final conclusion---I've also contacted the company behind Documents to...

Housekeeping note: I'm back ahead of time since Jon had some rush projects. Oh, he'll pay! I'll inflict more of the LibrayCity biz-plan update on him. Seriously, we really need other good TeleBlog contributors---beyond existing gems like Branko---to help spread the work around. Done on a $0 budget and without reimbursment for hosting costs, this blog is a major source of e-book news for people both inside and outside the industry. Anything you write here you can also include in your own blog. E-mail us....

Photo by Fir0002, distributed using a GFDL license.Eons ago I promised Carly I'd buy a scanner and file away my old newspaper clippings. Reality beat good intentions. Luckily we aren't neatniks, and just as importantly, the Web blossomed with all goods of digital goodies that I could stash away. Mind you, I could have been more orderly about it. Information organizers such as IZE had already appeared---heck, I perped a p-book about it---but they were too much of a hassle for me to use over the long term. Idea: An auto-IZE for Gmail And these days? When I see an interesting...

Here, via Fair Use Day. Also see Ars Technia and Recording Industry vs. People. Publishers, this is one reason why so many people hate the present copyright and DRM messes (not the same but linked by the DMCA). See Branko's commentary on DRM with mention of copyright as well. Hey, I myself am pro-copyright, but the RIAA doesn't exactly help the cause....

In an era when millions of Americans like their DVDs and pizzas to be delivered, many U.S. students feel the same about their courses. Distance education can be a godsend for people with both jobs and child-care responsibilties. Most colleges and universities here in the States already offer distance education in one form or another. The most-offer-it fact comes from the Aug.-Sept. issue of Innovate, one of the more important of the distance-education journals (free registration). E-book angle, including interactivity So how can e-books fit in? E-Books: Why They Matter for Distance Education---and How They Could Get Much Better is the lead...

OpenID seems to be slowly gathering steam; now Verisign has started an OpenID server called Personal Identity Provider. OpenID is about identity. Specifically, it is about proving you are not a spammer. Blogs, forums, nukes, wikis and other such web applications tend to ask you to register. There are two main reasons for them to do so: to avoid spam, and to help build a community. If, like Teleread, you leave your blog "open," you get to deal with a lot of spammers. There are ways to dam this tide, but it takes work that a lot of site owners are...

To get some stuff out of the way, I'm not particularly impressed with the writing or storyline here. I think it's too obvious early on that [several spoilers deleted--BC], and most of the actual plot elements feel more like setpieces than real places or NPCs -- you got your generic dragon cave (bone flooring optional), your generic village, your generic forest, your generic ruined castle. So given all that, why did the game work so well for me? The first time the game astonished me was when when I typed >KILL WOLF on the young wolf after I killed its mother,...

Kevin Kelly's New York Times Magazine article on the world-wide efforts to create a digital library, Scan This Book! (non-free registration required), discussed earlier by David here and here, seems to work as a catalyst for many original thoughts. (Either that, or I don't read nearly enough.) Some choice quotes from a discussion at Slashdot: There are two types of books: cold (paper-based) books and cozy (paper-based) books. Examples of cold books are the books that you use at work. You have no attachment to these books. They are there to provide information. Digital books will wipe out the market for...