News Roundup: Foldable E-Reader Coming Soon, New "Libraries" Bring New Privacy Issues, Analyst: Digital Change Targets TV and Film

Mac Slocum
July 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Foldable E-Reader Launching in Europe This Fall, U.S. in '09

The New York Times takes a look at the Readius foldable e-reader:

... the Readius, designed mainly for reading books, magazines, newspapers and mail, is the size of a standard cellphone. Flip it open, though, and a screen tucked within the housing opens to a 5-inch diagonal display. The screen looks just like a liquid crystal display, but can bend so flexibly that it can wrap around a finger. (Continue reading)

New "Libraries" Bring New Privacy Implications

As Google, Amazon and others become de facto digital libraries -- and lawsuits emerge -- Jeff Jarvis wonders what this means for users' privacy. From BuzzMachine:

Any site with content -- Google, Amazon, a newspaper, a blog, an ISP -- is now the moral equivalent of a library or bookstore, two institutions that try hard not to hand over information on what content we seek and consume arguing that that would violate our First Amendment rights. The controversy in the telco immunity legislation is that those searches were made without warrants. In this case [Viacom/YouTube], there is a warrant. When I ran sites, we got subpoenas all the time and handed over IP addresses when ordered; that was company policy. I always found it troubling and as a result ordered that we would change our data retention policy and get rid of IP addresses as soon as possible. Should Google and other sites erase IPs and rely only on cookies without personally identifiable information?

Analyst: Digital Disruption Has TV and Film in Crosshairs

In the wake of Lehman analyst Anthony DiClemente downgrading a wide swath of the entertainment industry, paidContent.org provides some blunt analysis:

Boiled down, the core argument is basically: You saw what happened to the music industry and the dramatic fall-off in CD prices. You've seen what's happened to the broadcast TV and newspaper industries. Now it's time for it to happen to TV and filmed entertainment. Hopes that digital revenue might somehow make up for lost physical sales are misguided, he [DiClemente] says, and again, you just have to look back at the music industry. (Continue reading)

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