Yesterday someone expressed sorrow about forgetting to pack books when he moved to a new city and I felt my heart break on his behalf. I can’t imagine life without being surrounded by shelves of books. But should I? Globe and Mail ’s Russell Smith wrote a piece entitled “A Lament for the Bookshelf,” and in it he contemplates how it appears that books are slowly taking a similar path to the one CDs once took—from racks of plastic discs to libraries full of digital files. More and more people are reaching for ebook readers and sending books through email, IRC, torrents, or gifting them in the form of links

And a party in my pants. I still have to find my pink unicorns, though. Till then, I will keep flipping this book, which makes a rainbow to appear floating in the air, without the aid of any funky pills. It’s still as wonderfully useless and pretty as when it was published in Japan, in 2007. [ Utrecht ]

Let’s not turn everything with a screen into an ebook reader, pleeeease? The DSi XL is launching in North America on March 28 , and Nintendo’s putting that gorgeous 256×192 display to use with 100 Classic Books June 14. Dear Christ . The 100-book package features works from Shakespeare and Mark Twain and it’s 20 bucks. Mercifully, you can adjust the text size, meaning if you want it to be readable, you’ll be able to scale it up to something like four words per screen.

Reading while flat on your back’s difficult. You need to either prop up your head or hold the book awkwardly above your face. Why go through that when you can use these glasses to “bend your vision” and remain supine? Sold by Hammacher Schlemmer , the Supine Reading Glasses use “two optical-quality glass prisms that bend your vision 90º” so that you can be even lazier for a mere $50. [ Hammacher via CrunchGear via Fashionably Geek ]

Well, it looks like anyone hoping that books on Apple’s iBookstore would be as DRM-free as music is on iTunes may be in for a bit of disappointment, as the Los Angeles Times is now reporting that Apple will be making its own FairPlay digital rights management available to any book publishers that wish to use it. Of course, that shouldn’t come as a huge surprise considering that Apple still uses FairPlay for movies and TV shows sold on iTunes — not to mention apps — and it even still technically supports it for music as well, although it’s pretty safe to assume Apple won’t be going back down that road anytime soon. For its part, Apple is unsurprisingly staying mum on the matter, but March is fast approaching, so we should know for sure soon enough. Apple said to be using FairPlay DRM for iBookstore originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

We said it long ago: The Apple iPad will redefine newspapers, textbooks, magazines . Were we right? Is Apple bringing a media revolution ? Oh, it’ll get there . Books, Books, iBooks We’ve had an iTunes store and now we’ve got an iBook store with content from Penguin, Harper Collins , Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette book group.

According to the WSJ, HarperCollins Publishers is in talks with Apple about providing ebooks for Apple’s tablet. It’s speculated that ebook markets such as Amazon’s would seriously suffer if such an arrangement were finalized. Based on explanations by Brian Murray, the chief executive of HarperCollins, the reason Amazon would initially have something to fear is that “e-books enhanced with video, author interviews and social-networking applications could command higher retail prices for publishers than current e-books” in the future. Apple’s tablet would, of course, be ideal for such enhanced content , and we already know that they’ll be digging for mags, newspapers and college textbooks but this is some of the first we’ve heard of Apple negotiating with publishers for regular e books.

There are too damn many ebook readers and it’s a struggle to figure out what’s worth buying and which reader will even survive the market. To make things easy, here’s our guide to the readers that matter—for now. Of course we’re skipping some of the many ebook readers floating around, but quite frankly we can’t really stomach all of them. We decided to focus on the ones that matter to us—whether because they stand a shot of surviving the over-saturated market, or simply because they are examples of what we think matters about these gadgets.

A synonym for “nerd” used to be “bookworm,” but it’s lost in today’s broadband ADHD society. We still read, though. Voraciously. Here we present a collection of books, new and old, that we’ve enjoyed over the course of this year. The Dark Pasts of Our Geekiest Treasures There’s that old expression about those who forget their history being doomed to repeat it. So it’s good that there are so many chroniclers of the great achievements in tech, and in geek culture

Last week, a host of book publishers, led by Simon & Schuster, said they will delay publication of e-reader versions of many books because they were afraid the electronic copies were cannibalizing sales of more expensive hardcover editions. As Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster, told The Associated Press , “We believe that a large portion of the people who have bought e-readers are from the most devoted reading population. And if they like the e-readers, they are naturally going to convert because the e-books are so significantly less expensive.” I own both an Amazon Kindle and a Sony Reader, and I can tell you that I didn’t buy them to save money. I know a lot of other avid bookworms, and I can’t recall a single one citing “to save money on books” as their reason to purchase one of these fancy new devices. How can e-books represent saving money when an person spends between $250 to $300 on a device and about $10 for each book?