On her LiveJournal, writer Seanan McGuire makes an important point about the nature of the digital divide and how it affects paper versus e-books. People below the poverty line—which at least 15.1% of Americans are, and probably more than that since it goes by an old standard of poverty—can’t afford e-book readers, or e-books to go on them. They can afford paper books, because books are cheap. The problem is that printed books are starting to go away due to the encroachment of e-books. Writes McGuire: [E]very time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably,...

My friend Eric Burns has recently started blogging again on Websnark, his blog that largely covers webcomics and comic books. In a post today, Burns looks at DC’s plans for same-day digital availability of every issue of every book starting with its “reboot” later this year, the “New 52”. While at first glance it looks like great news for those who prefer their media digital—especially since print comics are no longer as widely available as they used to be—Burns finds it runs up right against one of the same problems that has dogged print versus e-books: the matter of price....

You can find small-press books and e-books in some of the strangest places. Yesterday, I took a ride with my parents and some of their friends on the Arkansas Missouri Railroad, a small rail operation that operates cargo and passenger excursion runs between Springdale and Van Buren, Arkansas. Twice a year, it makes a special run out of Seligman, Missouri, traveling four hours and about a hundred miles down to Van Buren, Arkansas and the same length back, allowing passengers to spend three hours at a Van Buren arts and crafts street fair in between. I found a couple of used book...

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...

Aaron Miller has a brief post on the FrontMatters blog about Google’s book digitizing service. You can send in whole boxes of books and get them digitized, OCR'ed, and converted to “a multitude of digital formats.” The only problem, Miller notes, is that the service isn’t available to consumers, but is for publishers only. And it’s not likely that Google will offer it to us, ever. The likely outcome will be that eventually every mouldering tome in our decrepit paper collections will already have been scanned and available — and we’ll have to pay for...

Video and computer games share a bit of an odd similarity to books and e-books. Like books, they can be an example of intellectual property encapsulated in an object, which can be bought and sold new or used—but like e-books, they can also be delivered purely digitally, and equipped with restrictive DRM. And as with both, there’s some controversy surrounding the idea of used sales. While many print book publishers look at the sale of used books and gnash their teeth, they are largely powerless to do anything about them. The First Sale Doctrine states that...

Nick Harkaway has posted on the Bookseller’s “FuturEBooks” blog wondering about the possibility of selling “second-hand e-books”. He points out (as I did in this TeleRead post on the idea) that, since there is no physical artifact to depreciate, an e-book couldn’t really be considered “used”, so either people would pass on the e-book for exactly the same price as they paid for it or else they’d drive down the value of the book by selling it at a discount. Harkaway then proposes the ideas of “returning” an e-book to the seller in return for store credit...

In his “Loose Wire” column, Jeremy Wagstaff paints a very picturesque image of why (he feels) the printed book is nearing the end of its life. He cites Google’s announcement of its partnership with the American Booksellers Association to sell e-books via independent bookstore websites on the one hand, and Penguin’s 75th anniversary (which also represents the 75th anniversary of the true mass-market paperback) on the other, in building his case. Penguin, Wagstaff points out, was founded in 1935 by Allen Lane, who was frustrated that he couldn’t find any good cheap books to read on the train,...

Update: Welcome, Ebooknewser readers! A couple of days ago I mentioned the IEEE working group that is working on a standard to use DRM to treat digital property more like “real” property. It turns out they aren’t the only ones working on that sort of solution. A few days ago, Mediabistro’s “Ebooknewser” blog reported on a company called Lexink, which was gearing up to let customers resell “used” digital property like MP3s, videos, or e-books. (This is not the first time a startup has tried to do this. In 2008, a startup called “Bopaboo” wanted to work with record labels to allow...