Wednesday, February 16, 23:05 CST
Peanut Press, if you haven't heard of
them, are attempting to sell e-books for handhelds. They have proprietary reader
software I figured would be worth trying, so I installed it and a copy of
The Hacker Crackdown,
by Bruce Sterling
on the Palm3x. The software isn't *great*, but it works pretty well and has a
decent feature set (a table of contents, bookmarks, the ability to attach notes
to pages, and the tiniest clock display I've ever seen). It just might be worth
checking out their catalog - they don't have a lot of titles, but there are
some that'd be worth having in an electronic format. On the downside, this isn't
exactly an open content system. Not that I've any idea how else to go about
actually selling content.
The Hacker Crackdown has been freely available for years, but this is the first I've read it. It tells the story of the federal crackdown on hackers (unfortunate Evil Frightening Computer Intruder clueless media connotation) and phreaks back in the early 90's, a fascinating chain of events with some big consequences. Definitely worth a read.
I should mention Gurney's Cool SF, a sort of weblogish collection of SF-related links and news.