Don't say we didn't warn you. For years many publishers have correctedly believed that pirated e-books aren't attractive to most readers. And right now they still aren't. But that will rapidly change as young people grow more accustomed to reading off the screen and the technolgy improves. From a New York Times story--headlined In the Virtual Stacks, Pirated Books Find Eager Thumbs:

The activity is all the more striking because making a book available online is as cumbersome as ripping a CD is effortless. Each page must be scanned, run through optical character-recognition software and proofread before the complete work is uploaded to a network or transferred directly to a recipient.

Yet a quick survey conducted with peer-to-peer file-sharing software revealed the digital availability of dozens of titles currently on the New York Times best-seller list, including "The Da Vinci Code," "The South Beach Diet" and, of course, hundreds of copies of any Harry Potter title. Even the official audio-book versions read by the authors or celebrities are easy to come by. Computer and technical books that can cost as much as $100 in print are also a mainstay.

Other recesses of the Internet are also rich in illegally traded literature. A visit to a group called "#Bookz" on the Internet Relay Chat network revealed a multitude of titles being offered or sought every second.

News groups like alt.books also draw a steady flow of visitors, like Steven Audette of Verona, a town in central New York known for its casino rather than its literary establishments. Mr. Audette said he had downloaded about 2,000 titles, including some duplicates in varying formats.

"I download philosophy, religious, technical, engineering, science, sci-fi, horror, musical theory and almost anything but tawdry romance novels," said Mr. Audette, a 39-year-old father of two with a background in management and logistics.

Mr. Audette said he had never felt pangs of conscience when downloading books although he sometimes buys a copy if he finds a book to be of great interest. "Perhaps the cost factor has numbed the sense of guilt," he said. "I bought my first books when they were priced for 95 cents a paperback and less than $10 for a hardcover."

Again and again we've told how the traditional PDA without a cell phone is dead for now. Newsweek even has a cell phone story on the cover, and Jenny Levine beat me to the punch with some cogent, well-linked comment. Newsweek's own take is, "There are 1.5 billion mobile phones in the world today. Already you can use them to browse the Web, take pictures, send e-mail and play games. Soon they could make your PC obsolete." When will the e-book industry be more phone-oriented?

Fits a pattern. E-bookers were late to catch on to PDAs as replacements for dedicated devices, and they may well be the same toward phone-PDA hybrids.

The bookPOD

And on the horizon? Maybe bookPODs with mixes of music and e-book capabilities, and maybe video, too--and perhaps even phone functions? That's my vision, and I hope it becomes reality. It needn't happen to the exclusion of other approaches such as the tablet one. What is clear, however, is that the tired old PDA approach--with limited storage space, with no phone and with music not that important in the grand scheme of things--isn't going anywhere right now.

Even the desktop PC, as noted above, could be in danger as phone-related devices increasingly take on many of the same functions. From Newsweek:

Defenders of the PC react with religious outrage to this kind of prophecy. Laptops allow another kind of mobile computing, they point out, particularly with the emergence of thousands of Wi-Fi networks around the world over the past four years. By the end of this year half of all laptops shipped will be Wi-Fi-equipped, allowing laptop owners to set up temporary offices in the local cafe or public park. Then there's the matter of simple practicality: mobile phones are small and getting smaller. Humans are not. "Hundreds of millions of people are not going to replace the full screen, mouse and keyboard experience with staring at a little screen," says Sean Maloney, an executive VP at chipmaker Intel, which is investing heavily in both Wi-Fi and mobile-phone technology.

Yet mobile-phone innovators are working to solve that tricky problem, too. Scientists are continuing decades of research into speech-recognition systems and have recently introduced the technology into PDAs. Users can control these gadgets with simple voice commands. Phones don't have enough processing power for speech recognition yet, but Moore's Law—the inevitability of annual improvements in computing power—will help phones get there soon, provided that battery life can keep up. Other innovators are working on improving the keyboard instead of scrapping it altogether. Canesta, a five-year-old firm in San Jose, Calif., is working on a product called a "projection keyboard." A laser inside the phone emits the pattern of a large keyboard onto a flat surface, and the phone's camera perceives the user's finger movements. Canesta's first products for phones will be available as plug-ins later this year, but one day they could be cheaply integrated into handsets.

For K-12, it isn't enough to post classics and other books on the Net. They need to be discussed--in person if possible, and certainly in writing. Ideally the feedback could come from teachers and classmates alike. To learn more about the general Purposes of Blogs in the Classroom, you'd do well to drop by Dr. B's Blog out of Purdue University. I can't resist reproducing the bulk of her post, in fact:

There are many reasons for blogs in the classroom. The one that stands out for me most as I use a blog in my summer gender and literature class is that students get the opportunity to write about the texts that we read and to see and respond to what others in the class are writing. They seem to find affirmation that they are puzzled by, frustrated with, amused by, or totally hating the same things about the texts.

