Backward or forward? 

From Gary Frost, ebooks taking off in various directions, again

Find out why librarians and libraries are so backward and so forward at the Electronic Book Web For backward libraries see Internet & Libraries and for forward libraries (by the same author) see Future of ePublishing. What is difficult to believe is not the confusion itself, but the lack of understanding that the screen read book industry must be established in a reading mode other than the print reading mode.

See Gary's chart, Reading Matrix.

Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) 

Time to rewrite the DMCA by Rick Boucher

The American public has traditionally enjoyed the ability to make convenient and incidental copies of copyrighted works without obtaining the prior consent of copyright owners. These traditional "fair use" rights are at the foundation of the receipt and use of information by the American people.

Unfortunately, those rights are now under attack.

In 1997, motion picture studios, record producers, book publishers and other content owners came to Congress with a simple proposition: Give us a law that will stop pirates from circumventing technical protection measures used to safeguard copyrighted works, and we will release all sorts of exciting new content in digital formats

At the time, libraries, universities, consumer electronics manufacturers, Internet portals and others warned that enactment of the broadly worded legislation would stifle new technology, would threaten access to information, and would move us inexorably towards a "pay per use" society. That day is now close at hand. [read more]