Do as I say, don’t do as I do. In response to the Phoenix editorial about the New York Times committing a copyright violation by posting a PDF of a 36-year-old newspaper article even as Op-Ed columnist Bill Keller blasts the copyright violations of others, Keller suggests that irony should be “[kept] out of the hands of the clueless,” but seems to be clueless that he’s committing a significant irony himself. Keller writes that since the paper the article came from was long defunct without digital archives, he assumes the author of the article felt reposting the article...

When it comes to copyright and piracy, it often seems that some of the most vehement objectors don’t practice what they preach. The Boston Phoenix’s Carly Carioli has posted an editorial to the Phoenix’s blog calling out the New York Times, which published a couple of scorching columns on piracy over the weekend, for at the same time ripping off an article to which the Phoenix holds the copyright. The article in question is a 36-year-old investigative report into football injuries which was scanned and uploaded in PDF form to the New York Times’s website and linked from an...

On the New York Times Bits Blog, Nick Bilton suggests that both Apple and Google are engaged in (separate) projects to turn smartphones into more wearable devices. Apple has already been wearable in some respects—you could clip the iPod Shuffle to your clothing, or attach the iPod Nano to a wrist strap to make it impersonate an oversized watch. Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the...

Could we be getting closer to a free Kindle—but not one provided by Amazon? The rapid price drop of the Kindle led some to speculate that, if prices kept falling at the same rate, it would be free by the end of this year. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen, but the prices sure have fallen, haven’t they? Rumors have long been with us about free Kindles. In 2010, Mike Arrington heard from someone claiming Jeff Bezos was considering giving free Kindles to all Amazon Prime subscribers. More recently, Amazon reps told an AllThingsD reporter...

App store patent troll Lodsys (which has insisted app developers need to license in-app purchase technology from it despite being told by Apple that developers were covered in Apple’s own agreement with Lodsys) has filed more lawsuits against a number of developers and companies, including six companies (most notably, The New York Times Company) that had already filed preemptive declaratory judgment actions against Lodsys. It is seeking to have their declaratory judgment actions dismissed, and to have all cases involving Lodsys relocated to the troll-friendly courts of east Texas. It’s probably going to be a while before anything...

On Monday, Network World reported, an update to the New York Times iPad app caused the app to stop working for its users. This would be annoying in and of itself, but the icing on the cake is that iPad readers have to pay subscription fees starting at $20 per month to access the paper that way. Many subscribers were displeased, to say the least. and it surely did not help matters that this happened on a holiday weekend when most staff would be out of the office. The app was fixed sometime on Tuesday, and presumably subscribers are...

The New York Times has a column on how the late-night bombshell of the Bin Laden takedown affected the Times’s newspaper production process, coming as it did after most newspapers had already sent their staff to bed and their papers to the presses. The story is interesting in itself, but the most relevant part to Telereading involves the need to “stop the presses” in order to replace the front page of the next day’s paper with the news. Out of 26 national paper sites, most had already completed their print run—only 6 were able to print updated copies. 7,000...

As with the Kindle, so with the Nook. Barnes & Noble is going to be bundling free New York Times web access for Nook paper subscribers, just as Amazon is with the Kindle. The cost to subscribe to the paper on the Nook is $20 a month, just as with Amazon. So far, the Times paywall seems to be reasonably porous. And certainly, the idea of offering free access to subscribers via e-reader devices makes sense—especially if the combined benefit is enough to induce fence-sitters to sub on the Nook or Kindle. Either way, the Times gets more money....

I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to the New York Times’s controversial paywall since its announcement a couple of weeks ago. It seems like a fairly complicated proposition, with a number of interesting nuances—different levels of charge for subscriptions on different devices and the like. Those who read via the web (and aren’t already paid NY Times subscribers) get 20 article views per month for free—certainly more articles than I’ve ever read in a month. And as if that weren’t enough, redirects from search, blogs, and social media don’t count against the total. (This led...

The New York Times moves inexorably toward implementing a paywall on its website. An article on Bloomberg cites an anonymous source as saying the price will be less than the $19.99 per month currently charged for a New York Times subscription on the Kindle. Times CEO Janet Robinson has said that the paywall will provide a limited number of articles per month free, with heavy users required to pay a subscription fee. She has not said how many articles would be available free. Certainly a <$20 monthly subscription would be a bargain compared to the cover price...

A few days ago, FutureBook posted about the imminent launch of digital bestseller lists in 2011 by both the New York Times and Nielsen. It seems to be a sign of the increasing maturity of the e-book market that it is finally getting its own bestseller lists. Ironically, thanks to the presence of long-established paper book sales-tracking survey BookScan, it is currently significantly harder to quantify sales of electronic books (which should create a digital record with each single sale) than it is to track paper ones. As e-book sales grow, so the market...

A great deal of press is given to e-books replacing printed books, newspapers, magazines, and even comics. But as a New York Times article points out, e-reading devices have also begun making inroads on some less traditional forms of printed media—such as restaurant menus. A number of fine dining restaurants have begun replacing their traditional menus and wine catalogs with iPads equipped with the information in digital form. Establishments like them because they can incorporate multimedia in ways that old media couldn’t, and can easily be updated without necessitating an entire new printing; customers like them because...