David Rothman
Writer-Editor, TeleRead.org

I write the E-Book Report blog for Publishers Weekly and am editor-publisher of TeleRead.org. I’m also author of The Silicon Jungle (Ballantine), The Complete Laptop Computer Guide (St. Martin’s), and four other books.

Among my interests are e-libraries, e-book devices and related hardware such as OLPC’s sharp-screened XO-1, copyright, business models for E, digital divide issues, the DRM debate, and format standards. I consider both traditional DRM and the Tower of eBabel, as I’ve dubbed it, to be lit- and sales-toxins in most cases. One possible DRM-related compromise might be social DRM.

I’ve been writing about e-books since the early 1990s and am the author of the TeleRead chapter of Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (MIT/ASIS), where I call for a well-stocked national digital library system carefully integrated with schools and libraries—-and the popularization of book-friendly hardware. TeleRead-related articles have also appeared in the Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report , among other places.

Sessions

2:00pm Tuesday, 02/12/2008

Are New Devices Breathing New Life into e-Books?

E-books and Mobile Devices, General Broadway South

Tonya Engst (TidBITS Publishing Inc.), Ben Vershbow (New York Public Library), Mike Shatzkin (The Idea Logical Company), David Rothman (TeleRead.org), Steven Levy (Newsweek), Garth Conboy (eBook Technologies, Inc.)

Although Arthur Andersen famously predicted a billion-dollar e-Book market would be here by now, 2007 was a big year for the e-Book faithful, with the launch of Amazon's Kindle, the first experiments with delivery of digital books on revolutionary new mobile devices like the iPhone and the $100-laptop Read more.