CNET has a 3-minute video that bills itself as a “Buyer’s Guide” for tablets and e-readers, though it primarily focuses on tablets, and mostly the more expensive tablets—the iPad, the Galaxy S, and Sony’s Android tablet (which I hadn’t heard of before). It paints this trio of $499 tablets as the main attraction for buyers this holiday season, then spends a little time discussing the Amazon Kindle and Kindle Fire as alternatives. In the video, CNET’s Donald Bell refers to the Kindle Fire as a “good enough product”—essentially a device that will work well as an e-reader and...

This in-depth Wired feature article by Clive Thompson is a few months old, but I ran across it in an old print issue of Wired Magazine today at work and was completely fascinated. It does not have anything to do with e-books directly, perhaps, but is a great example of how new electronic media can be used for educational purposes. Salman Khan, a three-time MIT graduate with a Harvard MBA, was inspired while tutoring cousins in 2004 to begin creating educational YouTube videos along with self-testing software to help students learn from them. Before he knew it, thousands...

Anyone familiar with the latest crop of EInk readers knows that there's no good way to display animation or video in a satisfactory way. BBC developer Mark Longstaff-Tyrrell's "iPlayer for Kindle" (named after the BBC's streaming video player) doesn't solve that problem, but it humorously sidesteps it by converting video into a series of captioned screenshots--creating a sort of instant storyboard using the video's own closed captioning data. The resulting file can be loaded onto an ereader and read like a comic. Via GigaOm...

While this is not specifically about e-books, it is about an experience in transitioning from physical to digital media, and it should provide a lesson to all fields that are taking these steps—including books to e-books. A number of movies, especially titles from Paramount or Disney (such as Pixar’s Wall•E), have been coming with an “extra third disc” lately, containing a DRM-girt digital copy which can be transferred either to iTunes or Windows Media Player. This saves the buyer the trouble of ripping the thing, and lets the studio charge a little extra and feel they can keep some...

It’s no surprise that libraries are coming under increasing budget pressures, both in the US and the UK. If e-book publishers can ever get their act together so that libraries can make them available to more readers, the zero-marginal-cost nature of e-books plus the savings in physical space might be helpful in reducing some of those pressures. But in the meantime, one Virginia library system has produced a hilarious short film and music video to make it clear that, even in the midst of disheartening budgetary pressures, libraries will survive. ...

On his GigaOm blog, Om Malik takes on the old media vs. new media dichotomy that has been showing up in so many places over the last few years. The main example he cites is the recent case of television broadcasters blocking Google TV from accessing their content (in much the same way Hulu’s TV network sources forced it to block Boxee last year), but he also mentions the music industry’s problems and the “death of newspapers”. When I look at these industries and the failure — or impending failure — of these institutions,...

A couple of further notes about Apple’s event, due to start in just over an hour. Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac has an exclusive tip from an insider who explains that the streaming process is going to serve as a stress test for Apple’s new server farm, which will later be used to stream a version of iTunes for iOS devices. Kahney notes: Some have speculated that Apple is streaming the show to thwart livebloggers, who may have sabotaged Jobs’ iPhone 4 keynote at Apple’s WWDC event in June. Problems with the venue’s...

A number of news sites, such as Engadget, are reporting that Apple has released paired updates of iTunes 9.2.1 and iBooks 1.1.1. The iTunes update is largely a bugfix issue, according to its patch notes, but Crunchgear calls the iBooks release a “major update,” adding dictionary lookup of words and improvements to in-line images and PDF viewing. It also includes support for audio and video content in e-books. Given that a lack of dictionary lookup prompted some grumbling when iBooks first came out, the addition should please some of the app’s critics. Of course, the problem...

At about 3 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, the 16-gigabyte iPad I will be reviewing for TeleRead arrived. I unboxed it, and videotaped the unboxing below. One thing I should note is that, despite what I said in the video, it turned out afterward that the iPad did indeed have a full charge when I pulled it out of the box, so I was able to get started using it right away. I will give my full thoughts on that in another post. For now, here is the video. (At time of posting, the video was still being processed. Wait...

What’s in a name? A lot, really. Take the issue of “piracy”—most commonly used in Internet circles to refer to unauthorized distribution of other peoples’ intellectual property. Its use in that sense actually pre-dates the Internet by a considerable length of time (see video at bottom). For a long time, a debate on whether this is an appropriate use of the term has raged. Representing those who do not think the term is properly used, the Free Software Foundation has this to say: Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as...

While it is true that C-Span is not a “book”, it is a living repository of history. Over 160,000 hours of video footage of our government at work, spanning 23 years of network history. And C-Span has now made all of that footage available for free, at C-SpanVideo.org. This is every bit as valuable a resource as the Internet Archive—and searchable, too. Including on e-book related matters. For instance, searching on “Digital Rights Management” brought up a number of results, including this clip of Soft Skull Books founder and Cursor developer Richard Nash (who we covered...

Starting today, the New York Times is going to stream content from its website to 850 video screens in airport newsstands, coffee shops, and other public places in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston. 850 more screens, including some in other locations, will be added over coming months. The basic presentation will show an article on the left side of the screen and pictures and video on the right, on a 14-minute cycle, with ads, and some of the content, tailored to the location. Viewers can use cellphones to download either the...