Friday, July 03, 2009

More on e-books

As the proud owner of an iLiad (thanks Grahame) and a compulsive book buyer I am developing an obsession with e-book readers though the bad news is that there is not much happening in Australia.

Google and Sony have announced a tie up but that is no use as Sony doesn't sell theor reader in ustralia (I've asked them why - I'll let you know when they reply).

Meanwhile in the US there are some prepared to call it game over already for Amazon and the Kindle.

My new crusade is going to be in Government publications. Increasingly the only way to obtain them is electronically, but usually formatted for an A4 printed pdf. I can read these on my iLiad, but I need to zoom it to remove the page boarders. Would it be too much to start a campaign that as well as publishing reports in *.pdf and *.doc that they do them in the mobibook format? Then we can save alll those trees (everyone prints them) and also be able to carry less back and forth!!!

The new AGPS - coming to an e-book near you.

PS I've been informed by a reader that my earlier comment about the idiocy of the phrase "published on the Internet" is about a phrase that is itself redundant. My informant wrote;

These ‘must be published on the internet’ clauses are just spin. When something is a legislative instrument, that means it’s an instrument made under the Legislative Instruments Act which implemented a register of instruments (Federal Register of Legislative Instruments – pronounced ‘frilly’ if you hang out with law librarians). Anything on the register is published on the web ie comlaw, so those publication clauses are redundant. The register was created to deal with the problem that instruments were being made all over the place, often without anyone knowing where they all were.

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