Hm.

I find it interesting that while some of us in the US are lamenting the decline of the book, in other places in the world books and book production are actually enjoying a surge....

Musings on the e-reader replacing the book, and how well (or not) it replaces the book as conversation-starter. Replacing the ink-and-paper book may be a bigger issue than anyone so far has actually realized....

Really interesting interview about Wikipedia and the democratization of content.

Sen Jon Tester (D-MT) has proposed a law that would take something like FRPPA one step further, putting most public government documents (e.g., who lobbies the White House, not gov't personnel files) into a searchable database. This would be an improvement in granting access to the public as currently there is a fair amount of hard-copy red tape that must be gone through under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain these documents.

Blog entry about Yelp's answer to criticism that its favorably reviewed places, while ostensibly crowdsourced, were actually paid for. Will this help Yelp? Time will tell....

This would appeal to me more if I didn't get visions of people watching the 60 second videos and claiming to have "read" the book (my inner bookworm is cringing). If you can have previews for movies, though, I don't see why you couldn't have previews for a book, assuming that's how they are actually used (because I'm sure we all know how Cliff's Notes and even literary Wikipedia entries have turned out so far; some people do legitimately use them to merely clarify the text, but far more use them as a substitute...).

How much responsibility do services bear for the actions of their users?

Interesting take on the music piracy issue and a highlight of the punitive nature of the current laws.

The saga continues...

The plan's too vague at the moment for me to form an opinion on it (and this seems to be consensus), but it'll be interesting to see if this works or catches on to other papers....

Effects of social media on society at large.

This seems like a pretty fabulous idea to me from the student side....I could see why publishers probably aren't terribly thrilled though. (I'd be interested to see an adaptation for renting e-books, which isn't mentioned in the article as being extant...yet, anyway). Netflix for textbooks, indeed!

Less than flattering review of the Nook from B&N

Mostly having to do with scholarly publishing....