Remember the Supreme Court case about the Thai exchange student who bulk imported cheap overseas copies of textbooks and resold them in the U.S. (making over $1 million in sales) to finance his doctorate? The judges handed down a decision today. By a six to three majority, they found that the student’s importation and resale was legal under the Fair Use Doctrine. Just because the books were printed overseas did not exempt them from the right of First Sale, which means that people who buy them can resell them as they please. Ars Technica has more details on the decision. Essentially,...

We've all heard by now about the upcoming death of Google Reader. Our own Chris Meadows, in his write-up, has even thoughtfully offered some alternatives for those who, like me, are suddenly scrambling to fill the void. But to my surprise, reactions around the Web have been decidedly mixed. Many, like me, had that first 'OMG!' reaction, but then on second thought, weren't too sad at all. Some even saw it coming ... For instance, in this write-up at GigaOM, one of Google Reader's own creators says the writing was on the wall from day one: 'When they replaced sharing with +1 on...

There is a risk to relying on cloud services, as I’ve found to my chagrin time and again: they may not always be there when you need them. Etherpad servers have crashed, taking the only copy of my writing with them. Web-based IM service Meebo shut down, leaving me scrambling to find a replacement. And now comes the latest blow: Google plans to close down its Google Reader RSS reader service (along with a number of other, lesser-used services) as of July 1. I used Google Reader exclusively to find stories to reblog when I was writing more actively here—I would...

A few days ago I brought up a patent Amazon got on reselling “used” digital content. It turns out that’s not the only odd patent Amazon’s gotten lately. Dan brought to my attention U.S. patent number 8,370,271, which Amazon just received on “recurring delivery of products.” Essentially, Amazon just received a patent on the ability to ship a new order of a particular good every so often to a customer without being asked. Or, as one pundit put it, Amazon has just “patented the milkman.” Amazon has already been offering this service for some time now. If you order some sort...

  We’ve carried posts before that posited that e-books had not yet reached the watershed moment where they became more than an attempt to reproduce one medium in another. (The way that television was originally “radio with pictures,” for instance.) At the moment, they’re just “printed books on digital screens.” And while that’s fine for the people who just want another way to read printed books, video game developer Simon Meek thinks that they’re still not reaching out to modern audiences. Meek has the idea of doing for the gaming generation what PBS used to do for the television generation: adapting classic...

If you’re looking for a handily pocketable e-reader and wouldn’t feel dirty giving money to Apple, CNet points out that Apple is running a pretty good deal on refurbished 4th-generation (the model from two years ago) iPod Touch units. The 8 GB version is available for $129 shipped (it costs $199 new), the 32 GB version is $179 ($229 new), and the 64 GB version is $229 (not available new). While these aren’t the latest model, with the 16:9 screen, Lightning connector, and better rear-facing camera, they do have Retina-resolution screens, FaceTime cameras, and modern operating systems. I don’t mind saying,...

On The Verge, new e-book reader Laura June comes to the same realization as quite a few of her forebears (including me) over the last few years: in emphasized orange all-capital header-sized letters: “e-books are apparently lousy with typos.” She brings up the example of Umberto Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum, a still-in-print book by a living author translated from Italian at great trouble and expense, which features a number of c-for-e OCR errors: I’ve found other typos in other books too, but statistics on this are hard to come by, and since I’ve only been using an e-reader for a few weeks,...

E-Reader-info has some information about the forthcoming hyper-cheap “Beagle” e-reader from txtr, which is scheduled to sell for €9.90 (or about USD $13.00). This could very well be the cheapest E Ink reader ever seen, though the reason becomes obvious when you realize that it’s technically only about half of an e-reader, and that it will also be subsidized by cell phone carriers the way that cell phones commonly are. The idea behind the device is that it serves as a viewing device for e-books that are actually rendered into images by an associated smartphone, and uploaded over Bluetooth. This lets...

Do publishers deserve special treatment from anti-trust courts? Paid Content reports on antitrust experts who said no at a New York book event this week: “There’s never been a defendant sued for antitrust who didn’t think their market was special,” said Chris Sagers of Cleveland State University, adding that “agency pricing”  (a commission-style pricing system used by the publishers to check Amazon) is just another word for price-fixing. This is basically in line with the arguments the Department of Justice made in its response to public comments, and its arguments in the hearings concerning whether the proposed settlement should go through; Judge Denise...

Publishing Perspectives has a guest post discussing BookShout, a startup that currently works in conjunction with three of the Big Six publishers (it’s in discussions with the other three), plus Wiley, to allow importation of your Amazon and Barnes & Noble e-book purchases into its own e-reader apps. It does this by you giving it your Amazon and Barnes & Noble log-in IDs and passwords. It then logs in on your behalf, and slurps down your e-book purchase records. I first saw this mentioned a couple of weeks ago on FutureBook, where Baldur Bjarnason pointed out what a "phenomenally bad idea"...

The Humble Indie E-Book Bundle’s sale period is over. It raised over $1.2 million on over 84,000 sales, with an average purchase price of $14.28—an altogether impressive amount. Participating author John Scalzi has a couple of post-mortem posts on his blog looking at the reasons for it. Scalzi sees the keys to the Humble E-Book Bundle’s success as being the Humble Bundle brand reputation based on past success, a well-curated bundle featuring titles with mass geek appeal, the absence of DRM, the charity involvement, its overall uniqueness, and the pay-what-you-want and limited-time-offer gimmicks. All these factors combined to make the bundle...

Last week we carried a story about a claim that Random House was going to let libraries “own” its e-books. However, it turns out that “own” may have been an optimistic oversimplification. Peter Brantley, Director of the Bookserver Project at the Internet Archive, writes at Publishers Weekly that he's had some follow-up discussion with Skip Dye, Random House’s VP of Library and Academic Sales, to get clarification on exactly what “own” meant in that context. (Found via TechDirt.) What Random House actually meant was that it would assist libraries in moving e-books from one “authorized library wholesaler” to another. The publisher...