From Inside Higher Ed: Librarians might frown on P.D.A. in the library -- that is to say, Public Displays of Affection by canoodling college couples. But another kind of P.D.A. might bring a different, more welcome sort of disruption to the library; a disruption that, once libraries pass the e-book tipping point, could save some universities thousands in annual purchasing costs. That would be Patron-Driven Acquisition, a model of e-book licensing that aims to relieve library purchasing agents from spending thousands on books nobody will end up reading. A new report on the future of academic libraries identifies such demand-based services as an...

Our sister blog Gadgetell points out that it’s been just over a year since we first saw Steve Jobs come on stage with his clipboard-sized wonder tablet the iPad and show us for the first time just what it was capable of and how much it cost. Since then, the device has proceeded to redefine what we thought of as a tablet—certainly there had been tablets before, but none of them exactly set the world on fire. The iPad, on the other hand, did set the world on fire, opening up new possibilities for reading not only e-books, but...

E-books aren’t the only book-related revolution ushered in by the Internet. On Slate, Michael Savitz writes about his profession as a PDA-assisted used book reseller on Amazon Marketplace—and an interesting profession it is, too. Savitz spends as much as 80 hours a week haunting used bookstores, library sales, and other sources of second-hand books. He takes along an old Dell PDA with a bar code scanner (like the one pictured plugged into an iPAQ at left) plugged into it, with software that immediately tells him the going rate on the Amazon marketplace for any title he scans. He...

Fifteen years ago, the device that singlehandedly created the PDA market, and also probably did the most to start the e-book ball rolling, was the humble Palm Pilot. It was truly a marvel for its time—which is why it is so sad to see Palm floundering today, an also-ran in the smartphone market behind Apple and Android-powered devices. Palm’s stock prices hit a 52-week low on Friday after a lackluster earnings announcement, and analysts have downgraded their opinion of the stock to “sell”—with two analysts even lowering their price target to $0 (meaning that they think Palm’s stock prices will...

FedEx has informed me that my Sony PRS-700 Reader will arrive tomorrow before 10:30 a.m. I get to keep it for two weeks, officially starting Thursday but I’m not complaining about having an extra day to get the jump on things. I thought that, in the interest of chronicling my experiences, I would sit down and write down the preconceptions I come to this trial period with, so that I can look back in two weeks and see how much they have been changed by spending time with the thing. So, here are my uninformed impressions. Sony has offered me a generous...

George Santayana said “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Certainly e-book history has been repeating—the iPhone/iPod Touch and the Kindle are standing in for the Palm PDA and the RocketBook as a new generation discovers e-books just as the early adopters did ten years ago (only a bit more successfully this time). But the history that people have been forgetting (or perhaps not knowing to begin with) is that there was a thriving electronic fiction community years before even the earliest commercial e-books were around to be adopted. Over the last four columns, I have...

Ars Technica today has a great (and long—it goes on for seven pages) feature editorial about the past and future of e-books by Ars columnist John Siracusa. Siracusa, who took a job at the company that would eventually become eReader back when it was still called Palm Digital Media, has some fascinating insights and opinions about how e-books got started, what they are now, and what they might become. Siracusa holds several opinions about e-books that may seem controversial. For example, he feels that people still don't "get" e-books even now—which is why e-books have been so slow to catch...