This won't come as a massive surprise to most, but author Nick Hornby isn't so into e-books. After walking into a British Borders book store to find the £399 ($790) Iliad for sale next to some £4 paperbacks, he poo-poo'd the platform in a guest column on the Penguin Blog. So here we have a book author blogging on a book publisher's site about the downfalls of a technology that could supplant his industry. To be fair, he does make some salient points about the unlikelihood that e-books will replace print in the same way iPods have undermined CD sales. He points out that people, on average, only buy seven books a year compared to the number of CDs they used to buy. In addition, book readers just like books and tend to be suspicious of new technology. Finally, he goes back to the iPod: the popularity of portable entertainment devices, what with their TV shows, games, movies, and other fancy schmancy doohickeys will continue to make the notion of reading a book -- even in electronic format -- not so tempting.

[Via Shiny Shiny]

We can't say that we'd recommend a CEO steal property from Google in order to prove a point, but the head honcho of Macmillan Publishers pushed his superego aside and did just that at a recent BookExpo America in NYC. It's no secret that a number of publishers have been up in arms about Google's approach to digitizing their works, but Richard Charkin went so far as to recruit a colleague and swipe a pair of laptops from a Google Books kiosk at the event. About an hour later, the booth attendants actually noticed the missing goods and presumably began to panic, and the haughty executive then had the nerve to return the machines to their rightful owners whilst dropping the "hope you enjoyed a taste of your own medicine" line. He justified the bizarre behavior by suggesting that "there wasn't a sign by the computers informing him not to steal them," apparently referencing Google's controversial tactics when scanning books. That'll show 'em, Mr. Charkin.

[Via TechDirt]

We're not sure that the BiblioRoll exactly meets the definition of kawaii, but it's definitely all sorts of awesome looking, and feels pulled from a 70s sci-fi. The BiblioRoll is a 15cm (about six inches) plastic cylinder that contains three 2-inch LCDs encased in separate sections of the cylinder. Each section can be rotated to display pages of different books, each of which can be linked and referenced together. The good folks from Media Design Okude Laboratory at KEIO University in Japan say that the BiblioRoll won't be complete until 2010, which should give us enough time to save up enough money to actually buy one of these things. Maybe by then we'll also have organized a BiblioRoll throwing contest.

[Thanks, Takashi Matsumoto]

First off, contrary to the beliefs of certain commenters, we absolutely do not hate Sony -- we just think that after the infamous PS3 and BDP-S1 Blu-ray delays, the company would want to do everything possible to make sure that another highly-anticipated product doesn't fall into the same cycle. Yet that's exactly what we're seeing with the upcoming PRS-500 eBook reader first announced at CES -- originally scheduled for a spring release before slipping to a summer time frame -- whose launch has now been pushed back once again to sometime this fall. According to an email Sony sent out to potential customers -- wisely thanking them for their patience -- the e-ink-based Reader will now be shipping "in time for the holidays," which hopefully doesn't refer to December 24th. Sample launch titles include Freakanomics and The Da Vinci Code, although by the time you can actually get your hands on the hardware, you'll probably have already read those books along with many of the other initial offerings. As much as we'd like to own one of these handy ~$350 devices -- and despite having no need whatsoever for a bunch of aviation documents -- we're pretty close to just biting the bullet and shelling out $900 for the eFlyBook version of iRex's iLiad that went on sale yesterday.

[Thanks, Curt C. and Riley P.]