Galleycat reports that a group of 39 Japanese manga publishers has launched a portal site called JManga, offering digital English translations of manga readable in a Flash-based on-line reader. The manga is for sale via point-based subscription, but also offers free one-issue previews. It has a number of popular titles now, such as Naruto and One Piece, and plans to have 10,000 titles available by 2013. It used to be that Japanese content producers didn’t care what happened to their work outside of Japan. (Case in point: in the early 1980s, Japanese studio Tatsunoko licensed the external-to-Japan rights...

One of the biggest events in computer gaming last month was the long anticipated launch of Valve’s puzzle game Portal 2. After several months of promotion, including an alternate reality game, Valve's Portal sequel was exactly what's a lot of gamers had been waiting for. And after they finished beating the game—which, like its predecessor, did not take very long—some of them might have been curious exactly how the game came about. Enter game journalist Geoff Keighley. Keighley had written a series of articles called "Final Hours” about the production of various other computer games in the ‘90s and...

Even though this is an e-book blog, from time to time I poke my nose over into the world of computer gaming to point out some parallels. You could say that Internet game distribution is a sort of first cousin of the e-book, as they share a lot of commonalities. They’re both about telling stories—in books, you read the stories, but in games you experience them. More importantly, both started out as strictly physical means of media distribution—dead trees for books, dead dinosaur discs for games—but have moved into the digital forum where they’re more vulnerable to bit-copying...

A reader named Will posted a link in the Screens page to a handful of DX-friendly screensavers hosted over at Picasa. If you’ve read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, played Portal, or watched Futurama, you will likely be interested. If not, carry on. Kindle Screensavers by William [Picasa Web Albums] Via Chris Walters' Kindlerama...

Today Valve Software officially announced that its Steam digital game distribution platform will be coming to the Macintosh in April. But they are not stopping there. Macintosh owners who have already purchased the PC version of compatible Valve games (those built on the Source engine, such as Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead) will get the Macintosh version free. (And this will continue into the future, too: buying a new game will get you both versions from now on.) Imagine if buying the Kindle version of an e-book bought you the eReader version, too for one price—and...

All right, I will admit it: this is not about e-books. Well, not directly at least. But it does hold some interesting implications. I’ll get to the e-book connection at the end. A Game-Changing Event Yesterday, Valve updated the popular Portal first-person puzzle game with a rather cryptic patch that simply said “Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations.” I simply thought this referred to the clock radio object in the game that is playing a cheerful tune when your character first wakes up. I remembered it having an unrealistic...