For this third month of my DRM-free year, the big event was Read an E-Book Week. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed with the offerings. Most authors seemed to simply re-list whatever they had last year—some of these books didn't interest me then or now, and others I had already explored. A few others had impressed me in previous years and then had nothing new on offer. I have downloaded fewer and fewer books in each successive Read an E-Book Week year... Thank goodness for the message boards! A MobileRead poster alerted me to a publishing company called Bev...

Late last year, OverDrive began rolling out a new look to their site. My own library in Fairfax County had a "New Look Coming" banner up for several weeks. When I tried it out for the first time, my reaction was, "Not great, but I can live with it." I wasn't crazy about the new thumbnail view of the catalog. Maybe it's just me, but I find it easiest to process information in lists, not in blocks of images. I also missed the feature that told me exactly where I was in the hold line. The old site would tell me,...

The eBook Reader blog reports on a discovery in a MobileRead forum thread of a variable in some Amazon source code pointing to something called “Prime eBooks”. There is a variable in the code named PRIME_EBOOKS_COMPATIBLE, and a “prime_active_delete” command that asks readers if they’re sure they want to delete and return a library loan. Of course, we already knew Amazon was trying to sweet-talk publishers into letting it implement such a program, separate and distinct from the Overdrive Kindle library loan program it’s just launched, and it was said that Amazon would bundle it into its Amazon...

A MobileRead forumgoer reports that the latest Project Gutenberg newsletter contains an announcement of a new Project Gutenberg mobile website, m.gutenberg.org. The site is to be optimized not just for iPhones, but for any mobile phone including browsing-enabled dumbphones. Writes Gutenberg: There are 4.5 billion such devices in the world, versus only 1.15 billion computers, and more and more readers, in spite of what the pundits say, are surfing, reading, and everything else on such mobile devices. We’ve previously covered a couple of stories—earlier this year, and last year—on the possibility of using...

MediaBistro’s eBookNewser and GalleyCat have been putting together a directory of good Twitter accounts to follow for e-book news. Gratifyingly, our very own Paul Biba tops their list. Thanks for the mention, MediaBistro! Engadget reports that Amazon and ASUS are teaming up to pre-install the Kindle Reader software on some of the netbooks and laptops ASUS sells through Amazon. Engadget speculates that the pre-installation might extend to ASUS’s forthcoming Eee Pad tablet, but expects to hear more about that at an upcoming industry event. Also found on Engadget, Amazon’s Kindle 2.5 software is now rolling...

Nate the Great posts over on the Mobileread forum that the EPUB Maintenance Working Group is in the process of minor revisions of EPUB from v2.0 to v2.0.1, while identifying problems to tackle in the next major revision. Two weeks have been set aside for public comment, of which three days have passed so far. Nate has started a Mobileread forum topic for each of 13 different types of problems faced by the EPUB format, and hopes that Mobileread forumgoers might have some helpful ideas to discuss. The topics include: rich...