...le marketplace, the hardware (e-book readers) was clunky and awkward, the software unwieldy, the e-books badly written or already in the public domai... ...as only marginally more successful. Moreover, e-publishing's delivery platform, the Internet, has been transformed beyond recognition since Marc... ...onsider the now defunct BookTailor. It used to sell its book customization software mainly to travel agents - but such software is likely to conquer ... ...er Scindex and its Academic Resource Channel. Established by academics and software experts from Bulgaria, it epitomizes the tearing down of geograph... ...oint at the music industry. It failed to co-opt the emerging peer-to-peer platforms (Napster) and to offer a viable digital assets management system ... ... demise of old habits. E-books have yet to develop the user-friendliness, platform-independence, portability, browsability and many other attributes ... ...re in the form of publisher-controlled (ONIX-XML) "metadata" in a pop-up (Javascript or other) screen. The metadata include everything from the auth... ...nd can be read) is increasingly meaningless. Universal languages (such as Java) allow devices and applications to talk to each other. What matters a... ... GlobalVu converts text to device-independent images. GlobalEase Web is a "Java-based multilingual text input and display engine". It includes virtua...

...eoretical and empirical studies have helped me to understand everything from software patents to synthetic biology. Jerry Reichman has supplied energy... ... many of these issues. The work of Richard Stallman, the creator of the free software movement, remains an inspiration even though he pro- foundly dis... ...hem obsolete with word processors, or develop functional voice recog- nition software, or just concentrate on making solar-powered backscratchers? Who... ...In a competitive market, Apple would choose whether to make the iPod an open platform, able to work with everyone’s music service, or to try to keep i... ...ought out on the hardware (and software) level, with the manufacturer of the platform constantly seeking to make the competing prod- ucts incompatible... ... Mean- while the competitors would race to untangle the knots as fast as the platform manufacturer could tie them. If the consumers got irritated enou... ...ve choices in a code of A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s, just as a programmer does in Java or C++. Yet, software was already a stretch for copyright law. Synth...