United Kingdom book industry news site TheBookseller.com, which has been the source of a number of TeleRead stories, is being sold. The site’s owner, the Nielsen media research company, has arranged to sell it for an undisclosed sum to its managing director, Nigel Roby. The site expects its current staff to remain in place.
The Bookseller also reports from the London Book Fair on academic librarians stating that “students are dissatisfied with the lack of an interactive experience in academic e-books.” The librarians say that students want e-books to help them learn rather than just reproduce the contents of a paper textbook, and that the general public is still rather confused.
"There is confusion as to what an e-book actually is: is it a device, content, do you download it or view it online? The public finds different devices, different formats and DRM confusing," [Martin Palmer, principal officer of Essex County Council libraries] said. However he said there was a "groundswell of enthusiasm" for e-books at the moment: "The e-book of the latest Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol, was the first e-book download we had a pre-publication waiting list for," he said.
Amazon.com is filing suit to block a court order from North Carolina’s revenue department that would force it to reveal the identities and purchases of everyone in North Carolina, report Techdirt and CNet (among others). North Carolina wants the information so that it can enforce state sales tax against Amazon purchases, while Amazon insists this would be a breach of customer privacy and First Amendment rights.
We’ve previously reported on the potential of Amazon to act as a “big brother” with all the customer information it collects, especially with regard to the Kindle. It’s good to see the company going to bat for the privacy of its customers.
Three students at the Art Center College of Design have come up with an interesting concept for a newspaper of the future. A concept is all it is, since it uses a not-yet-invented form of foldable stand-alone e-paper, so to some extent it is pie-in-the-sky. On the other hand, it’s good to be thinking about interfaces now so we will be ready when and if this sort of material arrives.
The videos are interesting; the device is essentially a big sheet of paper with multiple folds in it, and it is manipulated in a sort of newspaper origami. The Cargo Collective blog has more information. (Found via Gizmodo and Nate the Great’s The Digital Reader.)
