The Digital Book World website has been down since at least 9:00 am EST this morning, for reasons unknown even to its editorial staff, from what we understand. But DBW's IT team has been hard at work on the problem—whatever it was—for the majority of the day, and the site now seems to be back up and working fine. Nice to have you back, DBW....

The Media Briefing has an interesting article looking at some recently-released statistics about Internet use in the UK. Only 77% of British households have Internet access, and half of those who don’t have it don’t feel they need it. And only a little more than half of those who do have it say they regularly read news on it. To put this in context, 57 percent of internet users and 91 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds used social networking sites in the same period. The people who are soon going to be your ad manager’s target audience already...

From the Los Angeles Times: Does Vogue magazine have a digital archive in the works -- one would stretch all the way back to its original 1892 issue? Rumors say that's exactly what the long-lived fashion magazine is up to. The blog Fashionista reads the tea leaves: Vogue editor Anna Wintour attending the Webbys in June, accepting her magazine's "People's Voice" award by saying, "Sometimes, geeks can be chic." (Webby Award winners must give five-word speeches). Vogue publisher Susan Plagemann telling AdWeek that the magazine will be rolling out a new Web property in December. She declined to specify what that might be. A "reliable...

From the Bodleian Library at Oxford University: A fifteen-month research project of the earliest surviving geographically recognizable map of Great Britain, known as the Gough Map, provides some revealing insights into one of the most enigmatic cartographic pieces from the Bodleian collections. The findings are recorded on a newly-launched website www.goughmap.org. The fifteen-month AHRC-funded [Arts and Humanities Research Council] project used an innovative approach that explores the map's 'linguistic geographies', that is the writing used on the map by the scribes who created it, with the aim of offering a re-interpretation of the Gough Map's origins, provenance, purpose and creation of which...

Authors have experimented with Twitter fiction before, and even fictional characters from a musical have taken to Twitter to do a little world building (and marketing). But Reif Larsen's enigmatic matryoshka doll piece is the first I've seen in a while to make such effective use of the format. Here are some examples from the blog A New Kind of Book: here’s what Reif wrote on July 19th: Package from Serbia just arrived. I did not request such a package. I wonder the % of unrequested packages that end up being life-changing. That’s odd, I thought. A little quirky, a...

You'll need to register but that's all you need to do. Once complete, you'll have access to the entire list of Cambridge Journals via the Cambridge Journals Online platform. Here's a List of Titles (More than 270) Free access is available through August 30, 2011. More info along with a link to register can be found here. Read on the go via Cambridge Journals Online Mobile Note: If you're a pop music fan many interesting articles in Popular Music. Via INFOdocket...

Through an arrangement with Orion Publishing Group imprint Victor Gollancz, the third edition of the massive Encyclopedia—first published in 1979—will launch later this year in online digital format only. About 75% of the projected final content will be available at launch, with the remainder to be added through 2012, for an estimated total of 3 million words. Although the book will be freely accessible and evolving through monthly updates, it won't be crowdsourced or editable. As to why Gollancz is footing the bill for this, an Orion executive told FutureBook that the publisher has some sort of "not entirely altruistic"...

Elsevier's new Heritage Collection consists of high resolution photographs of the bindings of "more than 1100 distinct titles printed or published by the early modern Elzevier firm, approximately 400 non-Elzevier early modern antiquarian titles, and over 2000 items in total." Via The Digital Reader....

Ever since Rupert Murdoch's The Times erected a paywall a year ago, observers have been curious about whether it could bring in enough paying readers with such a strict no-free-content policy. This week, AdNews reported that the newspaper "now has 101,036 people signed up to its digital platforms including website, iPad and kindle wireless reading device"—a 28% increase from February's tally of 79,000. This time last year, there were reports that nobody was going past the registration page (not even print subscribers with free access), with one person guesstimating that less than 30,000 readers had subscribed to the website or the...

"Why can't I subscribe to an author?" asks O'Reilly's Joe Wikert in a post on his personal Kindleville blog last week. He points out that while you can gather all the RSS feeds, Google alerts, and hashtag searches you like, it's not the most efficient way to follow a specific writer's work. Here at Teleread we've highlighted a couple of websites that offer a related service. Book Buzzes watches Amazon and alerts you when an author has a new book coming out, while BookWatch is an iOS app that performs a similar service for iBooks. But those are linked to...

The Bookseller reports that Amazon has reached an agreement to buy the online retailer The Book Depository, which was founded in 2004 and sells to customers in more than 100 countries, with estimated annual sales this year of £120m. Philip Jones at FutureBook has a good overview of the news and what it might mean both to customers and competitors. The Book Depository has for a long time been something of an unsung hero in the UK bookselling market... It has achieved it by focusing very clearly on one message--books delivered free "worldwide"--and steadily expanding those parts of the world where...

From Brain Pickings, here's a list of seven notable publishers and services, including the heavily hyped Byliner and the Kickstarter-like Unbound. Kirstin Butler writes, "Disrupting the mainstream marketplaces for journalism, literature, and the fundamental conventions of reading and writing themselves, [these startups] promise to reshape the way we create and consume ideas." "7 Platforms Changing the Future of Publishing" [Brain Pickings]...