digital library controversy

Open Letter to Librarians
(March 1, 2011 Library Love Fest)
http://harperlibrary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/03/open-letter-to-librarians.html

Open Letter to Harper Collins
(March 7, 2011 Library in Black)
http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2011/03/hc.html

e-books in the news (part 2 -- update)

Macmillan books coming back to Amazon
(Feb. 5, 2010, Chippewa Valley Newspapers)

e-books in the news (part 2)

Apple vs. Amazon: The Great Ebook War Has Already Begun
(Jan. 30, 2010 Mashable.com)

Combine this with incompatibility. It's no big deal to buy some physical books from one bookstore and others from another. But to have to buy two or more multi-hundred-dollar machines just to be able to choose books from all the major publishers is unacceptable.

Update:
Amazon shares slip; Macmillan titles still missing
(Feb. 1, 2010 KTUL)

e-books in the news

Here's another reason to be less than enthusiatic about e-books.

Apple's own approach to iPad e-books could confuse

(Feb. 1, 2010 The Independent)

Maybe the multiple inconveniences that these companies are imposing on readers will cause the whole e-book concept to fail before it gets a good chance to begin. Or maybe the industry will succeed in changing the way people think of a "book" from something that one reads anywhere over and over throughout one's lifetime, to something that's tied to one special device and becomes unavailable after it's read once or a few times.

e-books (part 2)

There does seem to be one use where an e-book (on a small device with a backlit screen) is handier than a paper book -- reading in bed. It's small, it glows, and it keeps your place if you fall asleep holding it.

And because it can lie flat and you can scroll through the pages with one finger, it's good for reading at the table, too. (Just avoid greasy finger foods if you don't want to smear the screen.)

e-books

I've been trying to give e-books a try, really I have. I can't justify paying the price of a dozen or so hardbacks for a machine to do what can be done for free with a lamp or a sunny window, but the library has e-books that can be read on a home computer and now there's a free Kindle reader for the iPhone.

Actually, I've been reading e-books since the early days of CD-ROMs. One of the earliest apps for the new (and at that time still very slow) format was a CD full of plain-text public domain works. And as any follower of this blog knows, I'm a big fan of Project Gutenberg. The difference with the new systems is that they include new books. And they scroll from side to side instead of up and down.

Supposedly, e-books are cheap, around ten bucks a pop. But that's not truly cheap to someone who remembers 65-cent paperbacks. For that matter, I strongly resist paying anything to read any book just once. I pay money for books I want to keep -- for the rest of my life, and be able to pass down to any great-grandkids I might have in the future. So for e-books I need to find modern books I'll want to read over and over, but only in the next few years. Or things I'd like to have a second, portable copy of. The problem is, every time I think of such a title, it turns out not to have an e-book version. Or it's one of the over-ten-dollars books.

The public library subscribes to netLibrary, which allows patrons to check out books to read on their home computers for a limited time. Sounds like a good deal, except that they have next to nothing I want to read even once -- except for public domain titles I can read at Gutenberg without the hassle of signing in, and download to keep for more than two weeks. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but browsing for books less than a year old brought up nothing at all, and I couldn't find any fiction, either.

So for now I'll go back to reading Poe's "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal" for free online.