I founded TeleRead.org – devoted to e-books, digital libraries and related topics. We’re an influence in our little niche. TeleRead advocated OpenReader, which in turn helped spur the IDPF to release the ePub standard. I’m also author of The Silicon Jungle (Ballantine), The Complete Laptop Computer Guide (St. Martin’s), and four other nonfiction books. In December 2008, Twilight Times Books will publish electronic and paper editions of The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel—a mix of suspense and satire on D.C.’s oft-bizarre ways. Among the formats? ePub. My interests include e-book devices and related hardware such as OLPC’s sharp-screened XO-1, e-libraries, copyright, business models for E, digital divide issues, the DRM debate, and, of course, 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.