When I saw the article in Google Reader, I had already clicked “mark as read” before going, “…what?” and hastily going back to see if I’d read what I thought I’d read. Ars Technica has a piece on the Overbite Project, an open-source effort to bring the Gopher format to modern computers which already has an alpha release for Android devices. Gopher is the hypertext network protocol that was in use before the development of the World Wide Web. I still remember using it back at college in the early ‘90s to find information on the...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting piece from young-adult publisher Jacob Lewis on why he has decided to create an on-line community called Figment where teens can write and share stories. Lewis was inspired by the way teens have adopted cell phones in Japan for many and more general purposes than they are usually used in America. But there was more to it than just wanting to see how well that would work over here. One aspect of the Japanese model that is particularly compelling is the intimate relationship created between writer and reader. Delivered...

BusinessWeek reports that Amazon is in talks with Japan’s largest publisher, Kodansha Ltd., to publish electronic versions of its books for a Japanese launch of the Kindle Reader. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, the Japanese e-book market has been a tough nut for dedicated e-book reader vendors to crack—even Sony, whose name is synonymous with the Japanese electronics industry, no longer tries to sell its Sony Reader within its native shores. Whereas in America reading on PDAs and cell phones was largely an early adopters’ sideline while it took a really good book-sized reader...

If you thought that the iPad kicked over an anthill of American publishers with its introduction, its effect on Japan may take things to an entirely different level. BusinessWeek has an article about the possible impact of the iPad on the Japanese publishing industry. Unlike in America, Japanese publishers wield total control over the pricing of their books in bookstores, setting pricing and preventing discounting—like agency pricing for e-books, but extending to print as well. In Japan, the keitai denwa, or cell phone, has historically been the reading device of choice. Japanese phones have considerably more...