“Oliver” at the Krafty Librarian has coverage of a discussion from a recent webinar concerning how libraries and librarians are relating to e-books. Though he mainly comes at the issue from a medical and academic librarian’s perspective, the points he mentions are largely universal to all types of libraries. A large part of it was factors relating to the “Tower of E-Babel” problem we’ve mentioned plenty of times before. DRM with arbitrary restrictions on what can be done with particular books, differing platforms with different access requirements. How books can be found via catalogs and search engines was...

Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Co. has written a fairly long article about how the book market is evolving in ways that were hard to foresee a year ago. After all, last year people were worrying that Amazon might somehow “take over” the e-book market. Those fears seem a little silly in retrospect now that we’ve got the Nook, the Kobo, and, of course, the iPad. Shatzkin points out that there is still a lot left to do, however. He includes a litany of points explaining why DRM’s promulgation of the Tower of e-Babel (though he does...

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...