Monday links: Cellphones as e-book readers, e-book prices, the audiobook scene and TelePosts from the holidays
Cellphones are growing more powerful with computerlike features, and that can only be good news for e-books, which have suffered from the slowdown in PDA growth. See a New York Times piece.
Let’s just hope that the prices of e-book-friendly phones—with relatively big screens and powerful CPUs and decent RAM—will be dropping. A $500 or $1,500 phone-computer hybrid is no substitute for a $200 PDA, especially for someone who doesn’t use a cellphone or wants to avoid a bundled plan.
Publishers could help by lowering their prices, a belief we’ve often expressed in the TeleBlog. John Guthrie, who has done e-book-related graduate work, will writing for us on this and other topics. Welcome, John.
Of course, you just might want to use your phone or other gizmo, to hear a book, not read it, even though my own favorite medium is text.
I’ll have more later. Meanwhile here are some links for people who missed important TeleBlog stories over the holidays or the period immediately after:
–OpenReader as an eBabel-fighter: Three ‘musts’ if the standard is to survive Jon Noring’s new ties with DigitalPulp. Also see OpenReader eBabel issue: Standards-harmful promo from DigitalPulp store—owned by OR leader Jon Noring’s new partner and Jon’s reply, plus Adobe e-booker Bill McCoy’s take.
–HarperCollins exec on e-books and what her mama told her.
–Door-to-door Clancy—or Kafka?
–The PDF security controversy. I’d love for Bill McCoy to write about this from an insider’s perspective at Adobe.
–Welcome to 1922! Welcome to 1922 and The Copyright Ghosts of 1923, Robert Nagle’s examples of the damage from the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. I actually think the act will harm copyright owners in the end. Future voters who do care about these issues are growing up, and eventually some will be sharpening their guillotine blades to slice off the heads of copyright zealots on the Hill.
–E-books and The Great Weed in Fairfax County, VA: ‘Hello, Grisham—So Long, Hemingway?’
–‘Kids enjoy a digital page-turner’—via OLPC’s $100 laptop and a kid’s library.
–Whew! U.S. ayatollahs fail to block valuable tools for K-12—social sites and chat rooms.
–Preserving your e-books: Free backup service could help.
–Mac owners vs. the Sony Reader’s eBabel: The horrors and some partial fixes.
–Creative Commons compatibility chart.
–New interactive e-book site—with pub domain books for Sony Reader and the iLiad.
–Sex test for prose: Austen vs. Dickens.
–A Holiday Wish: One Laptop Per Nepali Child.
–‘It’s a Wondeful Life’ is not in the public domain.
–The Parrot One book copying system.
–Baen Bar to sell e-book hardware next year? With E Ink or another advanced display?
–Open Content Alliance, Internet Archive to compete with Google Books.
–Of Long Tail towns and Long Tail books.
OK, maybe I’ve gone beyond just “highlights.” Just scan down the list and see what intrigues you.
Happy post-holidays!
Related: jkOnTheRun’s observations on CES 2007.
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