Travis Alber, Kat Meyer’s latest interviewee in her Digitizers series, is co-founder of BookGlutton. See more on Travis at the end. Launched in January 2008, BookGlutton is a cross between a book, a computer and a book group—a Web-based reading platform that lets users discuss books from...

Is the typography on Shortcovers, a new e-book service, up to snuff? Joe Clark, in fawny , his Web log, says no. An example is Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow’s novel, which Joe describes as "written in free verse about marauding human lycanthropes." Joe complains of problems in both the pa...

I hope TeleReaders will forgive the preponderance of Kindle stories this morning, but it is a pretty newsworthy event in the e-book world. (And besides, David has made two Kindle posts to my one, and I need to catch up!) Did you know that the expressions “the writing on the wall� and “days are...

Netbooks are okay for reading e-books, but tablets would be even better. But what will you type with? One Laptop Per Child solved that problem with a convertible laptop that you can also fold into a tablet. How about a different approach, though? Suppose you could simply detach the keyboard and kick...

As a reader who wants to own e-books for real, I’ve had reason aplenty to loathe DRM. Now, as a first novelist, I have even more justification. The e-bookers at Amazon insist that books in its Mobipocket format be distributed with DRM even when publishers object. And that’s hitting Twili...

Strange, isn’t it? Publishers don’t want Amazon to boss ‘em around on such issues as price—and yet they’re letting Amazon use DRM to lock in customers. This is hardly news to TeleRead readers. But it’s good to see Techdirt, itself no stranger to this issue, note t...

In the New York Times’s “Bits� blog, Saul Hansell ponders why it is that iPhone (and iPod Touch) users are willing to pay for content for their devices. For example, the iPhone app version of David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual (which I reviewed here) was the best-selling edition of tha...

Moderator’s note: Alan Baxter’s RealmShift, the SF-and-fantasy novel shown here, is one of the five-star-rated titles on Smashwords, a site for self-published writers and their fans. "Samuel Harrigan is a murderer," reads part of the plot descrption. "He used ancient blood...

DRM is tough on anyone who wants to own books—not just lease them in effect. Will Company X exist a few decades from now? Even Amazon isn’t necessarily for eternity. I say this regardless of any visions that Jeff Bezos, the outer-space entrepreneur, may have of Kindle 15s in hotel rooms ...

"Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like ‘epub,’ which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years." - Tim O’Reily in Why Kindle should be an open book, in Forbes. The TeleRead take: It’s hard to t...