In the week in which my 'definition' article - Books in a virtual world: The evolution of the e-book and its lexicon - has finally seen the light of day (Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 40 (3): 193-206; and deposited/soon available on E-LIS & CADAIR), it was thrilling to see a post on if:book by Bob Stein in which he distilled ...

I often write about reading in this blog; it is a fairly natural - even logical - progression or collocation for anyone thinking about information, books or libraries. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr wonders if - like the Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico [who, after Gutenberg's printing press] worried that the easy availability ...

I do not really like quoting at length in my blog entries, but the article that I am referencing here is such an important article from the house of a major publisher, that I think it is warranted. Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan Digital Publishing has written an article linked from the company blog, the digitalist: A book publisher’s manifesto for ...

I can't remember a previous year when I have had so many titles listed in the first 4 months. Admittedly, some are blog postings - but there's some interesting debate going on, and as regular visitors will know, I only select the more discoursive or debatable blog posts! If you need to keep up to date with what is happening in the e-book ...

... and we are reminded of this by, e.g. Epublishers Weekly, in their latest post, 30 Benefits of Ebooks. And there are 30, too! Slightly strangely, the Benefits are copyright - © 2008 by Michael Pastore... which presumably means I can only quote 3 here! Most of them are pretty obvious: searchable, portable, update-able, ''defy space'' (I ...

Following on from my last post, The Bookseller has just published ''Wiley: publishers must push e-books'' by Information World Review journalist, Mark Chillingworth. The article begins: Publishers must help to drive consumer adoption of e-book readers from the likes of Sony and iRex, according to John Wiley chairman Peter Wiley and his colleague, ...

Information World Review - in a further report from the Frankfurt Book Fair - reports that Wiley Chairman Peter Wiley and Stephen Smith, Wiley senior VP for Europe & International Development, are claiming that textbooks will soon be available digitally and that publishers will ''drive the adoption of e-book readers''. Stephen Smith noted that ...

Exact Editions has offered e-magazines, or electronic versions of print magazines since early 2006; as they say: Exact Editions is bringing magazines into the digital age. It turns out that if you treat them right, magazines work fine on the web pretty much exactly the way they are. This means that we can read a magazine as a sequence of web ...

I heard yesterday that some publishers are getting worried about what MPOW is doing with our institutional repository, which really confused me. Was this someone who hadn’t heard about the whole OA movement other than what we’re doing? As I don’t think we’re doing anything different to any other IR. OK it has quite alot ...

Having just praised Ellen Hage for her coverage of e-book readers, I find I have to take issue with her over her definition of an e-book. In her latest Tech From an E-booker's Viewpoint post, You could already be an e-booker, she says: I think that when we talk about e-books in our daily conversations, we need to simplify the definition. I define ...