The thing that has been most fun for me thus far is the immediacy of the responses. At 5 p.m. on day one Sandy Student says she hates the text because the characters are so disconnected and then at 8 a.m. the next day Sandy says something clicked for her and it now makes sense for her and she realizes why the author has developed the characters in the way that she did. I get to watch the interpretation and analysis process for the student. Another interesting thing so far has been that as students get to think "out loud" and hear responses to their thoughts it becomes another part of the writing process. It's more akin to the peer review process at the invention stage. The response papers that I receive from classes that use the blog seem to reflect this additional preparation.

There's an active blog going on for my ENGL 360K course now.

When tech reaches libraries, a major hassle can be the cost of keeping all those gizmos running, and that's the topic of Sandra Guy's well-done column in the Chicago Sun Times today.

Needless to say, a consortium approach could help librarians negotiate more successfully with vendors for both new systems and the services to keep them going. Useful, too, in some cases, would the use of centralized servers for information in library catalogues and on Web sites--if nothing else, for backup purposes. TeleRead, anyone (in addition to existing efforts)?

But back to the problem. Here are details from the Sun Times:

A conference held recently in Chicago brought together librarians from universities, colleges and historical societies as well as museum curators and commercial publishers to talk about how they can stretch their resources.

Many libraries depend on grants from foundations and government agencies to help them put their collections into a digital format.

"One of the major concerns is how to sustain these digital programs when the funding runs out or dries up," said Melissa McAfee, associate librarian at the Newberry Library, an independent, humanities-focused research library at 60 W. Walton that hosted the conference.

The staying power of the money is essential, given that libraries are increasingly offering critical and large-scale resources on the Web. The Newberry Library has put 20 percent of its catalog records online and has enabled Internet access to its historical maps for K-12 classrooms, an atlas of historical county boundaries, and an exhibit about Queen Elizabeth I.

Though money for such projects usually lasts only a few years, the costs continue.

Cheaper methods of reproducing library materials exist, such as microfilm, but they aren't as popular or as convenient for library users as are digital formats.

Another concern is that libraries cannot count on technology to preserve their collections. Once the technology becomes obsolete, libraries must invest in moving the data to a newer system, McAfee said.

On the other hand, libraries can extend their reach and fulfill their teaching missions when they make their collections accessible online.

We know about the Elements of Style. Now let's all profit from Ambrose Bierce's William Strunk act, bought to us courtesy of Distributed Proofreaders. Download Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults for free.

In character Bierce is up to his old tricks in the spirit of the Devil's Dictionary--in format and often in humor. For example:

Badly for Bad. "I feel badly." "He looks badly." The former sentence implies defective nerves of sensation, the latter, imperfect vision. Use the adjective.

Balance for Remainder. "The balance of my time is given to recreation." In this sense balance is a commercial word, and relates to accounting.

Banquet. A good enough word in its place, but its place is the dictionary. Say, dinner.

Bar for Bend. "Bar sinister." There is no such thing in heraldry as a bar sinister.

Oh, how primitive is Web linking. If you want to to link to another site, you're more or less at the mercy of the Webmaster. You either link to full pages or to anchors within them. Wouldn't it be nice to choose precise links from afar--for both Web sites and future e-books?

Standards gurus have come up with answers to the problem such as XPointer, but there are still nasty details to work out such as how to identify the exact material to which you're linking.

Michael Day's approach

Over at YesLogic, XML/CSS guru Michael Day believes that the best solution for identifying remote linking targets wouldn't be "purple numbering," which, among other things, would "require the reader to put up with purple blobs dotted throughout the text, which look ugly and distract the eye." Instead he says in his new blog:

A better solution would be to implement granular linking at the browser level, using the existing text selection mechanism. When the reader wishes to link to some text on a page, they should select the text they want by dragging or double clicking it, then invoke "Link To This" from the toolbar or popup menu, which would create a link to the selected text on the clipboard.

The resulting link could be a coarse link to the enclosing paragraph or a granular link to the exact words, depending on the browser configuration. The link URL would require an appropriate fragment ID, which could use XPointer if the browser implementor has the stomach for it, or maybe something simpler tailored to the task at hand.

This browser extension would be more usable than purple numbers and would even work for old web pages that are unlikely to be updated in the future.

Perhaps it could be done in JavaScript. Any takers?